Abstract
Most of previous studies on the social learning consider only social influences on the social learning, but seldom address cognitive, humanistic and behavioral influences on the social learning, in particular, the instructors' opinions. This study focuses on investigating how the individual and social learning are affected by humanistic factors, the relationship between the two types of learning based on instructors' opinions. Through reviewing existing literature, we identified four categories of humanistic learning factors, including affective factors, conative factors, personalities, self-initiator and self-regulation ability at first. Then, the interview and the focus group discussion were conducted to collect the data about instructors' opinions on how the individual and social learning are affected by these four categories of humanistic factors and the relationship between them. The study results show that the instructors all agree that all the four categories of humanistic factors influence both the individual learning and the social learning and individual humanistic factors can be shared in the groups and directly influence the group learning. The individual learning and the social learning are dependent on each other and complement each other in the students' learning process. The study provides a comprehensive understanding about instructors' viewpoints on humanistic influences on the two types of learning and the relationship between them.
Highlights
In order to improve students’ learning, the instructor needs to understand what affects their learning
The results from the interview and focus group discussion show that humanistic factors certainly affect both the individual learning and the social learning, but it is hard for the instructor to manage the humanistic factors in the classroom, especially in a large class
The participants’ teaching and knowledge background are very different they all came from the information sciences and technology field. The students that they talked in the interview and group discussion were from different majors
Summary
In order to improve students’ learning, the instructor needs to understand what affects their learning. In order to develop a better learning community, the instructors need to understand individual characteristics and social features that the learning process involves in the community, and the relationship between the two types of learning. There have been many studies on individual learning (Cronbach & Snow, 1977; Glass & Muthu, 1999; Melton, 1967; Smith, 1999a) and social learning (Fischer, 1999; Smith, 1999d, 2001) respectively, but not enough studies on the relationship between these two perspectives (Salomon & Perkins, 1998), neither the college instructors’ opinions on the learning phenomenon
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