"Think left and think right and think low and think high.

Oh, the
thinks you can think up if only you try!"
(Theodor Seuss Geisel)

So what is ‘Learning’?
This is tricky. When I started what developed into these sites, I adopted rather arbitrarily
the definition from what was then probably the most popular psychology textbook. I
wrote;
"a relatively permanent change in behavior (sic.; it's American of course) that results from practise."
(Atkinson et al 1993). This is of course arguable, particularly the "practice" criterion. Others would
accept changes in "capability" or even simple "knowledge" or "understanding", even if it is not manifest
in behaviour. It is however an important criterion that "learned" behaviour is not pre-programmed or
wholly instinctive (not a word used much nowadays), even if an instinctual drive underpins it. Behaviour
can also change as a result of maturation—simple growing-up—without being totally learned. Think of
the changing attitude of children and adolescents to opposite-sex peers. Whatever the case, there has to
be interaction with the environment.
But we are becoming more confused: evidence from genetics, evolutionary psychology
and neuroscience is arguing ever more strongly for predispositions for our behaviour.
Locke’s tabula rasa is getting dirtier by the minute: this is one of those areas for which
Mark Twain’s (attributed) comment might have been coined:
“Many researchers have already cast much darkness upon this subject, and it is probable that if they
continue, that we shall soon know nothing at all about it”
Even if psychologists ever agree about what learning is, in practice educationalists won't,
because education introduces prescriptive notions about specifying what ought to be
learnt, and there is considerable dispute about whether this ought only to be what the
teacher wants the learner to learn (implicit in behavioural models), or what the learner
wants to learn (as in humanistic models).
For a useful comment see this parallel page from infed.orgThere is a radical view that any self-
organising system adapting to its environment is "learning": the autopoietic theory of Maturana and
Varela. Click here for an external introductory tutorialOn the "tabula rasa" or "blank slate".
I seriously distrust the use of dictionary definitions, particularly when they are used to
short-cut legitimate debate in an academic context (Scheffler, 1960—no, it's not in the
bibliography. Look it up for yourself...). Like Humpty-Dumpty's view "learning" means
whatever the user meant by it, and few people are prepared to be constrained by
dictionary definitions.
`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a
scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean --
neither more nor less.

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words
mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be

master - - that's all.'
So let's just think about a few general characteristics; (you can expand the points
yourself, of course)
 It's about change. Yes, I think that is agreed.
...Isn't it?...

 in behaviour. Tricky. It may be in a

"capacity for" behaviour which is never
actually translated into action. There may be
many kinds of behaviour which might count
as evidence of having learned an underlying
principle. No-one else might ever know how
much of behaviour is due to learning, or at
what level. Someone mutilates herself (sorry,
it's more often a woman, I have learned—
what does that mean?) Was that accounted
for by her "learning" her worthlessness in a
loveless and abusive family. Apart from
 anything else, this is a tricky issue for
assessment. How do you test whether
someone has learned a skill or procedure you
hope they will never have to exercise
(remember the "kiss your a**e goodbye drills
on planes?)?

 Which more or less sticks; I've just gone for

another glass of wine as I think through how I
am going to put this. I know from experience
that if I have a drink while writing on line, I
don't post the result until next morning.
Where is the learning? Is the possibility of
changed behaviour as a result of alcohol
"learning"? Or is the learning in the strategy
of not posting ? (See here!)

 and is the product of interaction with the

organism's environment. Sorry to refer to
you as an "organism", although of course you
are. That is just a reminder that learning is
not only a human achievement. But many
organisms, including humans, simply "grow
up" or "mature". They thereby achieve
capabilities which are changes in behaviour
which are more or less permanent for the life
of the organism, but are not learned. I'm
thinking most obviously here of insects such
as butterflies or dragonflies which change
through their life cycle. For them, "learning"
is Darwinian "natural selection". So perhaps
we need to specify

 within an organism's lifespan? As I write

(May 2009) there is a great kerfuffle about
the expenses of Members of Parliament in the
UK. Many prominent politicians are declaring
that "we must learn the lessons..." Indeed, I
hope there will be change, but... do
institutions learn in the same way as
individuals? That is beyond the scope of this
site, but see Senge...)

What is Taught and what is Learned

It is a simple point that what is taught is not the same as what the students learn, but it
does have a number of implications.
In the figure above, it is clear that some of what we teach is wasted effort: but the
diagram is a representation of only one learner’s learning. It may be that within a class
as a whole, everything we teach is learned, by someone. The shape representing the
teaching is smaller than that for learning, because students are also learning from other
sources, including colleagues and the sheer experience of being in the educational
system, as well as more conventional other resources such as books.
It is an open question in any given case as to whether what they learn apart from what
they are taught is a "good" thing or not. It includes the “hidden curriculum”, which is a
phrase used by Snyder (1971) to describe what students learn by default in educational
settings. His original observations at MIT in the late 'fifties were about how students with
an over-loaded curriculum acquired survival tactics to get through their courses, such as
mugging up only the parts which were likely to come up in the exams, and thus losing
the point of much of the teaching. This selective learning is one of the characteristics of
what is now called "surface learning", although that tends to be seen as an attribute of
the learner — Snyder saw it as a problem of the institution.
From a sociological (Marxist) rather than primarily educational perspective, Bowles and
Gintis (1976) suggested that all US schooling has a hidden curriculum dictated by the
demands of a capitalist economy. More recently, critical theorists have sought to expose
the hidden assumptions behind curricula (see, for example, Collins (1991) — see also
Cultural Considerations). Some of the work seems marginal and academically political,
but there is no denying that teachers' strategies, such as labelling, can have a profound
effect on a student's experience. Claxton (1996) has convincingly argued that adult
learning is profoundly influenced by “implicit theories of learning” acquired at school, and
that teachers tend to reproduce their implicit models in the ways in which they
themselves go on to teach.

Site map: Learning

Site map: Teaching
About
References

[Behaviour
modification]
[Figures in
Behaviourism]
[Learned helplessness]
[Anticipatory-Avoidance
 Learning]
[Theories of Learning]
[What is learning?]

Recent
from the
Reflection blog...
FeedWind

Behaviorism Behaviourism
If you want to follow your own links, use "behaviorism" (sic.) Most of the material is US-based and
"behaviorism" and "behaviorist" is how they spell it, and I freely admit that this side-bar is purely to get
the stupid search engine "bots" to register "behavior"
Behavioural (or "behavioral") theory in psychology is a very substantial field: follow the
links to the left or right for introductions to some of its more detailed contributions
impinging on how people learn in the real world. How I have the effrontery to produce a
single page on it amazes even me, whatever my reservations about it!
Behaviourism is primarily associated with Pavlov (classical conditioning) in Russia and
with Thorndike, Watson and particularly Skinner in the United States (operant
conditioning).
 Behaviourism is dominated by the constraints
of its (naïve) attempts to emulate the
physical sciences, which entails a refusal to
speculate about what happens inside the
organism. Anything which relaxes this
requirement slips into the cognitive realm.

 Much behaviourist experimentation is

undertaken with animals and generalised.

 In educational settings, behaviourism implies

the dominance of the teacher, as in behaviour
modification programmes. It can, however,
be applied to an understanding of unintended
learning.

For our purposes, behaviourism is relevant mainly to:

 Skill development, and

 The "substrate" (or "conditions", as Gagné

puts it) of learning

Classical conditioning:
is the process of reflex learning—investigated by Pavlov—through which an
unconditioned stimulus (e.g. food) which produces an unconditioned response
(salivation) is presented together with a conditioned stimulus (a bell), such that the
salivation is eventually produced on the presentation of the conditioned stimulus alone,
thus becoming a conditioned response.
This is a disciplined account of our common-sense experience of learning by association
(or "contiguity", in the jargon), although that is often much more complex than a reflex
process, and is much exploited in advertising. Note that it does not depend on us doing
anything.
Such associations can be chained and generalised (for better of for worse): thus "smell
of baking" associates with "kitchen at home in childhood" associates with "love and
care". (Smell creates potent conditioning because of the way it is perceived by the
brain.) But "sitting at a desk" associates with "classroom at school" and hence perhaps
with "humiliation and failure"...
This site goes further into Watson's ideas, beyond Pavlov, and the "Little Albert" experiment.

Operant Conditioning
If, when an organism emits a behaviour (does something), the consequences of that
behaviour are reinforcing, it is more likely to emit (do) it again. What counts as
reinforcement, of course, is based on the evidence of the repeated behaviour, which
makes the whole argument rather circular.
Learning is really about the increased probability of a behaviour based on reinforcement
which has taken place in the past, so that the antecedents of the new behaviour
include the consequences of previous behaviour.

Summary of Skinner's ideas On operant conditioning Skinner's own account Wikipedia on operant
conditioning And here with diagrams of experimental set-ups and video
The schedule of reinforcement of behaviour is central to the management of effective
learning on this basis, and working it out is a very skilled procedure: simply reinforcing
every instance of desired behaviour is just bribery, not the promotion of learning.
Withdrawal of reinforcement eventually leads to the extinction of the behaviour, except
in some special cases such as anticipatory-avoidance learning.

Notes
Two points are often misunderstood in relation to behaviourism and human learning:
 The scale: Although later modifications of
behaviourism are known as S-O-R theories
(Stimulus-Organism-Response), recognising
that the organism's (in this case, person's)
abilities and motivations need to be taken
into account, undiluted behaviourism is
concerned with conditioning and mainly with
reflex behaviour. This operates on a very
short time-scale — from second to second, or
at most minute to minute — on very
specific micro-behaviour. To say that a course
is behaviourally-based because there is the
reward of a qualification at the end is
stretching the idea too far.

 Its descriptive intention: Perhaps because

behaviourists describe experiments in which
they structure learning for their subjects,
attention tends to fall on ideas such as
behaviour modification and the technology of
behaviourism. However, behaviourism itself is
more about a description of how [some forms
of] learning occur in the wild, as it were,
than about how to make it happen, and it is
when it is approached from this perspective
that it gets most interesting. It accounts
elegantly, for example, for ways in which
attempts to discipline unruly students actually
make the situation worse rather than better.

 (This point is heretical!) For human beings,

reinforcement has two components, because
the information may be cognitively
processed: in many cases the "reward"
element is less significant than the "feedback"
information carried by the reinforcement.
Applied to the theory of teaching, behaviourism's main manifestation is "instructional
technology" and its associated approaches: click below for useful guides.
For practical illustration of reinforcement as feedback, look here. Instructional Design & Learning Theory
(Mergel 1998) Gagné's model as an example of instructional technology
As a body of theory, behaviourism has really suffered from the "cognitive revolution" of recent years.
However, it has the distinction of being the first truly psychological account of learning, and some of its
byways still provide good accounts of otherwise inexplicable behaviour. For some reason, some of the
textbooks refer to Skinner as a "neo-behaviourist". He would have been grossly insulted: he was the real
thing!
To reference this page copy and paste the text below:
 BLOOM’S REVISED TAXONOMY

Creating
Generating new ideas, products, or ways of viewing
things
Designing, constructing, planning, producing,
inventing.

Evaluating
Justifying a decision or course of action
Checking, hypothesising, critiquing, experimenting, judging
 Analysing
Breaking information into parts to explore
understandings and relationships
Comparing, organising, deconstructing, interrogating, finding

Applying
Using information in another familiar situation
Implementing, carrying out, using, executing

Understanding
Explaining ideas or concepts
Interpreting, summarising, paraphrasing, classifying,
explaining

Remembering
Recalling information
Recognising, listing, describing, retrieving, naming, finding

Bloom's Revised Taxonomy

Bloom created a learning taxonomy in 1956. During the 1990's, a former

student of Bloom's, Lorin Anderson, updated the taxonomy, hoping to add
relevance for 21st century students and teachers. This new expanded taxonomy
can help instructional designers and teachers to write and revise learning
outcomes.

Bloom's six major categories were changed from noun to verb forms.

The new terms are defined as:

Remembering Retrieving, recognizing, and recalling relevant knowledge

from long-term memory.

Understanding Constructing meaning from oral, written, and graphic

messages through interpreting, exemplifying, classifying,
summarizing, inferring, comparing, and explaining.

Applying Carrying out or using a procedure through executing, or

implementing.

Analyzing Breaking material into constituent parts, determining how

the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or
purpose through differentiating, organizing, and
attributing.

Evaluating Making judgments based on criteria and standards through

checking and critiquing.

Creating Putting elements together to form a coherent or functional

whole; reorganizing elements into a new pattern or
structure through generating, planning, or producing.

Because the purpose of writing learning outcomes is to define what the

instructor wants the student to do with the content, using learning outcomes will
help students to better understand the purpose of each activity by clarifying the
student’s activity. Verbs such as "know", "appreciate", "internalizing", and
"valuing" do not define an explicit performance to be carried out by the learner.
(Mager, 1997)

Unclear Outcomes Revised Outcomes

 Students will know described Students will be able to review
cases of mental disorders. a set of facts and will be able
to classify the appropriate type
of mental disorder.

Students will understand the Students will distinguish

relevant and irrelevant between relevant and
numbers in a mathematical irrelevant numbers in a
word problem. mathematical word problem.

Students will know the best Students will judge which of

way to solve the word the two methods is the best
problem. way to solve the word
problem.

Cognitivism
The cognitivist revolution replaced behaviorism in 1960s as the dominant
paradigm. Cognitivism focuses on the inner mental activities – opening
the “black box” of the human mind is valuable and necessary for
understanding how people learn. Mental processes such as thinking,
memory, knowing, and problem-solving need to be explored. Knowledge
can be seen as schema or symbolic mental constructions. Learning is
defined as change in a learner’s schemata.
A response to behaviorism, people are not “programmed animals” that
merely respond to environmental stimuli; people are rational beings that
require active participation in order to learn, and whose actions are a
consequence of thinking. Changes in behavior are observed, but only as
an indication of what is occurring in the learner’s head. Cognitivism uses
the metaphor of the mind as computer: information comes in, is being
processed, and leads to certain outcomes.

behaviorism
Summary: Behaviorism is a worldview that operates on a principle of
“stimulus-response.” All behavior caused by external stimuli (operant
conditioning). All behavior can be explained without the need to consider
internal mental states or consciousness.
Originators and important contributors: John B. Watson, Ivan Pavlov, B.F.
Skinner, E. L. Thorndike (connectionism), Bandura, Tolman (moving
toward cognitivism)
Keywords: Classical conditioning (Pavlov), Operant conditioning (Skinner),
Stimulus-response (S-R)
Behaviorism
Behaviorism is a worldview that assumes a learner is essentially passive,
responding to environmental stimuli. The learner starts off as a clean slate
(i.e. tabula rasa) and behavior is shaped through positive reinforcement or
negative reinforcement. Both positive reinforcement and negative
reinforcement increase the probability that the antecedent behavior will
happen again. In contrast, punishment (both positive and negative)
decreases the likelihood that the antecedent behavior will happen again.
Positive indicates the application of a stimulus; Negative indicates the
withholding of a stimulus. Learning is therefore defined as a change in
behavior in the learner. Lots of (early) behaviorist work was done with
animals (e.g. Pavlov’s dogs) and generalized to humans.
Behaviorism precedes the cognitivist worldview. It rejects structuralism
and is an extension of Logical Positivism.

Constructivism
Summary: Constructivism as a paradigm or worldview posits that learning
is an active, constructive process. The learner is an information
constructor. People actively construct or create their own subjective
representations of objective reality. New information is linked to to prior
knowledge, thus mental representations are subjective.
Originators and important contributors: Vygotsky, Piaget, Dewey, Vico,
Rorty, Bruner
Keywords: Learning as experience, activity and dialogical process;
Problem Based Learning (PBL); Anchored instruction; Vygotsky’s Zone of
Proximal Development (ZPD); cognitive apprenticeship (scaffolding);
inquiry and discovery learning.
Constructivism
A reaction to didactic approaches such as behaviorism and programmed
instruction, constructivism states that learning is an active, contextualized
process of constructing knowledge rather than acquiring it. Knowledge is
constructed based on personal experiences and hypotheses of the
environment. Learners continuously test these hypotheses through social
negotiation. Each person has a different interpretation and construction of
knowledge process. The learner is not a blank slate (tabula rasa) but
brings past experiences and cultural factors to a situation.
NOTE: A common misunderstanding regarding constructivism is that
instructors should never tell students anything directly but, instead,
should always allow them to construct knowledge for themselves. This is
actually confusing a theory of pedagogy (teaching) with a theory of
knowing. Constructivism assumes that all knowledge is constructed from
the learner’s previous knowledge, regardless of how one is taught. Thus,
even listening to a lecture involves active attempts to construct new
knowledge.
Vygotsky’s social development theory is one of the foundations for
constructivism.

Posted in Constructivist Theories, Paradigms and Perspectives | Add to del.icio.us

| Share This

To share Constructivism on your website or blog,

please copy and paste the following URL below:
http://www.learning-theories.com/constructivism.html