This paper examines the tradition of research within the field of educational technology and cites problems endemic to the dominant research methods. It is suggested that a reexamination of the history of the field has intrinsic merit and is necessary at this time; furthermore, historical analysis may assist in the development of new research…

By 1960 there was a strongly developed theory of learning in which learning was considered as change of behavior. Neobehaviorist theories and then formal stochastic models analyzed processes in which probabilities of responses are altered. In the 1960's, analysis of learning as a discrete change between states of knowledge or stages of processing…