NAME: ________________________________________Course & Sec.

: ___________________Date:
_______________
COURSE TITLE: FACILITATING LEARNER-CENTERED TEACHING UNITS: 3
INSTRUCTOR: MRS. MERIAM BITASOLO-GABAISEN, MSMath- INSTRUCTOR 1

Learner-Centered Psychological Principles (LCP)

M Objectives:
 Explain the 14 principles.

O  Advocate for the use of the 14 principles in the teaching-learning process.

 Identify ways on how to apply the 14 principles in instruction as a future teacher.

D
CONCEPT NOTES:
The learner is the center of instruction. The world of instruction revolves around the learner. This
module introduces you to the 14 learner-centered principles which shall be used throughout as a
guide in determining appropriate pedagogy for learners at different life stages.

U Learner-Centered Psychological Principles

The Learner-Centered Psychological Principles were put together by the American

L Psychological Association. The following 14 psychological principles pertain to the learner and
the learning process. The 14 principles have the following aspects:
 They focus on psychological factors that are primarily internal to and under the

E
control of the learner rather than conditioned habits or physiological factors.
However, the principles also attempt to acknowledge external environment or
contextual factors that interact with these internal factors.
 The principles are intended to deal holistically with learners in the context of real-

1 world learning situations. Thus, they are best understood as an organized set of
principles; no principle should be viewed in isolation.
 The 14 principles are divided into those referring to (1) cognitive and metacognitive,
(2) motivational and affective, (3) developmental and social, and (4) individual
differences factors influencing learners and learning.
 Finally, the principles are intended to apply to all learners-from children, to
teachers, to administrators, to parents, and to community members involved in our
educational system.

Cognitive and Metacognitive Factors

1. Nature of the learning process

The learning of complex subject matter is most effective when it is an

intentional process of constructing meaning from information and experience.

 There are different types of learning processes, for example, habit

formation in motor learning; and learning that involves the generation of
knowledge, or cognitive skills and learning strategies.
  Learning in schools emphasizes the use of intentional processes that
students can use to construct meaning from information and experiences,
and their own thoughts and beliefs.
 Successful learners are active, goal-directed, self-regulating, and assume
personal responsibility for contributing to their own learning.

2. Goals of the learning process

The successful learner, over time and with support and instructional guidance,
can create meaningful, coherent representations of knowledge.

 The strategic nature of learning requires students to be goal-directed.

 To construct useful representations of knowledge and to acquire the
thinking and learning strategies necessary for continued learning success
across the life span, students must generate and pursue personally
relevant goals. Initially, student’s short-term goals and learning may be
sketchy in an area, but over time their understanding can be refined by
filling gaps, resolving inconsistencies, and deepening their understanding
of the subject matter so that they can reach longer-time goals.
 Educators can assist learners in creating meaningful learning goals that
are consistent with both personal and educational aspirations and
interests.
3. Construction of Knowledge

The successful learner can link new information with existing knowledge in
meaningful ways.
 Knowledge widens and deepens as students continue to build links
between new information and experiences and their existing knowledge
base. The nature of these links can take a variety of forms, such as adding
to, modifying, or recognizing existing knowledge or skills. How these links
are made or develop may vary in different subject areas, and among
students with varying talents, interests, and abilities. However, unless new
knowledge becomes integrated with the learner’s prior knowledge and
understanding, this new knowledge remains isolated, cannot be used most
effectively in new tasks, and does not transfer readily to new situations.
 Educators can assist learners in acquiring and integrating knowledge by
a number of strategies that have been shown to be effective with learners
of varying abilities, such as concept mapping and thematic organization
or categorizing.

4. Strategic Thinking
The successful learner can create and use a repertoire of thinking and
reasoning strategies to achieve complex learning goals.
 Successful learners use strategic thinking in their approach to learning,
reasoning, problem solving, and concept learning.
  They understand and can use a variety of strategies to help them reach
learning and performance goals, and to apply their knowledge in novel
situations.
 They also continue to expand their repertoire of strategies by reflecting on
the methods they use to see which work well for them, by receiving guided
instruction and feedback, and by observing or interacting with
appropriate models.
 Learning outcomes can be enhanced if educators assist learners in
developing, applying, and assessing their strategic learning skills.
5. Thinking About Thinking
Higher order strategies for selecting and monitoring mental operations
facilitate creative and critical thinking.
 Successful learners can reflect on how they think and learn, set
reasonable learning or performance goals, select potentially appropriate
learning strategies or methods, and monitor their progress toward these
goals.
 In addition, successful learners know what to do if a problem occurs or if
they are not making sufficient or timely progress toward a goal. They can
generate alternative methods to reach their goal. (or reassess the
appropriateness and utility of the goal).
 Instructional methods that focus on helping learners develop these higher
order (metacognitive) strategies can enhance student learning and
personal responsibility for learning.
6. Context of Learning
Learning is influenced by environmental factors, including culture, technology,
and instructional practices.
 Learning does not occur in a vacuum. Teachers play a major interactive
role with both the learner and the learning environment.
 Cultural or group influences on students can impact many educationally
relevant variables, such as motivation, orientation toward learning, and
ways of thinking.
 Technologies and instructional practices must be appropriate for
learners’ level of prior knowledge, cognitive abilities, and their learning
and thinking strategies.
 The classroom environment, particularly the degree to which it is
nurturing or not, can also have significant impacts on student learning.

Motivational and Affective Factors

7. Motivational and emotional influences on learning

What and how much is learned is influenced by the learner’s motivation.
Motivation to learn, in turn, is influenced by the individual’s emotional states,
beliefs, interests and goals, and habits of thinking.
  The rich internal world of thoughts, beliefs, goals, and expectations for
success or failure can enhance or interfere with the learner’s quality of
thinking and information processing.
 Student’s beliefs about themselves as learners and the nature of learning
have a marked influence on motivation. Motivational and emotional
factors also influence both the quality of thinking and information
processing as well as an individual’s motivation to learn.
 Positive emotions, such as curiosity, generally enhance motivation and
facilitate learning and performance. Mild anxiety can also enhance
learning and performance by focusing the learner’s attention on a
particular task. However, intense negative emotions (e.g., anxiety, panic,
rage, insecurity) and related thoughts (e.g., worrying about competence
ruminating about failure, fearing punishment, ridicule, or stigmatizing
labels) generally detract from motivation, interfere with learning, and
contribute to low performance.

8. Intrinsic motivation to learn

The learner’s creativity, higher order thinking, and natural curiosity all
contribute to motivation to learn. Intrinsic motivation is stimulated by tasks of
optimal novelty and difficulty, relevant to personal interests, and providing for
personal choice and control.

 Curiosity, flexible and insightful thinking, and creativity are major

indicators of the learners’ intrinsic motivation to learn, which is in large
part a function of meeting basic needs to be competent and to exercise
personal control.
 Intrinsic motivation is facilitated on tasks that learners perceive as
interesting and personally relevant and meaningful, appropriate in
complexity and difficulty to the learners’ abilities, and on which they
believe they can succeed.
 Intrinsic motivation is also facilitated on tasks that are comparable to
real-world situations and meet needs for choice and control.
 Educators can encourage and support learners’ natural curiosity and
motivation to learn by attending to individual differences in learners’
perceptions of optimal novelty and difficulty, relevance, and personal
choice and control.

9. Effects of Motivation on Effort

Acquisition of complex knowledge and skills requires extended learner effort
and guided practice. Without learners’ motivation to learn, the willingness to
exert this effort is unlikely without coercion.
 Effort is another major indicator of motivation to learn. The acquisition of
complex knowledge and skills demands the investment of considerable
learner energy and strategic effort, along with persistence over time.
  Educators need to be concerned with facilitating motivation by strategies
that enhance learner effort and commitment to learning and to achieving
high standards of comprehension and understanding.
 Effective strategies include purposeful learning activities, guided by
practices that enhance positive emotions and intrinsic motivation to learn,
and methods that increase learners’ perceptions that a task is interesting
and personally relevant.

Developmental and Social Factors

10. Developmental influences on learning
As individuals develop, there are different opportunities and constraints for
learning. Learning is most effective when differential development within and
across physical, intellectual, emotional, and social domains is taken into
account.
 Individuals learn best when material is appropriate to their
developmental level and is presented in an enjoyable and interesting way.
 Because individual development varies across intellectual, social,
emotional, and physical domains, achievement in different instructional
domains may also vary.
 Overemphasis on one type of developmental readiness—such as reading
readiness, for example – may preclude learners from demonstrating that
they are more capable in other areas of performance.
 The cognitive, emotional, and social development of individual learners
and how they interpret life experiences are affected by prior schooling,
home, culture, and community factors.
 Early and continuing parental involvement in schooling, and the quality
of language interactions and two-way communications between adults
and children can influence these developmental areas.
 Awareness and understanding of developmental differences among
children with and without emotional, physical, or intellectual disabilities,
can facilitate the creation of optimal learning contexts.

11. Social Influences on Learning

Learning is influenced by social interactions, interpersonal relations, and
communication with others.
 Learning can be enhanced when the learner has an opportunity to interact
and to collaborate with others on instructional tasks.
 Learning settings that allow for social interactions, and that respect
diversity, encourage flexible thinking and social competence.
 In interactive and collaborative instructional contexts, individuals have
an opportunity for perspective taking and reflective thinking that may lead
to higher levels of cognitive, social, and moral development, as well as
self-esteem.
 Quality personal relationships that provide stability, trust, and caring can
increase learners’ sense of belonging, self-respect and self-acceptance,
and provide a positive climate for learning.
  Family influences, positive interpersonal support and instruction in self-
motivation strategies can offset factors that interfere with optimal
learning such as negative beliefs about competence in a particular
subject, high levels of test anxiety, negative sex role expectations, and
undue pressure to perform well.
 Positive learning climates can also help to establish the context for
healthier levels of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Such contexts help
learners feel safe to share ideas, actively participate in the learning
process, and create a learning community.

Individual Differences Factors

12. Individual Differences in learning

Learners have different strategies, approaches, and capabilities for learning
that are a function of prior experience and heredity.
 Individuals are born with and develop their own capabilities and talents.
 In addition, through learning and social acculturation, they have acquired
their own preferences for how they like to learn and the pace at which
they learn. However, these preferences are not always useful in helping
learners reach their learning goals.
 Educators need to help students examine their learning preferences and
expand or modify them, if necessary.
 The interaction between learner differences and curricular and
environmental conditions is another key factor affecting learning
outcomes.
 Educators need to be sensitive to individual differences, in general. They
also need to attend to learner perceptions of the degree to which these
differences are accepted and adapted to by varying instructional methods
and materials.

13. Learning and Diversity

Learning is most effective when differences in learners’ linguistic, cultural, and
social backgrounds are taken into account.
 The same basic principles of learning, motivation, and effective
instruction apply to all learners. However, language, ethnicity, race,
beliefs, and socio-economic status all can influence learning. Careful
attention to these factors in the instructional setting enhances the
possibilities for designing and implementing appropriate learning
environments.
 When learners perceive that their individual differences in abilities,
backgrounds, cultures, and experiences are valued, respected, and
accommodated in learning tasks and contexts, levels of motivation and
achievement are enhanced.
14. Standards and Assessment
Setting appropriately high and challenging standards and assessing the learner
as well as learning progress – including diagnostic, process, and outcome
assessment –are integral parts of the learning process.
 Assessment provides important information to both the learner and
teacher at all stages of the learning process.
 Effective learning takes place when learners feel challenged to work
towards appropriately high goals; therefore appraisal of the learners’
cognitive strengths and weaknesses, as well as current knowledge and
skills, is important for the selection of instructional materials of an
optimal degree of difficulty.
 Ongoing assessment of the learner’s understanding of the curricular
material can provide valuable feedback to both learners and teachers
about progress towards the learning goals.
 Standardized assessment of learner progress and outcomes assessment
provides one type of information about achievement levels both within and
across individuals that can inform various types of programmatic
decisions.
 Performance assessments can provide other sources of information about
the attainment of learning outcomes.
 Self-assessments of learning progress can also improve students self
appraisal skills and enhance motivation and self-directed learning.

Alexander and Murphy gave a summary of the 14 principles and distilled them
into five areas:
1. The knowledge base. One’s existing knowledge serve as the foundation of all
future learning. The learner’s previous knowledge will influence new learning
specifically on how he presents new information, makes associations and
filters new experiences.
2. Strategic processing and control. Learners can develop skills to reflect and
regulate their thoughts and behaviors in order to learn more effectively
(metacognition).
3. Motivation and affect. Factors such as intrinsic motivation (from within),
reasons for wanting to learn, personal goals and enjoyment of learning tasks
all have a crucial role in the learning process.
4. Development and Individual Differences. Learning is a unique journey for
each person because each learner has his own unique combination of genetic
and environmental factors that influence him.
5. Situation or context. Learning happens in the context of a society as well as
within an individual.