The Learning Theories and Models

This section, we are going to see the various models and theories that have tackled human learning.

1 – Behaviourism 2 – Cognitivism 3 – Constructivism 4 – Humanism

Behaviourism

When the talk about behaviourism, we usually talk about B. F. Skinner, Pavlov, Edward Thorndike… etc. what characterizes behaviourists is their focus on the assumptions that learning is observable behaviour, man's attachment to environment and the principle of contiguity. With this school also came the notion of reinforcement, conditioning, punishment etc.

In his experiments on dogs, Pavlov came to the conclusion that behaviour is a reflex and endpoint of response to stimulus. So, simplifying the theory of Pavlov, we would say that Pavlov served dogs with food. Every time the dogs saw the food, saliva dribbles out of their mouths. Later on, Pavlov noticed that the dogs dribble saliva without being exposed to food. Pavlov then came to the conclusion that it's not food that makes dogs dribble saliva but rather it was the lab coat (the person who serve the food was wearing lab coat).

Based on the reaction of dogs to lab coat, Pavlov used this time “bells” instead of lab coats in an attempt to figure out the association between the sound of bells and the dribbling of saliva. By and large, this is what is called in the literature as classical conditioning.

BF Skinner studied Pavlov's results and conclusions, and came up with Operant conditioning. The word operant means the way behaviour operates on the environment. BF Skinner's assumption was that as long as there is reinforcement of the behaviour either by reward or punishment we would come to the desired behaviour. Reinforcement raises the likelihood of recurrence of positive behavior. As for punishment, there is decrease in the likelihood of a given behavior to be repeated.

The lesson we can draw from this theory is that its impact was very big especially with the emergence of educational approaches that came along the onset of this theory’s results. As science and technology advance, other theories and models criticized Pavlov and BF Skinner and argued replacements. Today, when dealing with discipline problems, we still use operant conditioning.

Cognitivism

By the turn of 1960s, a new competitive theory came into life by the name of cognitive theories. Not giving any importance to external overt behaviours - as the behaviourists did - the cognitivists based their assumptions on:

1 -- Memory as the core of information processing2 -- The importance of prior knowledge in learning

Which later came to be known as delving into “the black box”; so to speak. Bringing back consideration to humans on the basis that the latter are not programmed animals that respond external stimuli; rather they are beings capable of thinking, abstractly mapping concepts, ideas,…etc.

So, terms like: Schema, schemata, attention, retention, long-term memory, short-term memory, information mapping, encoding/decoding information… etc are some of the terms generally found in cognitivists’ literature which have emerged in the 70s and 80s and 90s of the last century.

Constructivism

Jean Piaget (biologist) Dewey (philosophy, psychology), Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (social psychologist) and the list is long are some of the precursors of this theory. Each in his domain came up with the idea that learning is an ongoing construction process. Based on their representations they have learnt in the past, people generally get the chance of putting on the right track their misconceptions about the world around them once they face the objective reality especially under instruction.

Plainly seen, constructivists don't be in the idea that people are born on “tabula rasa”. Learners before they come to class have personal experiences about the world around them and what teaching does is just, adjusting, renewing, or correcting their misconceptions.

Humanism

The humanistic approach to education started with Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow (developed a hierarchical theory of human needs) who in effect called for the study of the whole person over his lifespan. For this purpose, they have studied concepts like the self, motivation, feelings,…etc and other areas associated with the affect of human beings. And it follows that, while other educational theories tried to study some part of the other of human beings, humanists focused on affective and cognitive needs of the learners.

With this new assumption, the learner was put in the center of learning/teaching operation.