Kolb’s Experiential Theory

Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle

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David Kolb

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David Kolb, an American education theorist proposed his four-stage

experiential learning theory⁠

in 1984. It is built on the premise that learning is the acquisition of abstract concepts which can then be applied to a range of scenarios.

“Learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience”

– Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development (Vol. 1). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Each stage in the cycle both supports and leads into the next stage. Learning is achieved only if all four stages have been completed, however, a learner may travel around the cycle multiple times, further refining their understanding of the topic.

No one stage is an effective learning strategy on its own, for example, if the reflective observation stage is skipped, the learner could continue to make the same mistakes.

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Why are Visual Aids Important in the Classroom?

Visual information was defined by Paivio as being synchronous, or simultaneous’ in structure.

These two synonymous terms were used to explain that with diagrams, several, if not all, the elements could be viewed in one go.

Words, by contrast, have to be processed one at a time.

While Paivio noted these important structural differences, he didn’t devote his research to exploring them much further.

Others did, I’m glad to say, and we will shortly meet them and learn what they discovered. But, for now, we’ll stay with Paivio’s studies of the associative links between the two modality systems.

As robust as his findings were over several decades, we ought not to forget that the nature of the content learned by his laboratory subjects was cognitively unchallenging.

Like Ebbinghaus in the century before him, Paivio used simple content in order to discount any element of comprehension messing up his pure work on retrieval.

That’s not how schools work though, they do deal with cognitively challenging content.

The knowledge organiser with its lists of facts —let’s acknowledge it—while a very useful document, hardly represents the apex of schools’ intellectual aspirations.

Instead, different approaches are needed to mesh together such isolated facts into coherent networks and integrated concepts.

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