Some scholars in our country have made in-depth discussions on the quality structure of students from different angles, such as educational purpose, educational content, social demand for human development, human resources development and national quality. Gagne, on the other hand, divides students' qualities into three categories: congenital, acquired and acquired from the perspective that students are learners and learners of sustainable learning.
(A) the innate quality of students
Traditionally, the innate component of quality mainly refers to a person's neuroanatomical basis. Gagne mainly analyzes students' innate quality from the perspective of learning process (information input, information processing and information extraction).
For example, in the information input stage, there are individual differences in the visual acuity of human eyes, which is congenital. Studies have proved that people's short-term memory capacity is 5 ~ 9 information units. Short-term memory, an innate ability limitation, will affect learning. Although we can increase the amount of information in short-term memory by expanding memory chunks, the number of information units in short-term memory cannot be changed. In the stage of information extraction, the experiments designed by Hunt (1978) and "subtraction technology" prove that the speed of information extraction is different among individuals, and this difference is innate.
(B) the quality formed by students in development
Gagne put forward two qualities formed in development: intelligence and personality traits.
Many experts agree that intelligence is the ability to deal with abstract ideas, deal with new situations and learn to adapt to new environments. It is the result of the interaction between innate and acquired factors in the process of individual development, and it has relative stability. Zhan Sen (1969) pointed out that under the same ethnic and cultural conditions, 75% ~ 80% of the changes in individual IQ are attributed to genes and 20% ~ 25% to the environment. There are obvious individual differences in intelligence.
Personality trait is a universal tendency of all people, which can be revealed by personality test. It is also the product of the interaction between nature and nurture. And it is stable for a long time and is not easily influenced by teaching. The personality traits mentioned by Gagne include anxiety, introversion, caution, impulsiveness and self-satisfaction. Personality traits vary from person to person in quantity, which constitutes individual differences in personality traits.
(C) the acquired quality of students
Gagne regards the five learning achievements (verbal information, intellectual skills, cognitive strategy, attitude and motor skills) obtained by students as their acquired qualities.
Voice information. It is equivalent to the basic knowledge in "double basics". Most of the knowledge in historical geography classes in primary and secondary schools is oral information. It is the knowledge that answers what the world is, and it is the knowledge that individuals can consciously extract clues and directly state them. They are stored in the cognitive structure in the form of single proposition and proposition network.
Smart skills. It is equivalent to the basic skills in "double basics". The learning requirements of Chinese, mathematics, foreign languages and other disciplines are basically intellectual skills. Gagne believes that the essence of intellectual skills is people's ability to use symbols to deal with information or problems. Generally speaking, it is to speak or make sentences according to certain grammatical rules, or to solve problems by using some rules such as mathematics, physics and chemistry. Gagne further divided intellectual skills into four sub-categories from low to high, namely, discrimination, concepts, rules and advanced rules. Discrimination here refers to distinguishing the differences between things, and mainly cultivates students' ability to distinguish similar things in teaching; Concepts reflect the essential attributes of a class of things, and concept learning mainly cultivates students' ability to classify similar things among a large number of different things. Rules are the relationships among several concepts, which are presented in the form of propositions. Rule learning mainly cultivates students' ability to use rules, such as finding voltage by ohm's law. Advanced rules refer to the rules obtained by recombining simple rules. Advanced rule learning mainly cultivates students' ability to use simple rules to generate new rules and solve complex problems. For example, solving complex plane geometry problems in middle school mathematics involves the comprehensive application of many rules. These four subclasses have strict grades, and the wisdom and skills of superiors must be based on the skills of subordinates. We call it Gagne's hierarchy of wisdom and skills. Wisdom skills are embedded in the related proposition network in the form of production and production system in the brain. The skills of reading, writing and simple mental arithmetic mastered by primary and secondary school students belong to automatic intelligent skills.
Cognitive strategies. Some of them are similar to learning methods, but they are much richer in connotation. Cognitive strategy is "the skill organized by the same department that learners use to control their own psychological processing process", and it is the ability to deal with the internal world. If a set of concepts and rules dominate people's cognitive processing activities and improve their information processing ability, he will acquire cognitive strategies. For example, a primary school teacher teaches students a set of procedures to correct "elementary arithmetic" mistakes: one search, two checks, three calculations and four corrections. If a student can use this program to correct his mistakes every time, we think that he has obtained the cognitive strategy of "error correction".
Attitude. Attitude is an organized internal state or reaction tendency, which is learned and affects the individual's behavior choice for a specific object. It includes three components: cognition, emotion and behavioral tendency, and its core component is emotion. Moral education in China's education policy is contained in attitude. The two are sometimes the same in quality, but they are also different. If a student scribbles in his homework and doesn't listen carefully in class, we can only say that he has a bad learning attitude, not that he has a bad moral character. Only attitudes involving social moral norms belong to the category of morality. Attitude (moral) learning permeates the study of all disciplines, such as mathematics, physics, chemistry and other disciplines of science, and it is necessary to form an attitude of liking these disciplines, and moral education in Chinese, history, politics and other disciplines of liberal arts occupies a very important position. In quality education, attitude (moral character) education is one of the most important goals of school education.
Motor skills. Motor skill is an actual muscle movement that gradually becomes accurate and coherent under the control of exercise rules due to practice and feedback. It exists in many disciplines. For example, primary school students learn to write with pens and brushes; Learning to read aloud in Chinese class, there are complicated vocal cord muscle coordination movements in reading aloud; Middle school physical chemistry class should learn to do experiments; Learn to play the piano in music class; Learn to draw in art class; Physical education class and labor technology classes focus on learning motor skills.
Gagne's classification of five kinds of learning achievements is no stranger to China academic circles, but Gagne regards them as students' acquired qualities, which should attract the attention of China educational circles. Of course, Gagne regards the learning achievements obtained by students as the acquired quality of students. Whether this is reasonable remains to be tested. In the discussion of quality education in China, some people put forward the theories of "three educations (moral, intellectual and physical)", "five educations", "six educations" and even "ten educations", as well as "three levels and five aspects", "trinity", "compound content" and "four concerns" and so on. With the development of the times and the deepening of research, it can be expected that some experts will constantly put forward new contents of quality education. We believe that Gagne's theory has a characteristic, that is, no matter how many kinds of students' qualities (acquired, of course) are mentioned, they can basically be reasonably explained by his five kinds of acquired qualities, which really change with constants. Grasping these five acquired qualities, quality education will grasp the root.