Given the dynamic changing nature of knowledge, educators need to appreciate that learning and teaching theories can help them to conceptualise their use of digital technologies to support learning and teaching. This chapter will highlight the main learning and teaching theories that educators can draw upon to help them understand or inform their pedagogical approaches when using digital technologies in their classroom. The chapter is not meant to be a comprehensive review of major learning theories used in education, though it is intended to be a useful guide to help pre-service educators and beginning educators make the link between the use of digital technologies and a number of the learning theories that exist.

Additionally, the chapter will challenge you to understand how the influence of personal experience plays a large role on the pedagogical approaches that educators either consciously or subconsciously apply within our classrooms. The main focus of this chapter will highlight how digital technologies are used to support learning and teaching in consideration of these theoretical underpinnings.

Chapter 4 discusses various theories of learning that have an impact on how EC professionals can work with young children. Theories about how children (and, indeed, adults) learn science and the factors that affect learning in young children are described. The relationship between everyday concepts and scientific concepts is distinguished. The place of affective factors in children’s learning is also described. Various case studies are presented to highlight aspects of children’s learning.

Children attempt to make sense of, and to understand, the various phenomena and experiences they have. This is science in its purest and simplest sense – children gaining an understanding of the world around them. Children’s understandings are based on the range of interactions they have and the cognitive development of ‘key understandings (concepts)’ that help to explain the phenomena, at least to them. The Early Years Learning Framework (DEEWR, 2009, p. 12) indicates that it draws from a range of perspectives from early childhood developmental theory and knowledge about how children learn, which are then used to develop the Principles and Practices. There are many theories about how children (and adults) learn science and the factors that affect learning in young children. This chapter describes and discusses accepted theories of children’s development and the range of influences that impact science learning.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Darwinian interests in animal behavior converged with experimental psychology to give rise to systematic research on learning in animals. For the first half of the twentieth century, Ivan Pavlov’s study of conditioned reflexes was a major influence, but many American researchers maintained the behaviorist claim that all learning is based on stimulus–response (S–R) habits. A major critic of this dominant tradition emphasized spatial learning, suggesting that conditioning procedures produce expectancies rather than habits. Another kind of attack on S–R theory concentrated on its claim that learning processes were the same for all species. The comparative approach investigated ways in which, for example, the learning capacities of primates differed from those of rats or even goldfish. Other researchers investigated biological constraints on what animals can learn and the way that learning depends on a researcher’s choice of stimuli and responses, as in the study of conditioned taste aversions. Several key discoveries in the late 1960s laid the foundations for new associative theories of learning and a revival of interest in cognitive processes like attention. These approaches, together with breakthroughs in research on neural bases of behavior, have dominated research on animal learning ever since.