Robert Gagne

Where did they get their PhD?
Robert Gagne earned a doctoral degree in experimental psychology from Brown University in 1940.

Where have they taught / worked?
He served at Connecticut College for Women (1940); Princeton University (1958-1962); University of California at Berkeley (1966-1969); and Florida State University (1969 to 1985). From 1962 to 1966, he was director of research at the American Institutes for Research in Pittsburgh, PA. He was a professor in the Department of Education Research at Florida State University in Tallahassee until his death at 85 years old in 2002.

What things are they best known for?
He was best known for his foundational development of ISD. Professionals in instructional design and technology know Dr. Gagne best through his seminal book The Conditions of Learning. In these publications, he linked a taxonomy of learning outcomes with nine instructional events and provided instructional designers with specific strategies that were based on a hierarchy of intellectual skills.

What are their three most important publications?
His three most important publications consist of: 1) “Instructional Systems Design” 2) The Conditions of Learning, 1965 3) Principles of Instructional Design

Who are their most frequent collaborators?
His most frequent collaborators were Walter W. Wager (Author), Katharine Golas (Author), John M. Keller (Author)

Who are their main philosophical rivals (if any)?
None that could be found.

What (in)famous / apocryphal stories exist about this person?
“Much of Gagne’s research, writing and instructional design theory is colored by his work as a training designer for the army Air Corps during world war II. A freshly minted PhD from Brown universities phychology program, Gagne was handed the job of developing training materials that could be used by a small cadre of subject matter experts, acting as trainers, to impart specialized technical skills to thousands of raw recuites in the shortest time possible. Essentially, he was asked to figure out if there were any universal principles of effective instruction that would allow non-teachers to make air plane mechanics out of farmers in 30 days instead of 2 years of trial and error… Based on that research, he became convinced that in most training situations, effective and efficient learning takes place when the final task is first broken down into a set of component parts… Gagne certainly wasn’t the first teacher to practice what we now call task analysis. But he was the one who did it consciously and methodically, than formally described the process and stated it as a basic principle of systematic approach to instruction.” – Ron Zemke, Training July 1999.