4. Two versions of consilience tool

A Simplified Version of Consilience

Step1: To list all major learning and instructional theories, Then draw sound implications from each theory by discarding the unreasonable part.

Step 2: To figure out the possibilities and constraints in the given instructional context, from the perspectives such as: teacher’s capability, students’ prior knowledge, the nature of learning task, the time constraint, the available technology etc.

Step 3: To relate and tailor each theory implication to the specific context, and then add them up together.

A More Sophisticated Version

1. Each learning theory illuminates some aspects of learning while obscuring others.

2. By taking the illuminated aspects as a set for each theory, various sets might overlap or not.

3. For those aspects covered by more than a set, theories represented by these sets might explain learning in three ways: consensus, contradicting, or paralleling.

4. In the case of consensus, there might be only one choice. In the cases of contradicting and paralleling, the choice could be context-dependent.

However, the difficult part is to define and identify aspects of learning: an aspect might be a status, a process, a combination of two, or something else. In order to figure this out, I analyze the comprehensive theory matrix (Driscoll, 2005) from a few perspectives.

Reference

Driscoll, M. P. (2005). Psychology of learning for instruction (3rd ed.). Boston: Pearson Education Inc.