Towards a contemporary and comprehensive theory of learning

Knud Illeris

405 citations0/0 files storedInternational Journal of Lifelong Education

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Educational theories and practices Adult and Continuing Education Topics Innovative Education and Learning Practices

Abstract

The modern concept of competence comprises not only relevant knowledge and skills, but also a range of personal qualities and the ability to perform adequately and flexibly in well-known and unknown situations. To be up-to-date, the concept of learning must be understood in the same broad sense, and therefore traditional learning theories must be revised. The theory presented is based on two fundamental assumptions. Firstly, that all learning includes two essentially different types of process, namely an external interaction process between the learner and his or her social, cultural and material environment, and an internal psychological process of acquisition and elaboration in which new impulses are connected with the results of prior learning. Secondly, that all learning includes three dimensions, namely, the cognitive dimension of knowledge and skills, the emotional dimension of feelings and motivation, and the social dimension of communication and co-operation—all of which are embedded in a societally situated context. In addition, the approach specifies four levels of learning and deals with what happens when intended learning does not occur. Inside this framework existing learning theories deal with different aspects. Thus the new theory has been constructed as a sort of umbrella, offering an overview and a structure of the landscape of learning which can be applied in both analysing and planning learning processes, both inside and outside of the educational system. The development of the theory is described in detail in my book, The Three Dimensions of Learning, which has been a bestseller in the Scandinavian countries since 1999, and which has now been published in English (Illeris 2002).

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 405 citations exist upstream.

References

1994Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation.1991Situated Learning 1962Thought and language 1952The origins of intelligence in children.1991Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning 2014Learning by Expanding 2018The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence 1963The developmental psychology of Jean Piaget.

Cited by

2017Customers’ purchase decision-making process in social commerce: A social learning perspective 2014Problem-Based and Project-Based Learning in Engineering Education 2007CRITICAL LITERACY: Theories and Practices 2021Online purchase intention in Chinese social commerce platforms: Being emotional or rational?2007An application of games‐based learning within software engineering 2004Transformative Learning in the Perspective of a Comprehensive Learning Theory 2010

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.