Jean Piaget, an innovator in both philosophy and biology, identified four stages of learning development that segue through infancy, toddler, young and older adolescent stages. Infants, in the sensorimotor stage, act upon objects around them, and start to recognize themselves as acting agents. A key milestone in this stage, object permanence, is the infant's ability to recognize that an object still exists even when it is hidden.
Children in the pre-operational stage, ages two to seven, begin to utilize language to describe objects through words, images and descriptions. However, a child's ability to classify objects is limited to one feature.
Through ages seven to 11, children begin to discern logical relationships between objects and events, and can classify objects according to many colors, sizes and shapes. This is the concrete operational stage.
In the formal operations stage, students 11 years and older start to think abstractly and ideologically, enabling the ability to create hypotheses and predictions.
Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences expounds on the different cognitive strengths each individual may possess to a certain degree. This theory debunks the notion of verbal and mathematical reasoning as the only facets of intelligence, which was proposed by Stanford and Binet, creators of the IQ test used as the standard for many years.
These cognitive strengths include linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, body-kinesthetic, intrapersonal and interpersonal.
Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky argued that higher learning depends on social interaction. Furthermore, a child learns contextually from culture, family and society before integrating this knowledge on an individual level.
Vygotsky's concept of zone of proximal development (ZPD) asserts that learning occurs in a social environment among peers, with adult guidance.
B.F. Skinner, an advocate for the behaviorist school of psychology, stated that learning occurs through reinforcement. Skinner based his theories upon the stimulus object and response relationship and ignored any speculation on what cognitive processes could be occurring in the student. Learned behavior occurs when a student responds successfully to a paired drill. For example, teachers implement the behaviorist model in classroom management strategies. If a teacher desires the response of a student remaining quiet during a lecture, then she would administer an aversive stimulus, such as a detention, in order to elicit the desired response (no talking).
Albert Bandura, a well known psychologist at Stanford University and a contributor in social cognitive psychology, argues that an individual can not muster learning alone, but depends on observing and modeling others, such as teachers, to learn a skill successfully. Under this philosophy, learning occurs through guidance
Anger management therapists apply Bandura's theory by modeling appropriate ways to express anger.