ogy also was prime for a shift in paradigm. Psychologists in human learning
had become increasingly frustrated with studying rote learning and the lack of
generalizability of their theories to meaningful contexts. Research on language
development (e.g., Brown, 1973) was providing strong evidence against radical
environmentalist perspectives (e.g., Skinner, 1957). Computers also were rapidly
coming into wide use, supplying both a credible metaphor for human informa-
tion processing ( Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968; Baars, 1986) and a significant tool
for exploring human cognitive processes ( Newell & Simon, 1972). Thus, when
the "cognitive revolution" came, it came rapidly.

Today, cognitive psychology is no longer revolutionary; its perspectives on
human functioning and its concepts are seen as productive and are widely ac-
cepted. In education, however, the cognitive revolution still is in a relatively
early stage; this chapter examines college teaching and learning in the light of
an emerging cognitive perspective on instruction. My major aims are to outline
current themes in cognitive psychology that have the most relevance for higher
education, highlight key concepts related to each theme, and explore some of
their implications for college teaching.

To create a context for relating cognitive psychology to college teaching, I
will first describe some of the important features of the associationist-behavioral
perspective against which the cognitive perspective emerged. The purpose of
this description is to illustrate how these views underlie many of our current
assumptions about learning and teaching. Thus, my starting point in this chapter
is our past and, to a great extent, our present--an associationist-behavioral con-
ception of learning.

For the greater part of this century, most psychologists have conceptualized
learning as the strengthening of associations--associations between sensory im-
pressions and actions, between "stimulus" and "response." This theme has
appeared in American psychological theory in numerous forms--in E. L. Thorndike's
( 1913, 1932) connectionism, in Pavlov ( 1927) classical-conditioning
paradigm, in John Watson ( 1913) behaviorism, in Edwin Guthrie ( 1935)
contiguity theory, in the mechanistic theories of Clark Hull ( 1943) and Kenneth
Spence ( 1956), in the verbal learning theories of Benton Underwood ( 1959) and
Leo Postman ( Underwood & Postman, 1960), and in the radical behaviorism of
B. F. Skinner ( 1953, 1968; Ferster & Skinner, 1957). While these theorists em-
phasized very different types of learning and certainly disagreed in the partic-
ulars of their theoretical formulations, all shared a common conception of
learning--namely, learning as habit formation. Habits are formed through
associations. Repetition is a major mechanism for strengthening associations,

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