Orientation to Behaviorism. This first school of educational psychology focuses on the observable aspects of the environment instead of on mental or cognitive processes. According to the Behaviorist viewpoint, it is the environment that provides stimulation - the learner responds to that stimulation. The response changes the environment in ways that increase or decrease the likelihood of the same response in the future. The Behaviorist view offers hypotheses for classroom management and suggests ways to prevent and resolve discipline problems. It involves managing the learning activities of students. It represents the psychology of education that most clearly defines, for educators, several critical concepts of learning:
Advanced Organizer. Environmental events can come to control the behavior of those who find themselves in that environment. An important question for any teacher to ask is, "How do I establish and maintain control of my students' behavior? Behaviorism provides answers to that question offering key concepts and principles. We will explore some of the most familiar and important Behavioral theorists and theories that have contributed to the field of education.
I. THE THEORISTS
B. E. L. Thorndike and Connectionism
C. B. F. Skinner and Operant Conditioning
D. Albert Bandura and Social Learning Theory
A Russian psychologist, Ivan Pavlov, accidentally came upon an interesting learning phenomenon while working with dogs in his laboratory. If a bell was sounded a few seconds before a hungry dog was presented with food, after several trials the dog would salivate simply at the sound of the bell. Pavlov identified the food as an UNCONDITIONED STIMULUS and salivation as an UNCONDITIONED RESPONSE (an example of a stimulus that produces some observable response without prior learning). The bell, which originally had no particular meaning for the dog, took on meaning or became a CONDITIONED STIMULUS, because of its association, or pairing, with the food which elicited a CONDITIONED RESPONSE -- salivation.
This manner of learning is called CLASSICAL CONDITIONING, or stimulus substitution, because the conditioned stimulus, after being paired with the unconditioned stimulus often enough, can then be substituted for it. Here is a schematic representation of Classical Conditioning:
Pavlov found that when a dog was conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell, it would also salivate at other similar sounds such as that of a siren, even though the new stimuli were never used in training. He termed this new experience STIMULUS GENERALIZATION. The experiment placed the animal in a confined environment to control his access to food and to record the responses to the stimuli. It looked like the following graphic:
Implications for the Classroom. Many students' attitudes are learned through Classical Conditioning. For example, they may learn to acquire negative reactions to learning a foreign language because they associate these languages with the unpleasant experience of being asked to translate sentences aloud in class. Being asked difficult questions (US) elicits anxiety (UR). Students who are conditioned to fear foreign languages may generalize that fear to other subjects in the curriculum. The same learning process operates in other school-wide experiences. Can you see how changing the pattern of US --> UR can result in changes in the behavior and attitudes of the student towards school?
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