Gagne takes into consideration learning outcomes, including intellectual skills, cognitive strategies, verbal information, attitudes, and motor skills. He also considers the knowledge, skills, and abilities of learners and how the differences among learners affect instructional planning and design. It is a theory of animal and human behavior holding that actions can be explained entirely as responses to stimuli, without accounting for the profound influences of interpretation on introspection. Thus an educator who believed in behaviorism would tend to attribute learning as a reaction to an event or action that would stimulate the student, but would be provided by the teacher. To the behaviorist teaching is essentially a matter of arranging contingencies of reinforcement so as to produce and maintain prescribed behaviors.
Constructivism is quite an opposite paradigm of Behaviorism as described and defined above.
Jerome Brunner first proposed the concept of constructivism in the mid-1960's and builds on earlier ideas of Jean Piaget. Basically, it holds that the learner rather than the teacher develops or constructs knowledge and that opportunities created for such construction are more important than instruction that originates from the teacher. If we look at the delivery of information and learning via web-based instructional systems we find some similarities to traditional learning, however we find more differences than similarities. We find that many web-based instructional systems do indeed make use of stimulants such as movies, sounds, and graphics. We also find that the best web-based instructional sites provide a reference library of sorts, to assist the student in their understanding of the material elements of the particular course.