The nineteenth century brought about the scientific study of
learning. Working from the thoughts of Descartes and Kant, and especially the
influence of Charles Darwin, psychologists began conducting objective tests to
study how people learn, and to discover the best approach to teaching. The 20th
century debate on how people learn has focused largely on
behaviorist vs. cognitive psychology. Psychologists have asked, “Is the human simply
a very advanced mammal that operates by a stimulus response mechanism, or actually
a cognitive creature that uses its brain to construct knowledge from the information
received by the senses?”
Edward Thorndike (1874 – 1949) is considered by many to be
the first modern education psychologist who sought to bring a scientific
approach to the study of learning. Thorndike believed that learning was
incremental and that people learned through a trial and- error approach. His
behaviorist theories of learning did not consider that learning took place as a
result of mental constructs. Instead, he described how mental connections are
formed through positive responses to particular stimuli. For Thorndike,
learning was based on an association between sense impressions and an impulse
to action. Thorndike favored students’ active learning and sought to structure
the environment to ensure certain stimuli that would ‘produce’ learning
(Hilgard and Bower, 1975).
The father of modern behaviorism, B. F. Skinner (1904 –
1990), further developed Thorndike’s Stimulus-Response learning theory. Skinner
was responsible for developing programmed learning which was based on his
stimulus response research on rats and pigeons in experiments that provided
positive reinforcement for “correct” responses. He considered learning to be
the production of desired behaviors, and denied any influence of mental
processes. Programmed learning gave proper reinforcement to the student,
emphasized reward over punishment, moved the student by small steps through
discrete skills and allowed the student to move at their own speed. “There are certain
questions which have to be answered in turning to the study of any new
organism. What behavior is to be set up? What reinforcers are at hand? What
responses are available in embarking upon a program of progressive
approximation that will lead to the final form of the behavior? How can
reinforcements be most effectively scheduled to maintain the behavior in strength?
These questions are all relevant in considering the problem of the child in the
lower grades.” (Skinner, quoted in Hilgard and Bower 1975).
Behaviorist learning theory has had substantial influence in
education, guiding the development of highly-sequenced and structured
curricula, programmed instructional approaches, workbooks, and other tools. It
has proved useful for the development of some types of skills – especially
those that can be learned substantially by rote through reinforcement and
practice. However, evidence has accrued that tasks requiring more complex
thinking and higher mental processes are not generally well-learned through behaviorist
methods and require more attention to how people perceive, process, and make
sense of what they are experiencing.
Jean Piaget (1896 – 1980) was the first to state that
learning is a developmental cognitive process, that students create knowledge
rather than receive knowledge from the teacher. He recognized that students
construct knowledge based on their experiences, and that how they do so is
related to their biological, physical, and mental stage of development. Piaget
spent years observing very young children and mapping out four stages of
growth: sensorimotor (birth to about 2 years), preoperational (roughly ages 2 –
7), concrete operations (encompassing about ages 7- 14) and formal operations (beginning
around ages 11 – 15 and extending into adulthood) (Hilgard and Bower, 1975).
His work acknowledged the utility of some behaviorally-guided rote learning while
also arguing that other activities that support students’ exploration are
essential:
Generally
speaking, since every discipline must include a certain body of acquired facts
as well as the possibility of giving rise to numerous research activities and
activities of rediscovery, it is possible to envisage a balance being struck,
varying from subject to subject, between different parts to be played by
memorizing and free activity. In which case, it is possible that the use of
teaching machines will save time… (Piaget, quoted in Hilgard and Bower 1975).
The Russian scientist Vygotsky (1896 – 1934) extended Piaget’s
developmental theory of cognitive abilities of the individual to include the
notion of social-cultural cognition – that is, the idea that all learning
occurs in a cultural context and involves social interactions. He emphasized
the role that culture and language play in developing students’ thinking and
the ways in which teachers and peers assist learners in developing new ideas
and skills. Vygotsky proposed the concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) which suggested that students learn
subjects best just beyond their range of existing experience with assistance from the
teacher or another peer to bridge the distance from what they know or can do
independently and what they can know or do with assistance (Schunk, 1996). His
work led to an emphasis on the deliberate use of discourse and cooperative
learning in the classroom, and theories of assistance or “scaffolding” that
help students learn in systematic ways. Following Piaget, the developmental
learning theorists brought to education the ideas that teachers can be more effective
if they organize learning so that it is responsive to the child’s stage of development,
if they connect learning to the child’s prior knowledge and experiences, and if
they use the social and natural environments as opportunities for learning.
Reference:
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ed269/hplintrochapter.pdf
