If you are teaching, you will need to attend to all forms of learning in students, whether inner or outward. In classrooms, behaviorism is most useful for identifying relationships between specific actions by a student and the immediate precursors and consequences of the actions.
This fact is not a criticism of behaviorism as a perspective, but just a clarification of its particular strength or usefulness, which is to highlight observable relationships among actions, precursors and consequences. One variety of behaviorism that has proved especially useful to educators is operant conditioning, described in the next section.
Operant conditioning focuses on how the consequences of a behavior affect the behavior over time. It begins with the idea that certain consequences tend to make certain behaviors happen more frequently. If I compliment a student for a good comment made during discussion, there is more of a chance that I will hear further comments from the student in the future and hopefully they too will be good ones!
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. The original research about this model of learning was not done with people, but with animals. One of the pioneers in the field was a Harvard professor named B. Skinner, who published numerous books and articles about the details of the process and who pointed out many parallels between operant conditioning in animals and operant conditioning in humans , , Skinner observed the behavior of rather tame laboratory rats not the unpleasant kind that sometimes live in garbage dumps.
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. The lever released a small pellet of food, which the rat would promptly eat. Gradually the rat would spend more time near the lever and press the lever more frequently, getting food more frequently.
Eventually it would spend most of its time at the lever and eating its fill of food. See below. Skinner and other behavioral psychologists experimented with using various reinforcers and operants.
They also experimented with various patterns of reinforcement or schedules of reinforcement , as well as with various cues or signals to the animal about when reinforcement was available. It turned out that all of these factors—the operant, the reinforcement, the schedule, and the cues—affected how easily and thoroughly operant conditioning occurred. For example, reinforcement was more effective if it came immediately after the crucial operant behavior, rather than being delayed, and reinforcements that happened intermittently only part of the time caused learning to take longer, but also caused it to last longer.
Consider the following examples. In most of them the operant behavior tends to become more frequent on repeated occasions:. These examples are enough to make several points about operant conditioning.
First, the process is widespread in classrooms—probably more widespread than teachers realize. Second, learning by operant conditioning is not confined to any particular grade, subject area, or style of teaching, but by nature happens in every imaginable classroom. Third, teachers are not the only persons controlling reinforcements.
This leads to the fourth point: that multiple examples of operant conditioning often happen at the same time. A case study in Appendix A of this book The decline and fall of Jane Gladstone suggests how this happened to someone completing student teaching.
Because operant conditioning happens so widely, its effects on motivation are a bit complex. Operant conditioning can encourage intrinsic motivation , to the extent that the reinforcement for an activity is the activity itself. The combining of both is noticeable in the examples in the previous paragraph.
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.
This was because part of what reinforced their behavior was the behavior itself—whether it was making faces, running a mile, or contributing to a discussion. 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.
The boy who made a face was reinforced not only by the pleasure of making a face, for example, but also by the giggles of classmates. The track student was reinforced not only by the pleasure of running itself, but also by knowledge of his improved times and speeds. Note that the extrinsic part of the reinforcement may sometimes be more easily observed or noticed than the intrinsic part, which by definition may sometimes only be experienced within the individual and not also displayed outwardly.
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. But more about this issue later! Key concepts about operant conditioning: Operant conditioning is made more complicated, but also more realistic, by several additional ideas.
They can be confusing because the ideas have names that sound rather ordinary, but that have special meanings with the framework of operant theory.
Among the most important concepts to understand are the following:. The paragraphs below explain each of these briefly, as well as their relevance to classroom teaching and learning. Extinction refers to the disappearance of an operant behavior because of lack of reinforcement.
A student who stops receiving gold stars or compliments for prolific reading of library books, for example, may extinguish i. A student who used to be reinforced for acting like a clown in class may stop clowning once classmates stop paying attention to the antics.
Generalization refers to the incidental conditioning of behaviors similar to an original operant. If a student gets gold stars for reading library books, then we may find her reading more of other material as well—newspapers, comics, etc. 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.
Discrimination means learning not to generalize. In operant conditioning, what is not overgeneralized i. If I am a student who is being complimented reinforced for contributing to discussions, I must also learn to discriminate when to make verbal contributions from when not to make them—such as when classmates or the teacher are busy with other tasks.
The American philosopher, John Dewey , first popularized learning by doing. For Dewey, this meant a heavy emphasis on student engagement. This approach upended the traditional notion that learning happens through lectures and rote memorization. Dewey became famous by arguing that we learn best when we deeply engage with the material. This makes intuitive sense in real life situations. Imagine hopping onstage with only the slightest knowledge of the new chords.
Before you can hop onstage, you need the basic ability to comfortably play the chords. The same principle holds in the classroom. Part of the reason is short-term memory.
It holds the key to making learning experiences productive. Researchers like John Sweller have shown that short-term memory is often where learning happens. If we want to successfully improvise with a set of new chords, then short-term memory has to process the chords.
Only after short-term memory processes the chords can they arrive in long-term memory. Your fingers fall out of place, each chord loses its shape and what should be a beautiful sound comes out a jumbled mess of dissonance. Your hands, just like your mind, need time to learn the basic techniques. To learn, we need to break down knowledge and skills into digestible parts and concentrate on discrete bits of mastery. In other words, you have to learn a few chords at a time before you can master multiple chords in multiple key signatures.
What point is the author trying to make? John spent the next few years teaching; first at a high school in Pennsylvania, then at the Lake View Seminary in Charlotte, Virginia. Returning to Burlington, he took up another teaching role. During this time he wrote a paper called The Metaphysical Assumptions of Materialism which was later published in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Enrolling at Johns Hopkins University in , he studied for his doctorate, which he gained in John spent much of the next 45 years or so in academia, teaching at the University of Michigan, followed by the University of Chicago and finally Columbia University.
John married Alice, his first wife, in They had six children, with just four surviving into adulthood. The Deweys also adopted a boy, Sabino, who they met in Italy. Alice became Principal of the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, but a dispute about the school led to them leaving Chicago. John went on to Columbia University, where he worked until retiring as a full-time faculty member in He was then appointed professor emeritus of philosophy in residence at Columbia, however, and held that post until his eightieth birthday.
Alice died in and he married his second wife, Roberta, in He continued to write, travel and lecture until his death in Dewey wrote on many topics — such as philosophy, psychology and aesthetics — but the one we will focus on is education. John began by studying philosophy, but soon became interested in psychology. He was particularly drawn to the works of William James, elements of which he merged into his developing views on education.
America was shifting towards a different kind of economy and, John maintained, traditional schooling would not produce active, creative citizens. So how could students develop skills to shape their future lives?
Students were much more likely to embrace mathematics, for example, if they could see how it applied to their daily lives. He wrote in My Pedagogic Creed. John was given the opportunity to test his ideas at the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago. Alice, his wife, was the Principal and the curriculum was based around real-life issues. Peggy Hickman gives an excellent overview of the approach used at the school in an article she wrote about John Dewey.
She wrote:. Reading, writing, and math was to be taught in the daily course of these routines. Building, cooking, and sewing had these schooling components in it and these activities also represented everyday life for the students. For an example, if a student was not able to read it was here how they would be taught to achieve the ability to read. This would help the child learn how to share and communicate with others. Problems would be presented to the child and by trial and error the child would be able to solve the problem.
Dewey wrote a book about his findings from the Dewey school called The School and Society. What became known as The Dewey School came about because the University of Chicago offered John the chairmanship of the department of philosophy, psychology and pedagogy.
He set up the school as part of his work and it operated for 7 years. Most children came from the Hyde Park area of Chicago and, at its peak, it had over students.
Many were from reasonably well-off families and there were no African American students. Dewey learned a great deal from the school, much of which was translated into his writings. The transition proved difficult and eventually led to the Deweys leaving.
Alice found the experience particularly depressing. The Laboratory School survived, however, and lives to this day.
Below is an excerpt from its website. You can discover more via the following link. Combining his views on education with observations at The Laboratory School, John produced a succession of books.
The latter two books were based on his lectures and laid out his educational beliefs. A prototype experiment would involve, for example, presenting 4- to year-olds with long lists of pictures to remember, far more than they could if they simply tried to remember them individually. Such a list might consist of pictures of a cat, rose, train, hat, airplane, horse, tulip, boat, coat, etc. Given a item list, older children remember more than younger children, but the factor responsible for better recall is not age per se, but whether the child notices that the list consists of four categories animals, plants, means of transportation, and articles of clothing.
If the categories are noticed, young children often recall the entire list. In the absence of category recognition, performance is poorer and shows the age effect. Younger children employ categorization strategies less often than older ones. However, the skill is knowledge related, not age related; the more complex the categories, the older the child is before noticing the structure. One has to know a structure before one can use it. If one believes that learning differences are determined by gradual increases in capacity or speed of processing, one would expect relatively uniform increases in learning across most domains.
The importance of prior knowledge in determining performance, crucial to adults as well as children, includes knowledge about learning, knowledge of their own learning strengths and weaknesses, and the demands of the learning task at hand.
Whereas self-regulation may appear quite early, reflection appears to be late developing. If children lack insight to their own learning abilities, they can hardly be expected to plan or self-regulate efficiently. The evidence suggests that, like other forms of learning, metacognition develops gradually and is as dependent on knowledge as experience. It is difficult to engage in self-regulation and reflection in areas that one does not understand.
However, on topics that children know, primitive forms of self-regulation and reflection appear early Brown and DeLoache, Attempts at deliberate remembering in preschool children provide glimpses of the early emergence of the ability to plan, orchestrate, and apply strategies.
In a famous example, 3- and 4-year-old children were asked to watch while a small toy dog was hidden under one of three cups. The children were instructed to remember where the dog was. The children were anything but passive as they waited alone during a delay interval Wellman et al. Some children displayed various behaviors that resemble well-known mnemonic strategies, including clear attempts at retrieval practice, such as looking at the target cup and nodding yes, looking at the non-target cups and nodding no, and retrieval cueing, such as marking the correct cup by resting a hand on it or moving it to a salient position.
Both of these strategies are precursors to more mature rehearsal activities. These efforts were rewarded: children who prepared actively for retrieval in these ways more often remembered the location of the hidden dog. Box 4. These attempts to aid remembering involve a dawning awareness of metacognition—that without some effort, forgetting would occur. And the strategies involved resemble the more mature forms of strategic intervention, such as rehearsal, used by older school-aged children.
By recognizing this dawning understanding in children, one can begin to design learning activities in the early school years that build on and strengthen their understanding of what it means to learn and remember. The strategies that children use to memorize, conceptualize, reason, and solve problems grow increasingly effective and flexible, and are applied more broadly, with age and experience.
But different strategies are not solely related to age. To demonstrate the variety, we consider the specific case of the addition of single-digit numbers, which has been the subject of a great deal of cognitive research. For a group of and month-old children, an attractive toy, Big Bird, was hidden in a variety of locations in a playroom, such as behind a pillow, on a couch, or under a chair.
Instead, they often interrupted their play with a variety of activities that showed they were still preoccupied with the memory task. More recently, however, a more complex and interesting picture has emerged Siegler, On a problem-by-problem basis, children of the same age often use a wide variety of strategies. This finding has emerged in domains as diverse as arithmetic Cooney et al.
Even the same child presented the same problem on two successive days often uses different strategies Siegler and McGilly, For example, when 5-year-olds add numbers, they sometimes count from 1, as noted above, but they also sometimes retrieve answers from memory, and sometimes they count from the larger number Siegler, The fact that children use diverse strategies is not a mere idiosyncrasy of human cognition.
Good reasons exist for people to know and use multiple strategies. Strategies differ in their accuracy, in the amounts of time their execution requires, in their processing demands, and in the range of problems to which they apply. Strategy choices involve tradeoffs among these. The broader the range of strategies that children know and can appreciate where they apply, the more precisely they can shape their approaches to the demands of particular circumstances.
Even young children can capitalize on the strengths of different strategies and use each one for the problems for which its advantages are greatest. The adaptiveness of these strategy choices increases as children gain experience with the domain, though it is obvious even in early years Lemaire and Siegler, Once it is recognized that children know multiple strategies and choose among them, the question arises: How do they construct such strategies in the first place?
This question is answered through studies in which individual children who do not yet know a strategy are given prolonged experiences weeks or months in the subject matter; in this way, researchers can study how children devise their various strategies Kuhn, ; Siegler and Crowley, ; see also DeLoache et al, a. In this approach, one can identify when a new strategy is first used, which in turn allows examination of what the experience of discovery was like, what led to the discovery, and how the discovery was generalized beyond its initial use.
Three key findings have emerged from these studies: 1 discoveries are often made not in response to impasses or failures but rather in the context of successful performance; 2 short-lived transition strategies often precede more enduring approaches; and 3 generalization of new approaches often occurs very slowly, even when children can provide compelling rationales for their usefulness Karmiloff-Smith, ; Kuhn, ; Siegler and Crowley, Children often generate useful new strategies without ever having generated conceptually flawed ones.
They seem to seek conceptual understanding of the requisites of appropriate strategies in a domain. On such tasks as single-digit addition, multidigit subtraction, and the game of tic-tactoe, children possess such understanding, which allows them to recognize the usefulness of new, more advanced strategies before they generate them spontaneously Hatano and Inagaki, ; Siegler and Crowley, A common feature of such innovations as reciprocal teaching Palincsar and Brown, , communities of learners Brown and Campione, , ; Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, , the ideal student Pressley et al.
These programs differ, but all are aimed at helping students to understand how strategies can help them solve problems, to recognize when each strategy is likely to be most useful, and to transfer strategies to novel situations. The considerable success that these instructional programs have enjoyed, with young as well as older children and with low-income as well as middle-income children, attests to the fact that the development of a repertoire of flexible strategies has practical significance for learning.
In his theory of multiple intelligences, Gardner , proposed the existence of seven relatively autonomous intelligences: linguistic, logical, musical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. The theory of multiple intelligences was developed as a psychological theory, but it sparked a great deal of interest among educators, in this country and abroad, in its implications for teaching and learning.
The experimental educational programs based on the theory have focused generally in two ways. Some educators believe that all children should have each intelligence nurtured; on this basis, they have devised curricula that address each intelligence directly.
Others educators have focused on the development of specific intelligences, like the personal ones, because they believe these intelligences receive short shrift in American education. There are strengths and weaknesses to each approach. The application of multiple intelligences to education is a grass roots movement among teachers that is only just beginning. An interesting development is the attempt to modify traditional curricula: whether one is teaching history, science, or the arts, the theory of multiple intelligences offers a teacher a number of different approaches to the topic, several modes of representing key concepts, and a variety of ways in which students can demonstrate their understandings Gardner, Children with entity theories believe that intelligence is a fixed property of individuals; children with incremental theories believe that intelligence is malleable see also Resnick and Nelson-LeGall, Children who are entity theorists tend to hold performance goals in learning situations: they strive to perform well or appear to perform well, attain positive judgments of their competence, and avoid assessments.
They avoid challenges that will reflect them in poor light. They show little persistence in the face of failure. Their aim is to perform well.
In contrast, children who are incremental theorists have learning goals: they believe that intelligence can be improved by effort and will. They regard their own increasing competence as their goal.
They seek challenges and show high persistence. Although most children probably fall on the continuum between the two theories and may simultaneously be incremental theorists in mathematics and entity theorists in art, the motivational factors affect their persistence, learning goals, sense of failure, and striving for success.
Teachers can guide children to a more healthy conceptualization of their learning potential if they understand the beliefs that children bring to school. Just as children are often self-directed learners in privileged domains, such as those of language and physical causality, young children exhibit a strong desire to apply themselves in intentional learning situations.
They also learn in situations where there is no external pressure to improve and no feedback or reward other than pure satisfaction—sometimes called achievement or competence motivation White, ; Yarrow and Messer, ; Dichter-Blancher et al. Children are both problem solvers and problem generators; they not only attempt to solve problems presented to them, but they also seek and create novel challenges. An adult struggling to solve a crossword puzzle has much in common with a young child trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle.
Why do they bother? It seems that humans have a need to solve problems; see Box 4. Children 18 to 36 months of age are given nesting cups to play with DeLoache et al. However, the children immediately started trying to fit the cups together, often working long and hard in the process.
Overall, in their spontaneous manipulations of a set of nesting cups, very young children progress from trying to correct their errors by exerting physical force without changing any of the relations among the elements, to making limited changes in a part of the problem set, to considering and operating on the problem as a whole.
Most important, the children persist, not because they have to, or are guided to, or even because they are responding to failure; they persist because success and understanding are motivating in their own right. Research has shown that learning is strongly influenced by these social interactions.
Parents and others who care for children arrange their activities and facilitate learning by regulating the difficulty of the tasks and by modeling mature performance during joint participation in activities. A substantial body of observational research has provided detailed accounts of the learning interactions between mothers and their young children.
As an illustration, watch a mother with a 1-year-old sitting on her knees in front of a collection of toys. A large part of her time is devoted to such quietly facilitative and scene-setting activities as holding a toy that seems to require three hands to manipulate, retrieving things that have been pushed out of range, clearing away those things that are not at present being used in order to provide the child with a sharper focus for the main activity, turning toys so. Parents frame their language and behavior in ways that facilitate learning by young children Bruner, a, b, ; Edwards, ; Hoff-Ginsberg and Shatz, For example, in the earliest months, the restrictions of parental baby talk to a small number of melodic contours may enable infants to abstract vocal prototypes Papousek et al.
Parental labeling of objects and categories may assist children in understanding category hierarchies and learning appropriate labels Callanan, ; Mervis, An extremely important role of caregivers involves efforts to help children connect new situations to more familiar ones.
In our discussion of competent performance and transfer see Chapter 3 , we noted that knowledge appropriate to a particular situation is not necessarily accessed despite being relevant. Effective teachers help people of all ages make connections among different aspects of their knowledge. Scaffolding involves several activities and tasks, such as:. Consider the efforts to reach an understanding between an adult and a month-old about which toy the infant wants to play with.
The adult is looking for a toy in the toy box. But the infant ignores the cloth and points again at something in the toy box, then, impatiently, waves his arm. They repeat the cycle with another toy, and the baby waves his arm impatiently.
Engle, A variety of literacy experiences prepare children for this prowess. Recently, the efficacy of this process has been scientifically validated—it has been shown to work see National Research Council, In the late nineteenth century, C. The majority of the book consisted of reprints of the famous Tenniel woodcut illustrations. This was a first of its kind, and we quote Lewis Carroll cited in Cohen, Sixteenth-month-old Julie is left alone temporarily with a visiting grandfather.
To be read? Nay, not so! The pictures were the primary focus; much of the original tale is left unspecified. For example, when looking at the famous Tenniel picture of Alice swimming with mouse in a pool of her own tears, Carroll tells the adult to read to the child as follows cited in Cohen, :. And Alice has tumbled into the Pool: and the Mouse has tumbled in: and there they are swimming about together.
You can just see her blue stockings, far away under the water.
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