Robert M. Gagné

Robert Mills Gagné (August 21, 1916 – April 28, 2002) was an American educational psychologist best known for his "Conditions of Learning". Gagné pioneered the science of instruction during World War II when he worked with the Army Air Corps training pilots. He went on to develop a series of studies and works that simplified and explained what he and others believed to be 'good instruction.' Gagné was also involved in applying concepts of instructional theory to the design of computer-based training and multimedia-based learning..

Gagné's work is sometimes summarized as the Gagné assumption. The assumption is that different types of learning exist, and that different instructional conditions are most likely to bring about these different types of learning.

In high school at North Andover, Massachusetts, he decided to study psychology and perhaps be a psychologist after reading psychological texts. In his valedictory speech of 1932, he said the science of psychology should be used to relieve the burdens of human life. He had a scholarship to Yale University, and received A.B. in 1937. In graduate work at Brown University, he studied "conditioned operate response" of white rats under various conditions as a part of his Ph. D. thesis. His first college teaching job in 1940, at Connecticut College for Women.

His initial studies of people rather than rats were interrupted by World War II. In the first year of war, at Psychological Research Unit No. 1, Maxwell Field, Alabama, he administered and scored aptitude tests to choose and sort aviation cadets. Thereafter, he was assigned to officer school in Miami Beach. He was commissioned a second lieutenant, and assigned to School of Aviation Medicine, Randolph Field, Fort Worth, Texas.

After the war, he held a temporary faculty position at Florida State University. He returned to Connecticut College for Women. In 1949, he accepted an offer to join the US Air Force organization that became the Air Force Personnel and Training Research Center, where he was research director of the Perceptual and Motor Skills Laboratory. In 1958, he returned to academia as professor at Princeton University, where his research shifted focus to the learning of problem solving and the learning of mathematics. In 1962, he joined the American Institutes for Research, where he wrote his first book, "The Conditions of Learning." He spent additional time in academia at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked with graduate students. With W. K. Roher, he presented a paper, "Instructional Psychology", to the Annual Review of Psychology.

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