Learning Theories -- A Primer Exercise

An Examination of Behaviorism, Cognitivism, and Humanism

Created from excerpts from Educational Psychology, a course taught by Dr. Lawrence Tomei, Duquesne University and Applying Educational Psychology in the Classroom, a text by Myron H. Dembo, University of Southern California. Taken with permission and copyright reserved.

Conclusion. Congratulations on completing the Primer on Learning Theories. As mentioned in the Introduction, let's take another look at your beliefs about learning. Did they change?

Agree	Disagree	I Believe that...
		1. Learners need grades, gold stars, and other incentives as motivation to learn and to accomplish school requirements.
		2. Learners can be trusted to find their own goals and should have some options or choices in what they learn at school.
		3. Teachers need to determine what students are thinking about while solving math problems.
		4. Students should be graded according to uniform standards of achievement which the teacher sets for the class.
		5. Students should set their own individual standards and should evaluate their own work.
		6. Curriculum should be organized along subject matter lines that are carefully sequenced.
		7. The teacher should help students to monitor and control their own learning behavior.
		8. The school experience should help students to develop positive relations with their peers.

Once again, here's the recap....

Statement 1, 4, and 6 would be supported most strongly by Behavioral psychologists.
Statements 3 and 7 would have be sustained by Cognitive pcyhologists. And,
Statements 2, 5, and 8 would be on the ledger of the Humanistic psychologists.

If your selection changed, can you relate (at least to yourself) WHY it changed? Do you feel as though you are more of an ECLECTIC - someone who thinks that a combination of all three psychologies in some particular proportion would best serve your purposes in the classroom? Regardless, this Primer has prepared you to satisfactorily employ these models in the design of your own instructional materials. To do so, you must have a working knowledge of educational psychology.

Instructional Learning Theories is centered on these three major Schools of Educational Psychology. From these schools have evolved modern thinking about how learning occurs and how instruction affects that learning. Behaviorism brings to the table an historical foundation for learning at its most rudimentary base. Classical and Operant Conditioning first attempted to explain the nature of learning and continue to provide much explanation in the fruits of competency-based programs such as Mastery Learning. Cognitivism and its pivotal contributions of the schema ideology has its roots in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s and continues to impact classroom teaching and curriculum development. A more recent educational persuasion, Humanism is a child of the 1970s and its commitment to the personalization of learning has produced such anonymous citations as, "Tell me, I'll forget. Show me, I will remember. Involve me and I will understand."

Congratulations for completing these Web sites. If you would like to send comments to the author of this site, please contact Dr. Lawrence Tomei at tomei@rmu.edu.

Created and Maintained by Dr. Lawrence Tomei

Revised 10-15-2004