In Piaget’s viewpoint, though, what is being transferred to a new setting is not simply a behavior (Skinner’s “operant” in operant conditioning), but a mental representation for an object or experience. And still another example—one often relevant to new teachers: when I began my first year of teaching, I was more focused on doing the job of teaching—on day-to-day survival—than on pausing to reflect on what I was doing. Vygotsky called the difference between solo performance and assisted performance the zone of proximal development (or ZPD for short)—meaning, figuratively speaking, the place or area of immediate change. The bad news is that students’ negative behaviors may take longer to extinguish as well, because those too may have developed through partial reinforcement. As it turns out, many theories, concepts, and ideas from educational psychology do make it through the “screen” of education, meaning that they are consistent with the professional priorities of teachers and helpful in solving important problems of classroom teaching. But more about this issue later! This view challenges both the behaviorist notion of the learner as a blank slate and the cognitivist notion of learning as the acquisition of objective information from an expert. Another recent example of psychological constructivism is the cognitive theory of Jean Piaget (Piaget, 2001; Gruber & Voneche, 1995). These relationships are diagrammed in Exhibit 2. Rather than measuring learning based on observable behaviors, cognitivists evaluate learning based on a learner’s demonstration of knowledge and understanding. First emerging in the late 20th century, social and contextual learning theories challenge the individual-focused approaches evident in both constructivism and cognitivism. A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. Partly for this reason, his theory is often considered less about learning and more about development, or long-term change in a person resulting from multiple experiences that may not be planned deliberately. Read over 100+ summaries of learning theories, along with guides to useful tools — welcome to one of the best resources on the web. It is true that external reinforcement may sometimes alter the nature or strength of internal (or intrinsic) reinforcement, but this is not the same as saying that it destroys or replaces intrinsic reinforcement. Educational psychologists apply theories of human development to understand individual learning and inform the instructional process. They believe that learning depends on a group’s effective use of cooperation, trust, understanding, and problem-solving to produce beneficial learning outcomes for the community. In cognitivism theory, learning occurs when the student reorganises information, either by finding new explanations or adapting old ones. A preschool child who already understands the concept of bird, for example, might initially label any flying object with this term—even butterflies or mosquitoes. As explained in the next section, both focus on individuals’ thinking rather than their behavior, but they have distinctly different implications for teaching. Albert Bandura, for example, emphasizes the roles that social observation and modeling play in learning, while Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger posit that learning works best in a community of practice that produces social capital that improves the health of the community and its members. Put in more social constructivist terms, the teacher arranges a zone of proximal development that allows the student to compare species successfully, but the student still has to construct or appropriate the comparisons for him or herself. Anderson, L. & Krathwohl, D. He is best known for his sociocultural theory and his concepts of the zone of proximal development and guided practice. A teacher’s effort to explicitly address the importance of lesson material reflects the impact of social and contextual learning theory. Behaviorist theories ascribe to a reductionist approach, which dictates that breaking behavior down into parts is the best way to understand it. Theories in Educational Psychology’s purpose is to introduce readers to the pioneering educational psychology theories that continue to shape our understanding of the classroom learning environment, present support for the theories from perspectives in the current research literature, and share how these theoretical traditions have translated into effective teaching methods. A student who clowns around inappropriately in class, for example, may not be “supported” by classmates’ laughter every time it happens, but only some of the time. Because operant conditioning happens so widely, its effects on motivation are a bit complex. Similar ideas were independently proposed by the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978), whose writing focused on how a child’s or novice’s thinking is influenced by relationships with others who are more capable, knowledgeable, or expert than the learner. Classmates sitting around them giggle in response (the reinforcement). Mental-discipline theories; Naturalistic theories; Apperception theories; Conditioning and behaviourist theories; Cognitive theories; Maturation and readiness theories; Structural theories Rousing minds to life: Teaching, learning, and schooling in social context. This dual principle is important for teachers because so much of the reinforcement we give is partial or intermittent. (Ed.). Psychology gives education the theory of individual differences that every child has different mental ability and learns with different pace. Experientialist David A. Kolb identifies four stages in this learning process: experiencing, absorbing and reflecting on experience, conceptualizing experience, and testing concepts in other situations. Although they admit that thought and emotion influence learning, behaviorists either dismiss these factors as phenomena beyond the realm of scientific inquiry (methodological behaviorism) or convert internal factors into behavioral terms (neobehaviorism/radical behaviorism). Skinner, B. F. (1938). A twelfth-grade student—a member of the track team—runs one mile during practice (the operant). The theoretical differences are related to three ideas in particular: the relationship of learning and long-term development, the role or meaning of generalizations and abstractions during development, and the mechanism by which development occurs. Following Piaget, cognitive constructivism acknowledges age-based developmental learning stages and articulates learning as an expansion (through assimilation and accommodation processes) of a learner’s experientially informed mental model of their world. A child who is usually very restless sits for five minutes doing an assignment (the operant). Generalization is a lot like the concept of transfer discussed early in this chapter, in that it is about extending prior learning to new situations or contexts. Download Full PDF Package. By assigning a more active role to expert helpers—which by implication includes teachers—than does the psychological constructivism, social constructivism may be more complete as a description of what teachers usually do when actually busy in classrooms, and of what they usually hope students will experience there. Bloom’s taxonomy, as it is usually called, describes six kinds of learning goals that teachers can in principle expect from students, ranging from simple recall of knowledge to complex evaluation of knowledge. Distinguish parts of information, a concept, or a procedure. The selection of behavior: The operant behaviorism of B. F. Skinner. Reinforcement was associated with pressing a lever when, and only when, the light was on. To many educators these days, his ideas may seem merely like good common sense, but they were indeed innovative and progressive at the beginning of the twentieth century. Metacognition in literacy learning. In each example, it is reasonable to assume that the student felt intrinsically motivated to some partial extent, even when reward came from outside the student as well. It begins with the idea that certain consequences tend to make certain behaviors happen more frequently. 37 Full PDFs related to this paper. Experientialism also shapes theories of organizational learning, including workplace design and professional training. An early expression of this viewpoint came from the American psychologist Jerome Bruner (1960, 1966, 1996), who became convinced that students could usually learn more than had been traditionally expected as long as they were given appropriate guidance and resources. But if that cue does not occur—if the student is not called on—speaking may not be rewarded. At most it might be misconstrued as an oversimplified, overly concrete idea—as “just” about taking votes in class, for instance. (The levels are defined briefly in Error: Reference source not found with examples from Goldilocks and the Three Bears.). Learning and behavior, 6th edition. Lave and Wenger, on the other hand, view the diversity in knowledge levels as the best asset to a community of practice. the teacher) also has to organize the content into manageable parts, offer the parts in a sensible sequence, provide for suitable and successful practice, bring the parts back together again at the end, and somehow relate the entire experience to knowledge and skills meaningful to the learner already. Like Piaget, Vygotsky believed that children learn actively and through hands-on experiences. Acting together, assimilation and accommodation continually create new states of cognitive equilibrium. On constructivist epistemology. (Ed.). For the biology student mentioned above, for example, you may be able not only to plan activities that support comparing species, but also to devise ways for the student to think about how he or she might learn the same information independently. Decide whether Goldilocks was a bad girl, and justify your position. He called the food pellets the reinforcement and the lever-pressing the operant (because it “operated” on the rat’s environment). At the same time, though, note that each student probably was also extrinsically motivated, meaning that another part of the reinforcement came from consequences or experiences not inherently part of the activity or behavior itself. A student who knows few terms for the species studied in biology unit (a problem at Bloom’s knowledge and comprehension levels), for example, may initially need support at remembering and defining the terms before he or she can make useful comparisons among species (Bloom’s analysis level). At some point we all use this perspective, whether we call it “behaviorism” or something else. Young children, for example, can not only engage in science experiments like creating a “volcano” out of baking soda and water, but also discuss and speculate about their observations of the experiment. New York: Teachers College Press. Educational Psychology Theories The research on Educational Psychology Theories are extensive, and the four major perspectives which make the foundation for its qualitative and quantitative research methods of study are those of behaviorist, cognitive, humanistic and social learning. Whether you think of yourself as a psychological constructivist or a social constructivist, there are strategies for helping students help in develop their thinking—in fact the strategies constitute a major portion of this book, and are a major theme throughout the entire preservice teacher education programs. Several ideas and priorities, then, affect how we teachers think about learning, including the curriculum, the difference between teaching and learning, sequencing, readiness, and transfer. Applied behavior analysis for teachers, 7th edition. If a student tells a joke to classmates and they laugh at it, then the student is likely to tell more jokes in the future and so on. (1995). and the major learning theories (behaviorism, Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner), as related to educational psychology and the implications to teaching. He or his assistants would put them in a cage that contained little except a lever and a small tray just big enough to hold a small amount of food. Piaget, J. The process of education. As I hope you will see, each describes some aspects of learning not just in general, but as it happens in classrooms in particular. Skinner and other behavioral psychologists experimented with using various reinforcers and operants. Behaviorist learning theory distinguishes between classical and operative conditioning. Someone who has played very little chess, for example, will probably compete against an opponent better if helped by an expert chess player than if competing against the opponent alone. The image of the teacher therefore is more one of collaborating with students’ ideas rather than challenging their ideas or experiences. 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