Sunday, January 27, 2013
There are a number of theories which tried to describe how learning
is taking place and how teaching should be like. Two of the major theories that
made a revolution in the field of educational psychology are Behavioral and
social learning theories. So what are the main principles of these theories?
And what are their shortcomings?
Behaviorism is a psychological theory founded by J B Watson.
It appeared in the US as a new approach to the study of psychological phenomena
in the early 1920s. It is a psychological
theory which views language just like any other human behaviour;
conditioning is the basic learning principle, thus Learning becomes a process
of habit formation. Classical and operant conditioning are two central concepts
to behavioral psychology. As far as Classical conditioning is concerned, Learning
occurs a result of associating a stimulus with a specific response. Through
repetition, the association between stimulus and response becomes automatic.
Once this automatic process is established, learning of a new habit takes
place. Regarding Operant conditioning by Skinner; Learning occurs as a function
of reinforcement: reward (positive behavior), or Punishment (negative
behavior).Learning therefore takes place when good habits are rewarded whereas
bad ones are ‘punished’.
On the other hand, Albert Bandura is
known for his social learning theory (SLT). The latter posits that people learn
from one another via observation, imitation, and modeling. This theory has
often been called a bridge between behaviorist and cognitive learning theories
because it encompasses attention, memory, and motivation. Bandora criticized the
Skinnerian emphasis on the effects of the consequences of the behavior. Unlike the
behaviorist appraoch, Bandura stated that much of human learning takes place
through observation of and sensorial experiences with models. Modeling is
deemed the key to learning because children want to be and act like the model.
Bandura's analysis of observational learning involves four phases: Attention
phase, Retaining phase, Production, and Motivation phase. Attention refers to
how a person perceives which person to observe and what aspects of behavior to
observe. Retention indicates the process of remembering what has been seen and
storing it in memory. On the other hand, Production phase brings to light the
process by which a person physically acts out the behavior they have
remembered. Whereas the Motivation phase revolves around the idea that we may
acquire new skill through observation, but may not perform it until there is
motivation or incentives to do so.
Because there no theory that can be
deemed as perfect or thorough, it would be worthwhile to shed light on the
shortcomings of the two theories mentioned above. Let's start with behaviorism;
one should admit that the behaviourist view
offers a partial explanation of some aspects of children’s early language
learning. Notwithstanding, behaviourism has been under a fierce criticism from
many psychologists. Part of the criticism is that behaviourist theory failed to
recognize the creativity of human minds. Children pick out patterns and then
generalize them to new contexts. They create new forms or new uses of words
until they finally figure out how the forms are used by adults. Furthermore, the
rate of imitation may be less than 10% for some children but 30% or 40% for
others. In other words, children don't imitate everything they hear. One the
other hand, criticism that social learning theory received was mainly as a reaction
to the laboratory studies of imitation on which Bandura based his theory. One
criticism is that it does not take into account individual differences or
social context. For example, we often find people brought up together but the
way they act is very different. Criticism was also due to the idea that students
learn best as passive receivers of sensory stimuli, as opposed to being active
learners.
One way to
reconcile the behaviourist and social learning theories is to see that each one of
them may help to explain a different aspect of children’s development. Behaviourism
gives us explanations on how human behaviour is developed. It also explains the acquisition
of vocabulary and grammatical morphemes. On the other hand; social learning explanations
may be useful for Explaining the role of social influence from the media, peers
and parents. It also covers a wider range of explanations such as the
importance of cognitive factors rather than suggesting we have no control.
Omar Taky-Eddine
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