ABSTRACT
Just as Dave Merrill synthesized his prodigious body of research and design into his First Principles of Instruction (Merrill, 2002), in this chapter I too hope to synthesize what I have learned about learning in my First Principles of Learning. Merrill (2002) synthesized five principles of instruction: activation, demonstration, application, and integration wrapped around a problem. In Figure 17.1, I suggest five principles of learning: problem-based, analogizing, modeling, reasoning causally, and arguing. Both Merrill's First Principles of Instruction and my First Principles of Learning may be regarded as the epitome of our work (see Reigeluth & Stein, 1983, for the notion of an epitome).
