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This citation comes from my reading book.

Behaviorism- is thetheoretical perspective in which learning and behavior are described and explained in terms of stimulus–response relationships.

Cognitive psychology- is the general theoretical perspective that focuses on the mental processes underlying learning and behavior.

Social cognitive theory- istheoretical perspective that focuses on how people learn by observing others and how they eventually assume control over their own behavior.

Social Cognitive Theory

In the opening case study, we see evidence of the first of several assumptions underlyingsocial cognitive theory:

● People can learn by observing others. From the perspective of instrumental conditioning learning is often a process of trial and error: People try many different responses, increasing those that bring desirable consequences and leaving unproductive ones behind. Social cognitive theorists argue that learners do not necessarily have to experiment in such a trial-and-error manner. Instead, they can acquire many new responses simply by observing the behaviors of other individuals, or models. For example, a student might learn how to solve a long division problem, spell the word synonym correctly, or mouth off at a teacher simply by watching someone else do these things first.

● Learning is an internal process that may or may not lead to a behavior change.

Some of the things that people learn appear in their behavior immediately, other things affect their behavior at a later time, and still others never influence their behavior at all. For example, you might attempt to swing a tennis racket as soon as you learn the correct form. But you probably will not demonstrate that you’ve learned how to apologize tactfully until a later time when an apology is necessary. And you might never walk through campus nude, no matter how many times you see someone else do it. Rather than define learning as a change in behavior (as many behaviorists do), social cognitive theorists (like cognitive psychologists) view learning as an internal mental process that may or may not be reflected in the learner’s behavior.

● Cognitive processes influence motivation as well as learning. Like cognitive psychologists,social cognitive theorists recognize the importance of particular cognitive processes—attention, encoding, and so on—for learning and remembering new information. But social cognitive theorists point out that cognition is an important ingredient in motivation as well. From the perspective of social cognitive theory, people set mental goals toward which they direct their behavior, and their goals are based to some degree on their expectations about what they might reasonably be able to accomplish. People’s expectations about their ability to execute certain behaviors or reach certain goals—that is, their self-efficacy—play a key role in how hard they try, how long they persist at challenging tasks, and ultimately how much they learn and achieve.

● People and their environments mutually influence each other. Some learning theorists, especially behaviorists, focus primarily on how the environment can affect learners. But the reverse is true as well: Learners affect their environments, often quite consciously and intentionally. To some degree, learners influence their environments through their behaviors. For instance, the responses students make (e.g., the academic classes they choose, the extracurricular activities they pursue, the company they keep) determine the learning opportunities they will have and the consequences they will experience. Internal cognitive processes, personality characteristics, and other things that in some way reside inside learners come into play as well (social cognitive theorists refer to these things as person variables). For instance, students are apt to focus their attention on (and thus learn from) only certain aspects of their environment and their idiosyncratic interpretations of why they have been reinforced or punished will influence the specific effects that such consequences have.

Ultimately, all three of these variables—environment, behavior, and person— influence one another in the manner shown in Figure 10.1. Social cognitive theorists use the term reciprocal causation when referring to this constant interplay among environment, behavior, and person variables (Bandura, 1989, 2006; Schunk & Pajares, 2004; Zimmerman & Schunk, 2003).

● Behavior becomes increasingly self-regulated. In the first few years of life, children’s actions are controlled and guided to a considerable degree by others: parents, older siblings, childcare providers, teachers, and so on. But as children grow older, most of them increasingly take charge of their lives, not only making decisions about the goals toward which they will strive but also directing and monitoring their behaviors and thought processes to accomplish their goals. In other words, most children increasingly engage in self-regulation.

Cognitive psychology has much to offer teachers and studentsalike. Following are several key principles that can guide all members of any classroom community:

● Learners are actively involved in their own learning. As should be clear by now, learning involves creatingself-constructed understandings, rather than thoughtlesslyabsorbing information from the environment. Hence, strictlyone-way forms of instruction—for instance, talking at ratherthan with students—will not necessarily lead students to thinkabout classroom topics in the same way that their teachers do.

● To learn and remember something effectively, learners must give it their undivided attention. That is, theymust mentally focus on it and temporarily make it the center of their cognitive world. However, attention and workingmemory have a limited capacity (i.e., learners can attend toand think about only a small amount of information at onetime), thus creating a major bottleneck in the human memorysystem. No matter how fascinating a topic may be, studentscan learn only so much so fast.

● In most circumstances, meaningful learning is more effective than rote learning. Effective learners try to makenew information meaningful, logical, organized, and vivid—for instance, by identifying ways in which it’s similar tothings they already know, drawing inferences from it, findingconnections among its various pieces, and formingvisual images that capture some of its key qualities. Whencertain kinds of information have little underlying logic—asis the case, for example, with many capitals of states andcountries and with many words in foreign languages—usingmnemonic techniques provides a viable alternative. As teachers, we must continually emphasize the importanceof understanding classroom subject matter—seeinghow it all ties together, recognizing new examples, and soon—rather than simply memorizing it in a relatively thought-free manner. This emphasis must be reflected not only in our words but also in our instructional activities,classroom assignments, and assessment practices. Forinstance, in high school science classes, we might embedthought-provoking questions into our explanations and lectures—perhaps questions that require students to evaluate,synthesize, or apply new ideas. In elementary math instruction,rather than ask students simply to memorize proceduresfor adding two two-digit numbers, we might ask themto identify at least three different ways they might solve aproblem such as “15 _ 45 _ ?” or “29 _ 68 _ ?” and to justifytheir reasoning. And in middle school history, ratherthan assess students’ knowledge with questions aboutnames, places, and dates, we might ask students to explainwhy certain events happened and how those events alteredthe course of subsequent history. Such approaches will notonly make students’ learning more meaningful and effectivebut will also enhance their belief that classroom topics areinteresting, enjoyable, and relevant to their own lives.

● Repetition over the long run has greater benefits than repetition in the short run. As you have learned,rehearsal—repeating something over and over within thecourse of a few seconds or minutes—is a useful way ofkeeping information in working memory but is relativelyineffective for storing it in long-term memory. Once informationis in long-term memory, however, occasional repetitionover the course of several weeks, months, or years canhelp to keep it there indefinitely. Furthermore, students arelikely to achieve automaticity for important facts and skills—enabling them to retrieve those facts and skills quickly andefficiently—only if they practice using them at regular intervalsand in different contexts.

● Long-term memory appears to have as much capacityas learners could ever need. Thanks to the process ofmeaningful learning, the more information that learners currentlyhave in long-term memory, the more easily they canunderstand and remember new ideas. When it comes toacquiring new knowledge, then, the rich get richer and thepoor (in knowledge) stay relatively poor. There appear tobe no limits to the amount of information and the numberof skills that human beings can learn. (Ormrod, 2011)

Behaviorism focuses on how environmental stimuli bring about changes in people’s behaviors. We will also use behaviorist ideas to understand how, as teachers, we can help students acquire behaviors that are perhaps more complex, productive, or prosocial than the ones they exhibit when they first enter our classrooms.

Basic Assumptions of Behaviorism

When psychologists first began studying human learning and behavior systematically in the late 1880s, much of their work involved asking people to “look” inside their heads and describe what they were doing mentally (e.g., Ebbinghaus, 1885/1913; Galton, 1880; James, 1890). But beginning in the early 1900s, some psychologists criticized this approach as being subjective and scientifically unsound. In their minds, the human mind was a “black box” that simply could not be opened for inspection. Instead, these psychologists began to focus on two things that could be observed and objectively measured: environmental events, or stimuli (sometimes abbreviated as S), and people’s behaviors, or responses (sometimes abbreviated as R). This focus gave rise to the behaviorist movement, which dominated much of psychology in the middle decades of the twentieth century, especially in North America.

In later decades, psychologists became increasingly inventive in their effects to study thinking processes with scientific rigor, and many left the behaviorist approach behind for more cognitively oriented approaches. Nevertheless, behaviorism is still very much alive and well, in large part because behaviorist concepts and principlescan be quite useful in helping people of all ages acquire productive behaviors in classrooms and other settings.

Underlying the behaviorist perspective are several key assumptions:

● People’s behaviors are largely the result of their experiences with environmental stimuli. Historically, many behaviorists have suggested that, with the exception of a few simple reflexes, a person is born as a “blank slate” (or in Latin, tabula rasa), with no inherited tendency to behave one way or another. Over the years, the environment “writes” on this slate, slowly molding, or conditioning, the person into someone who has unique characteristics and ways of behaving. As teachers, we must keep in mind the very significant effect that students’ past and present environments are likely to have on their behaviors. We can often use this basic principle to our advantage: By changing the classroom environment, we may also be able to change how students behave.

● Learning involves a behavior change. In Chapter 6, we defined learning as “a long-term change in mental representations or associations as a result of experience.”

Some behaviorists would quibble with this definition because we cannot see mental changes. Instead, they suggest, we might define learning as a change in behavior due to experience. Such a view of learning can be especially useful in the classroom. Consider this scenario:

Your students look at you attentively as you explain a difficult concept. When you finish, you ask “Any questions?” You look around the room, and not a single hand is raised. “Good,” you think, “they all understand.” However, do your students understand? Based on what you have just observed, you really have no idea whether they do or do not. Only observable behavior changes—perhaps an improvement in achievement test scores, a greater frequency of independent reading, or a reduction in off-task behaviors—can ultimately tell us that learning has occurred.

● Learning involves forming associations among stimuli and responses. Largely, behaviorist principles focus on relationships among observable events. For example, the opening case study illustrates one important behaviorist principle: People are more likely to learn and exhibit behaviors that bring about certain kinds of consequences. In particular, James increases his disruptive behaviors (responses) because those behaviors lead other people to behave in certain ways (i.e., their behaviors are stimuli for James). If we were to take a strict “black box” perspective here, we would not concern ourselves with what is going on inside James’s head at all. But in recent decadesit has become increasingly evident, even to behaviorists, justhow difficult it is to omit thinking from explanations of learning and behavior. Accordingly, some behaviorists have begun to incorporate cognitive processes and other internal phenomena into their theoretical explanations (e.g., DeGrandpre, 2000; Rescorla, 1988). As you read this chapter, you will find thatI occasionally allude to internal phenomena in my discussion

of behaviorist principles. In doing so, I am revealing my own biases as a cognitive psychologist, and pure behaviorists might object.

● Learning is most likely to take place when stimuli and responses occur close together in time. When two events occur atmore or less the same time—perhaps two stimuli or perhaps astimulus and a response—we say that there is contiguitybetween them. The following examples illustrate contiguity:One of your instructors (Professor X) scowls at you as shehands back an exam she has just corrected. You discoverthat you have gotten a D_ on the exam, and your entirebody tenses up. The next time Professor X scowls at you that same bodily tension returns. Another instructor (Professor Y) calls on you every timeyou raise your hand. Although you are fairly quiet in yourother classes, you find yourself raising your hand andspeaking up more frequently in this one In the first situation, Professor X’s scowl and the D_ on yourexam are presented more or less simultaneously. Here, we seecontiguity between two stimuli. In the second situation, your hand-raising response isfollowed immediately by Professor Y’s request for your input. In this case, we see contiguitybetween a response and a subsequent stimulus (although calling on you is aresponse that Professor Y makes, it is a stimulus for you). In both situations, a behaviorhas changed: You have learned to tighten your muscles every time one instructorscowls, and you have learned to raise your hand and speak up more frequently inanother instructor’s class.

● Many species of animals, including human beings, learn in similar ways. Many behaviorist principles have been derived from research with nonhumananimals. For instance, as you will see in a moment, our knowledge about classicalconditioning first emerged from Ivan Pavlov’s early work with dogs. And anotherwell-known behaviorist, B. F. Skinner, worked almost exclusively with rats andpigeons. Students in my own educational psychology classes sometimes resenthaving human learning compared to that of laboratory rats. But the fact is thatbehaviorist principles developed from the study of nonhuman animals are oftenquite helpful in explaining human behavior.

(Ormrod, 2011)

This citation comes from my reading book.

“All three perspectives provide valuable lessons about how to help studentsachieve in the classroom. For instance, principles from cognitive psychologygive us ideas about how we can help students remember information and apply it to new situations and problems. Principles from behaviorism yield strategies for helping students develop and maintain more productive classroom behaviors. Principles from social cognitive theory show us how we can effectively model the skills we want students to acquire and how we can promote greater self-regulation. And principles from all three perspectives are useful for motivating students to succeed in the classroom” (Ormrod, 2011).

Text Book

Reference

Ormrod, J. E. (2011). Teaching and Educational Psychology. In J. E. Ormrod, Educational Psychology: Developing Learners Seventh Edition. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.