Learning Theory and Education

Learning theory and education

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Learning theory and education

Michael Toye, ITRU

Introduction

This paper was requested because adult educators and those concerned with their training feel that if there is something called Learning Theory it is only sensible that they should know what it says. In my experience this feeling is a chronic condition which occasionally becomes acute, producing symptoms such as the present request - for a straight answer. In the tradition of my Craft, I fail to give one. No psychologist could do so without being partial and selective to a degree which would leave his audience confused and baffled by subsequent, conflicting versions of the truth.

The problem arises from the state of psychology and the part which learning plays in psychology as a whole. To single out learning theory as a special aspect is like asking a botanist to explain the ‘theory of plant growth’: he would find it too difficult to know what to leave out. And if there were a dozen discordant Botanies and Sub-Botanies his task would be impossible. Admittedly it is the fault of psychologists themselves for putting about the idea that they have got A Theory of Learning but this makes the problem no easier. My answer to it in this paper, is to try briefly to restate the important lines of development in psychology during its modern history and relate these to the problems underlying them. This is not for the sake of history as such. The issues are not dead and passed: they are active in modern psychology, either on the surface or just beneath it. Without this perspective no theory of learning can make more than a limited amount of sense, or its achievements and limitations be seen for what they are. Neither is the easy way out of ‘reviewing the research’ of much use as an alternative. Empirical research on human learning is fitful and often at several removes from the concerns of educators, the reason being precisely the theoretical problems of psychology and its account of learning. Indeed, the more relevant and hopeful recent developments depend not so much on new evidence (and not at all on crucial experiments) as on new though s about the common experience of learning. It is because I think that it is in these that psychology has most to offer the educator that I have laid stress on the thinking of psychologists and used a little experimental work to illustrate it rather than attempt a catalogue of empirical findings with a top-dressing of theory.

Early Learning Theory

The great days of learning theory are gone - for the moment at least. And in any case it was ‘theories’ with an ‘s’, never Learning Theory in the Grand Singular. Other empirical studies, the Sciences, may inhabit grandly designed mansions of theory which house rich collections of authenticated facts, but Psychology has never seemed able to manage more than a makeshift sprawl of temporary huts, constantly being wrecked by their noisy inhabitants as they dispute each others ‘findings’. This sort of thing can only lower the tone of an area so it is not surprising that their well-to-do neighbours have sometimes tried to have them removed from the estate of science on the grounds that they are not really scientists at all. Psychologists have often appeared to justify these complaints about themselves and made it difficult for anyone to defend them. But as with any other disorderly and troublesome group, we have to understand the conditions they are forced to live in before we can understand what they are trying to do.

Learning theory is at the centre of psychology and to understand one is to understand the other. The essential property of living systems, and of human ones in particular, is their responsiveness. Responsiveness to the environment outside them, and responsiveness to the environment inside them. How the organism receives and operates upon information from these environments to organise its responses is the real mystery. Consequently, any problem of psychology must show up in crucial form as a problem in learning theory. Some aspects of what psychologists have tried to do appear to escape from that trap: for instance intelligence and personality tests have been constructed which predict human behaviour as in some situations; equations (real equations with logarithmic functions in them) have been established which predict response time to particular stimulus configurations or the psychophysical judgements a person will make. But in all these cases the gain has been made either by severely restricting the range of the hypothesis to highly specified behaviour in highly specified circumstances, or by making assumptions which permit the use of large scale averaging - in which case the predictions made in many individual cases are not particularly accurate. Learning theories have also slid into one or other of these tactics from time to time, but have failed to satisfy when they have done so because they brought no compensating ‘benefits’ of practical application such as personality or intelligence testing have done. And, being the obvious path of theoretical advance for psychology, more was expected of them. To evaluate theories of learning and understand what their uses and failings are, we must therefore consider their special difficulties and the ways they have coped with them.

For psychology, as a theoretical study, the dilemma has been to reconcile the subject matter with the methods considered proper to science. These methods have been developed in areas of study where the objects or relationships under investigation can be manipulated to suit the scientist - even if it sometimes requires inspired ingenuity. But the psychological state, even of a rat, has an inherent resistance to being manoeuvred in this way. How do you get a rat to feel hungry? Not difficult. But how do you get him to feel precisely as hungry as he was yesterday, or as his littermate is now? This kind of question has led to a mini-technology in its own right.

The earliest professional psychologists were less intimidated by such problems. These classical psychologists of the 19th Century and early 20th Century had a philosophical upbringing and naturally turned to introspection and intuition. Thus they met their subject matter head on and attempted direct observation of mental phenomena from what they believed was a ringside seat. The explanatory concepts which sprang from their work were designed to summarise the principles by which ideas were combined: principles such as ‘similarity’, ‘contiguity’ and ‘contrast’. From a modern intellectual standpoint it is easy to see where this approach falls short. It is wholly dependent on the assumption that people can report accurately on the processes of their own minds - an assumption that is now recognised to be dubious. It is also doubtful whether introspection can normally distinguish between the manifest content of the mind and the process by which it got there. It is the latter that psychology has to deal with. In any case, men had had thousands of years to introspect and there was no particular reason to suppose that they were suddenly going to yield new findings which had previously been missed by the thinkers, geniuses and wise men of a dozen civilisations. It seems that such a psychology is doomed to endless restatements of what we already know. That may not be an empty achievement: it is what philosophers and artists do and they illuminate by it. But it is not what Science does.

The behaviourists wanted science. Science wants tangibility and objectivity. Behaviour is tangible, so are stimuli (apparently) and neurons and reflexes. Behavioural Science offered all these positive assets which the old psychology lacked. Notions about ideals consciousness, mind, thoughts etc. were jettisoned as being superfluous and positively misleading. Behavioural Science was fiercely anti-mentalistic. The work of Pavlov came as encouragement and inspiration to behaviourists. Although working purely as a physiologist, Pavlov’s methods offered an ideal paradigm for experiments in behaviour. The physiological concept of the reflex was also an appealingly objective notion which was incorporated as the explanatory unit for behaviour, in the form of the S-R unit.

Working with such small-scale methods and concepts, behavioural psychology was obviously starting a long way from the problems of education. But the early behaviourists saw their task as a long term programme which, though starting humbly with reflexes and habits, would eventually encompass all of human behaviour. Although they had abandoned ‘thought’, ‘ideas’, ‘understanding’ and suchlike, this was only a matter of clearing the decks for a proper scientific programme. Eventually, psychology would build up an analytical structure powerful enough to re-take such elaborate notions, reduce them to simpler, objective components and therefore provide a causal account of them.

The most complete and impressive attempt to do this is the system built up by the American psychologist Clark L. Hull in the 1930s. Hull devised explanations of learning in terms of intervening variables such as reactive inhibition (IR), conditioned inhibition (SIR) and habit strength (SHE) all of which could be operationally defined and measured. The predictions which these variables could be made to yield by mathematical combination has produced one of the most extensive experimental literature in psychology. Hull never himself believed that complex human behaviour was simply reducible to primitive units of habit (S-R links), but he did believe that the principles of action which could be discovered at the simple S-R level were applicable higher up. But even that hope looks over-ambitious nowadays. If we ask the simple question: ‘What do Hull’s theories and all the experiments they produced tell us about educating a person in mathematics, geography or history?’, the answer is ‘depressingly little’;. we are reduced to supposing that we wish to teach lists of facts or figures in order to find any common ground. Even then, we learn only that errors disappear in a certain order from a rote learning sequence.

Why are the achievements of Hullian psychology so limited? Another equally tough minded behaviourist had strong opinions about that question. Skinner regarded Hull’s attempt to pattern psychology after geometry or Newtonian physics inappropriate. To him, the collection and classification of data were of supreme importance, not the generation of intricate deductions from an intricate system of hypothetical variables. Skinner was also impatient of the ‘physiologism’ of psychology: ‘The gain to the science of behaviour from neurological hypotheses in the past is, I believe, quite certainly outweighed by all the misdirected experimentation and bootless theorising that have arisen from the same source’. Skinner’s own preference was for an extreme form of empiricism. His studies produced graphs of responding rates produced under various regimes of reward. Though it was mostly rats or pigeons which did the responding, Skinner nevertheless found the results they produced applicable to human learning and thereby earned himself the reputation of father of programmed instruction.

The philosophy behind programmed instruction, Skinner’s version of it at any rate, enshrines the old behaviourist principle of the Law of Effect, first pronounced by Thorndike in the 1920s. This ‘principle’ is Hedonism transposed into S-R language and states that any response which is associated closely in time with congenial events will tent to be repeated if the original stimuli, present at the time of the response, should recur. (As a principle it has a distressing tendency to circularity since there is no independent definition of ‘congenial events’). Skinner’s method of programming is therefore to maximise reward during learning by arranging for the learner to make lots of correct responses to lots of small-step frames. The small step principle and programming generally have certainly taken hold of the educational world even if the first enthusiasm has died away. How should we evaluate it? Is it, at long last, the significant contribution to educational advance that would justify psychology as a science? In principle, the answer is probably ‘no’. The idea of pacing and dividing instruction to give the learner the near-certainty of making correct answers was not new. Probably it was a strategy followed by sensitive teachers for centuries, at least since the time Pythagoras used it with his slave. Neither do the principles of programming show how to organise the material into steps if it has a cognitive structure more complex than a list. Subsequent research findings have emphasised the importance of this point by showing that the initial superiority of a programme over a lecture can disappear if the lecturer ‘cribs’ the programme’s structure and revamps his lecture accordingly. In other words the superior analysis of a subject which a programme may embody is the significant factor rather than the Skinnerian principle of frequent and rapid reward. The practical success of programmed instruction is perhaps due more to unenlightened teaching practices than to enlightened psychology.

Against the ‘S-R-reward’ view of learning there have been two major rival theories. One, due to Guthrie, dispensed with the idea of reward while keeping to the S-R link as the basic unit. This has the advantage of avoiding the ambiguity inherent in defining ‘reward’ and takes ‘earning theory a step nearer real life where people do rather more subtle things than press buttons to get peppermints. Guthrie proposed that the ‘S’ and the ‘R’ were linked merely by any alteration occurring in the situation. This change in emphasis is not so trivial or technical as it looks. It marks an important theoretical change by treating the organism as something which responds to information rather than kicks.

But it is Tolman’s theory, dating from the 1930s, that has carried the flag for a psychology of intelligent, thoughtful behaviour. As well as dispensing with reward, he rejected also the S-R unit. Instead he proposed that it was ‘S’ connecting with ‘S.’ which constituted yearnings that the learner acquired not response habits but information maps upon which to plan and act. Where Hull had proposed the telephone exchange as a model of the brains Tolman proposed the map control room. The consequences of Tolman’s ideas become obvious if we apply them to programmed instruction. Where Skinner emphasises making the right response to a stimulus questions Tolman emphasises the correct relation between one idea or piece of information and the next. Where Skinner says nothing about the structure of the topic to be learnt, Tolman puts it at the centre. Where Skinner talks of rewards Tolman says nothing.

Later Developments

The theories outlined above represented the state of the art at about 1940. The current state of mind of psychology is due mainly to the fact that there was no decisive victory for any one theory. Each could be shown to have crucial weaknesses, but none could quite vanquish the others. Tolman’s theory was strong in its description of how animals and men came to know about the world but was considered weak in showing how they acted on their knowledge. The great phobia of behaviourism was that psychology would slip back into the old mentalistic habits of classical days and it was feared that Tolman had left a ghost in the machine to read the maps and pull the muscle levers. But the S-R theories were also undermined, in this case by simple conditioning experiments which produced results quite indigestible to a straightforward S-R explanation. For instances a person who is given an electric shock to his finger whenever a light comes on will soon become conditioned to the light and lift his finger from the source of the shock in response to the light alone. Suppose he is conditioned with his hand palm-downwards, in which case his avoidance response will be a finger-extension movement If he is then tested with his hand palm uppermost he will respond equally well, but by making a finger-flexion movement - precisely the opposite muscular response. This and similar experiments on humans and animals have repeatedly demonstrated the effect. These results may not trouble common sense but they are poisonous for traditional S-R theory.

To cope with this situation, elaborations of S-R theory have been constructed which involve strings of subsidiary S’s and R’s inside the animal. Whether or not these elaborations are logically adequate, they have compromised the initially simple and straightforward theory which based its appeal on directly observable stimuli going in and unambiguous responses coming out. S and R had defected from the ‘objectivity’ they were meant to serve and had treacherously slipped back inside peoples’ heads.

Learning theory - the current scene

The great system-building epoch of the l950s resulted in theories which neither blew up nor advanced to victory, but simply bogged down. So people got off and walked, and they are still walking. The situation was summed up in a standard text Conditioning and Learning (1961) in a review of recent trends:

(Because) the great theories.... are inadequate both on systematic and factual grounds, the process of deduction is playing a smaller role than it once did in psychology. In its place there has appeared an increased emphasis on fact findings, parametric studies.