ABSTRACT
Much of the early work was done in the 1970s in the context of an ‘instructional systems’ approach to teaching and training. As noted in Chapter 1, much systems writing operates at the general level of course design and development (on a par with the macro model), but in the end such an approach has to get down to the concrete, nitty-gritty realities of what goes on in the classroom if it is going to be of practical use. One of the first modern, systematic attempts to do this was Gagné’s identification of nine ‘instructional events’ (Gagné, 1965, 1975), a foundation that was subsequently built on by him and other writers (Gagné, Briggs and Wager, 1988; Reigeluth and Curtis, 1987). Gagné is probably best known for his theory of conditions of learning, which states that learning is not a single, unitary phenomenon, but rather an umbrella concept that covers a number of different kinds of behavioural or cognitive outcomes, each of which requires its own internal and external conditions. However, in parallel with this, he also developed his ideas about basic instructional events, which have to occur for learning to take place in relation to any outcome. This list of instructional events shows the influence of earlier work by him and others in the training field, some of which goes back to the Second World War. By the fourth edition of The Conditions of Learning (Gagné, 1985), the list had become linked not only to outcome variables but to student variables, though not to setting variables.
