Is A Theory Of Learning That Focuses Solely On Observable Actions And Responses

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Behaviorism is an expanse of psychological study that focuses on observing and analyzing how controlled environmental changes affect behavior. The goal of behavioristic education methods is to dispense the environment of a bailiwick — a homo or an beast — in an endeavor to alter the subject field'due south appreciable behavior. From a behaviorist perspective, learning is defined entirely past this change in the subject'southward observable behavior. The office of the subject in the learning process is to exist acted upon past the environment; the subject forms associations between stimuli and changes beliefs based on those associations. The role of the instructor is to manipulate the environment in an effort to encourage the desired behavioral changes. The principles of behaviorism were not formed overnight merely evolved over time from the work of multiple psychologists. As psychologists' agreement of learning has evolved over time, some principles of behaviorism accept been discarded or replaced, while others continue to be accustomed and expert.

History of Behaviorism

A bones understanding of behaviorism can exist gained by examining the history of 4 of the near influential psychologists who contributed to the behaviorism: Ivan Pavlov, Edward Thorndike, John B. Watson, and B.F. Skinner. These four did not each develop principles of behaviorism in isolation, but rather congenital upon each other's work.

Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Pavlov is perhaps most well-known for his work in workout dogs to salivate at the audio of a tone after pairing food with the sound over time. Pavlov'southward research is regarded as the first to explore the theory of classical conditioning: that stimuli cause responses and that the encephalon can acquaintance stimuli together to learn new responses. His research also studied how certain parameters — such as the time between two stimuli existence presented — afflicted these associations in the encephalon. His exploration of the stimulus-response model, the associations formed in the brain, and the effects of certain parameters on developing new behaviors became a foundation of futurity experiments in the study of human and brute behavior (Hauser, 1997).

In his about famous experiment, Pavlov started out studying how much saliva different breeds of dogs produced for digestion. However, he soon noticed that the dogs would start salivating even earlier the nutrient was provided. Afterwards he realized that the dogs associated the audio of him walking down the stairs with the arrival of food. He went on to exam this theory by playing a tone when feeding the dogs, and over time the dogs learned to salivate at the sound of a tone even if there was no food nowadays. The dogs learned a new response to a familiar stimulus via stimulus association. Pavlov called this learned response a conditional reflex. Pavlov performed several variations of this experiment, looking at how far autonomously he could play the tone before the dogs no longer associated the sound with food; or if applying randomization — playing the tone sometimes when feeding the dogs merely not others — had any consequence on the end results (Pavlov, 1927).

Pavlov's piece of work with conditional reflexes was extremely influential in the field of behaviorism. His experiments demonstrate three major tenets of the field of behaviorism:

Beliefs is learned from the surroundings. The dogs learned to salivate at the sound of a tone after their surround presented the tone along with food multiple times.
Behavior must be appreciable. Pavlov concluded that learning was taking place considering he observed the dogs salivating in response to the sound of a tone.
All behaviors are a production of the formula stimulus-response. The sound of a tone caused no response until information technology was associated with the presentation of food, to which the dogs naturally responded with increased saliva production.

These principles formed a foundation of behaviorism on which future scientists would build.

Edward Thorndike

Edward Lee Thorndike is regarded as the first to study operant conditioning, or learning from consequences of behaviors. He demonstrated this principle by studying how long it took different animals to push a lever in order to receive nutrient as a reward for solving a puzzle. He also pioneered the law of effect, which presents a theory about how beliefs is learned and reinforced.

One experiment Thorndike conducted was called the puzzle box experiment, which is similar to the classic "rat in the maze" experiment. For this experiment, Thorndike placed a cat in a box with a piece of food on the outside of the box and timed how long it took the cat to push the lever to open the box and to go the food. The offset two or 3 times each true cat was placed in the box at that place was little divergence in how long information technology took to open up the box, but subsequent experiments showed a marked decrease in fourth dimension every bit each cat learned that the same lever would consistently open the box.

A second major contribution Thorndike made to the field is his work in pioneering the law of effect. This constabulary states that behavior followed by positive results is likely to exist repeated and that any behavior with negative results will slowly finish over time. Thorndike'due south puzzle box experiments supported this belief: animals were conditioned to frequently perform tasks that led to rewards.

Thorndike's 2 major theories are the basis for much of the field of behaviorism and psychology studies of animals to this mean solar day. His results that animals can learn to printing levers and buttons to receive food underpin many unlike types of animal studies exploring other behaviors and created the modernistic framework for the assumed similarities between animal responses and man responses (Engelhart, 1970).

In addition to his piece of work with animals, Thorndike founded the field of educational psychology and wrote ane of the first books on the subject, Educational Psychology, in 1903. Much of his later career was spent overhauling the field of teaching by applying his ideas near the police of issue and challenging one-time theories on generalized learning and penalisation in the classroom. His theories and piece of work have been taught in teaching colleges across the world.

John B. Watson

John Broadus Watson was a pioneering psychologist who is generally considered to exist the first to combine the multiple facets of the field under the umbrella of behaviorism. The foundation of Watson's behaviorism is that consciousness — introspective thoughts and feelings — can neither be observed nor controlled via scientific methods and therefore should be ignored when analyzing behavior. He asserted that psychology should be purely objective, focusing solely on predicting and decision-making appreciable behavior, thus removing any interpretation of conscious experience. Thus, according to Watson, learning is a alter in observable behavior. In his 1913 article "Psychology equally the Behaviorist Views It", Watson defined behaviorism equally "a purely objective experimental branch of natural science" that "recognizes no dividing line between human and brute." The sole focus of Watson's behaviorism is observing and predicting how subjects outwardly respond to external stimuli.

John Watson is remembered as the first psychologist to utilise human test subjects in experiments on classical conditioning. He is famous for the Picayune Albert experiment, in which he applied Pavlov'south ideas of classical conditioning to teach an infant to be agape of a rat. Prior to the experiment, the nine-month-old baby Albert was exposed to several unfamiliar stimuli: a white rat, a rabbit, a domestic dog, a monkey, masks with and without hair, cotton wool, burning newspapers, etc. He showed no fear in response. Through some farther experimentation, researchers discovered that Albert responded with fright when they struck a steel bar with a hammer to produce a shap racket.

During the experiment, Albert was presented with the white rat that had previously produced no fright response. Whenever Albert touched the rat, the steel bar was struck, and Albert cruel forward and began to whimper. Albert learned to become hesitant effectually the rat and was agape to bear on it. Eventually, the sight of the rat caused Albert to whimper and crawl abroad. Watson concluded that Albert had learned to exist agape of the rat (Watson & Rayner, 1920).

By today's standards, the Little Albert experiment is considered both unethical and scientifically inconclusive. Critics accept said that the experiment "reveals little evidence either that Albert developed a rat phobia or even that animals consistently evoked his fear (or anxiety) during Watson's experiment" (Harris, 1997). However, the experiment provides insight into Watson'southward definition of behaviorism — he taught Albert by controlling Albert'southward environment, and the change in Albert'due south behavior led researchers to conclude that learning had occurred.

B. F. Skinner

Skinner was a psychologist who continued to influence the development of behaviorism. His most important contributions were introducing the idea of radical behaviorism and defining operant conditioning.

Unlike Watson, Skinner believed that internal processes such as thoughts and emotions should exist considered when analyzing beliefs. The inclusion of thoughts and actions with behaviors is radical behaviorism. He believed that internal processes, like observable beliefs, can be controlled past environmental variables and thus can be analyzed scientifically. The application of the principles of radical behaviorism is known as practical behavior analysis.

In 1938, Skinner published The Behavior of Organisms, a book that introduces the principles of operant conditioning and their application to human and animal beliefs. The core concept of operant conditioning is the relationship between reinforcement and punishment, similar to Thorndike'southward law of event: Rewarded behaviors are more likely to exist repeated, while punished behaviors are less likely to be repeated. Skinner expounded on Thorndike'south law of effect by breaking down reinforcement and punishment into five discrete categories (cf. Fig. one):

Positive reinforcement is calculation a positive stimulus to encourage beliefs.
Escape is removing a negative stimulus to encourage beliefs.
Agile avoidance is preventing a negative stimulus to encourage behavior.
Positive punishment is adding a negative stimulus to discourage behavior.
Negative penalty is removing a positive stimulus to discourage beliefs.

Reinforcement encourages beliefs, while penalty discourages behavior. Those who utilise operant conditioning use reinforcement and penalization in an endeavor to change the subject'due south behavior.

Figure i. An overview of the v categories of operant conditioning.

Positive and negative reinforcements can be given according to different types of schedules. Skinner developed five schedules of reinforcement:

Continuous reinforcement is applied when the learner receives reinforcement after every specific action performed. For example, a instructor may reward a student with a sticker for each meaningful comment the student makes.

Fixed interval reinforcement is applied when the learner receives reinforcement after a fixed corporeality of time has passed. For example, a teacher may give out stickers each Fri to students who made comments throughout the calendar week.
Variable interval reinforcement is applied when the learner receives reinforcement afterward a random amount of time has passed. For case, a teacher may requite out stickers on a random twenty-four hour period each week to students who have actively participated in classroom discussion.
Fixed ratio reinforcement is applied when the learner receives reinforcement after the behavior occurs a set number of times. For instance, a instructor may reward a student with a sticker subsequently the student contributes five meaningful comments.
Variable ratio reinforcement is applied when the learner receives reinforcement after the behavior occurs a random number of times. For instance, a teacher may reward a educatee with a sticker after the pupil contributes three to ten meaningful comments.

Skinner experimented using different reinforcement schedules in lodge to clarify which schedules were most effective in various situations. In general, he found that ratio schedules are more than resistant to extinction than interval schedules, and variable schedules are more resistant than fixed schedules, making the variable ratio reinforcement schedule the well-nigh effective.

Skinner was a strong supporter of education and influenced various principles on the manners of educating. He believed at that place were ii reasons for teaching: to teach both verbal and nonverbal behavior and to interest students in continually acquiring more knowledge. Based on his concept of reinforcement, Skinner taught that students acquire best when taught by positive reinforcement and that students should be engaged in the process, non simply passive listeners. He hypothesized that students who are taught via punishment learn simply how to avert penalty. Although Skinner'due south doubtful view on penalization is important to the discipline in education, finding other ways to discipline are very difficult, and so punishment is all the same a big part in the didactics system.

Skinner points out that teachers demand to be ameliorate educated in pedagogy and learning strategies (Skinner, 1968). He addresses the chief reasons why learning is not successful. This biggest reasons teachers neglect to educate their students are because they are only teaching through showing and they are not reinforcing their students enough. Skinner gave examples of steps teachers should take to teach properly. A few of these steps include the following:

Ensure the learner conspicuously understands the action or operation.
Separate the task into small steps starting at simple and working up to complex.
Allow the learner perform each pace, reinforcing correct actions.
Regulate so that the learner is always successful until finally the goal is reached.
Modify to random reinforcement to maintain the learner's functioning (Skinner, 1968).

Criticisms and Limitations

While there are elements of behaviorism that are nonetheless accustomed and practiced, at that place are criticisms and limitations of behaviorism. Principles of behaviorism can help us to sympathize how humans are afflicted past associated stimuli, rewards, and punishments, but behaviorism may oversimplify the complexity of human learning. Behaviorism assumes humans are similar animals, ignores the internal cognitive processes that underlie beliefs, and focuses solely on changes in observable behavior.

From a behaviorist perspective, the role of the learner is to be acted upon by the teacher-controlled surround. The teacher'southward office is to dispense the environs to shape beliefs. Thus, the educatee is non an agent in the learning process, but rather an animate being that instinctively reacts to the environment. The instructor provides input (stimuli) and expects anticipated output (the desired alter in behavior). More recent learning theories, such as constructivism, focus much more on the role of the student in actively amalgam knowledge.

Behaviorism as well ignores internal cognitive processes, such as thoughts and feelings. Skinner'southward radical behaviorism takes some of these processes into business relationship insofar as they tin be measured but does not really attempt to empathise or explain the depth of human emotion. Without the desire to understand the reason behind the behavior, the behavior is not understood in a deeper context and reduces learning to the stimulus-response model. The behavior is observed, but the underlying cognitive processes that cause the behavior are not understood. The thoughts, emotions, conscious state, social interactions, prior noesis, by experiences, and moral code of the student are non taken into business relationship. In reality, these elements are all variables that demand to exist accounted for if human beliefs is to be predicted and understood accurately. Newer learning theories, such equally cognitivism, focus more on the roles of emotion, social interaction, prior knowledge, and personal experience in the learning process.

Another limitation to behaviorism is that learning is only defined equally a change in appreciable behavior. Behaviorism operates on the premise that knowledge is only valuable if information technology results in modified behavior. Many believe that the purpose of learning and teaching is much more than educational activity everyone to conform to a specific set of behaviors. For instance, Foshay (1991) argues that "the one continuing purpose of instruction, since ancient times, has been to bring people to as total every bit realization as possible of what it is to be a human being" (p. 277). Behaviorism'due south focus on beliefs solitary may non achieve the purpose of educational activity, because humans are more than only their behavior.

Conclusion

Behaviorism is a study of how controlled changes to a field of study's surroundings touch on the subject's observable beliefs. Teachers control the surround and use a system of rewards and punishments in an attempt to encourage the desired behaviors in the subject field. Learners are acted upon by their surround, forming associations between stimuli and changing behavior based on those associations.

There are principles of behaviorism that are still accepted and practiced today, such as the use of rewards and punishments to shape behavior. Even so, behaviorism may oversimplify the complexity of homo learning; downplay the function of the student in the learning process; condone emotion, thoughts, and inner processes; and view humans as being as simple as animals.

References

Engelhart, Thousand. D. (1970). [Review of Measurement and evaluation in psychology and education]. Journal of Educational Measurement, 7(one), 53–55. Retrieved from http://world wide web.jstor.org/stable/1433880

Foshay, A. W. (1991). The curriculum matrix: Transcendence and mathematics. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 6(iv), 277-293. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/jcs/jcs_1991summer_foshay.pdf

Harris, B. (1979). Any happened to Little Albert? American Psychologist, 34(2), 151-160. Retrieved from http://world wide web.academia.edu/8144115/Whatever_happened_to_Little_Albert

Hauser, L. (1997). Behaviorism. In J. Fieser & D. Bradley (Eds.), Internet encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved from http://www.iep.utm.edu/behavior/

Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned reflexes: An investigation of the physiological action of the cognitive cortex (M. V. Anrep, Trans.). London, England: Oxford University Printing. Retrieved from http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Pavlov/

Skinner, B. F. (1938). The behavior of organisms. New York, NY: Appleton-Century. Retrieved from http://due south-f-walker.org.united kingdom of great britain and northern ireland/pubsebooks/pdfs/The%20Behavior%20of%20Organisms%twenty-%20BF%20Skinner.pdf

Skinner, B. F. (1968). The technology of teaching. Due east Norwalk, CT: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Thorndike, E. L. (1911). Animal intelligence: Experimental studies. New York, NY: The Macmillan Company. Retrieved from http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Thorndike/Animal/chap5.htm

Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology every bit the behaviorist views information technology. Psychological Review, 20(2), 158-177. Retrieved from http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/views.htm

Watson, J. B., & Rayner, R. (1920). Conditioned emotional reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 3(i), 1-14. Retrieved from http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/emotion.htm