Why is behaviorism important in education




















What is an example of behaviorism? How is the behaviorist approach used today? What is the role of the teacher in behaviorism? How can behaviorist theory be used in the classroom? How does behaviorism impact learning? How can we apply behaviorism in the classroom? What are the three main theories within the behaviorist perspective? Why is social learning theory important?

How do you apply the social learning theory to the classroom? What are the limitations of social learning theory? Who developed the social learning theory? Previous Article What is the importance of cell? It assume that learners are passive so they are responding external stimuli.

Learners focus attention on what is observed. It concerned more on behavior than thinking. The behaviorism originated by American psychologist John B. Watson 's effort was based on the experiments of Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov, and classical conditioning. Nowadays, behaviorism is associated with the name of B.

Classical conditioning concept include unconditional stimulus, unconditional response, conditional stimulus and conditional response. Pavlov used the dog to do that experiment. He associated ringing bell with the food. So teacher can use theory in the classroom. Teachers can use this theory, when they are teaching.

Which help to minimize the misbehavior and help to increase the behavior in the classroom. When teacher enter the classroom, teacher would not get any response from that particular student. Therefore, teacher gave the instruction and explained the classroom rules with the help of.

However, there are two groups of learners for whom these procedures may not be beneficial: 1 those who make a lot of mistakes and 2 those who are excessively dependent on adult guidance. When given material that is too difficult, low-achieving learners make many errors. Such learners experience low rates of positive consequences and high rates of negative ones.

Consequently, they are likely to ignore corrective feedback and simply stop working. This finding underscores the importance of designing your instruction to produce as few errors as possible in all learners. The second case, learners who depend greatly on adult guidance, may involve attention-seeking behavior.

In other words, some learners may persist in making mistakes because of the attention they receive after doing so. These researchers carried out experiments in which teachers circled only correct responses and drew no attention to those that were incorrect. This surprising finding reminds us that focusing on mistakes may actually reinforce the wrong response. This may be especially true in classrooms where teachers pay more attention to children who are misbehaving talking out of turn, not following instructions than to those who routinely follow class rules.

Behavioral scientists have conclusively demonstrated the crucial role played by positive consequences in promoting and strengthening learning in animals. Thus, for the classroom teacher today, the important question is not whether to use positive consequences in the classroom, but what type of consequence to use and how. Behavioral scientists make a distinction between positive consequences and positive reinforcers.

They may or may not serve as positive reinforcers. Something can be called a positive reinforcer only when it can be conclusively shown that it increases the frequency of a target behavior. In order to classify this consequence as a positive reinforcer, you must show that the learner continues to make progress and that your praise was the causal factor. Some teachers develop elaborate systems of positive rewards, hoping that they will energize their learners to achieve increasingly higher levels of both social and academic skills Canter, However, the teachers believe they are using positive reinforcers when they are simply using positive consequences.

We will now extend our discussion of positive consequences following learning to address two additional issues: 1 how to use positive consequences to promote and maintain learning and 2 how to establish natural reinforcers i. Recall from our discussion of operant conditioning that positive reinforcement is the process of strengthening behavior by the presentation of a desired stimulus or reward. While this definition appears simple, reinforcement is nevertheless easily misunderstood and misused.

These will help you grasp the complexity of positive reinforcement. Learners who read more than five books a year are treated to a special roller skating party at the end of the school year, hosted by the principal. There is nothing wrong or inappropriate about these activities. Learners, their teachers, and parents generally like and support them. They even may have some beneficial outcomes on learning, but they are not necessarily examples of positive reinforcement. When behavioral scientists speak of positive reinforcement they refer to a sequence of actions by a teacher, trainer, or behavioral specialist that has a beginning, middle, and end.

When you decide to use positive reinforcement you commit yourself to this specific sequence of steps. Note that very few of these steps were followed in the examples given earlier. Reread the examples now, and ask yourself how many included: baseline measurement of specific behaviors; assessment of reinforcer preferences; immediate, continuous reinforcement for the performance of specific behaviors; and a gradual fading of the use of extrinsic reinforcers to natural reinforcers.

The point is that the expert practice of positive reinforcement is a demanding intellectual and physical challenge. When you decide to use it, you are committing yourself to a process that involves measurement, consistent delivery of reinforcers, and the responsibility to fade them. Because of this commitment, there may be few examples in regular school classrooms today where the science of reinforcement, as developed by behavioral scientists, is consistently and appropriately applied.

In either case, users of positive reinforcement should be aware of the ethical issues involved in the use of extrinsic rewards, such as paying students for reading books or for staying off drugs. Behavioral scientists have often been criticized for creating a generation of learners who are hooked on artificial or extrinsic consequences in order to learn and behave in the classroom see, for example, de Charms, , However, an analysis of the writings of early behaviorists like B.

Skinner , , or other behavioral scientists like Ogden Lindsley , a, b and Baer, Wolf, and Risley , challenges this criticism.

Such behavioral scientists have advocated the use of natural reinforcers , those that are naturally present in the setting where the behavior occurs. Thus, there are natural reinforcers for classrooms grades , ballfields the applause of fans , the workplace money , and the home story hour, parent attention.

Examples of unnatural reinforcers are paying children or giving them treats for achievement in schools, or buying toys for children who behave well at home. Skinner makes a further distinction in his definition of a natural reinforcer: he sees it as a change in stimulation resulting from the behavior itself. In other words, natural reinforcers occur when the behavior itself produces an environmental change that gives the person pleasure.

For example, the natural reinforcer for hitting the correct keys on a piano is the pleasurable sound that the behavior brings. Similarly, the natural reinforcer for writing correct letters is the satisfaction the first-grader experiences when she sees the letters forming on the page. Thus to Skinner a natural reinforcer is a consequence that results from the very performance of the behavior we want the child to learn; that consequence, in turn, motivates the child to want to perform these behaviors again.

Children who enjoy solving puzzles are receiving natural reinforcement for doing so. Likewise, learners who write poetry, play the guitar, study history, read novels, or compete in gymnastics are receiving natural reinforcement.

What these examples have in common is that children are engaging in the behaviors again and again without the need for external praise or other reinforcers delivered by another person. Some learners are naturally reinforced by learning to write, read, color, answer questions, play sports, solve equations, answer textbook questions, and write essays, but others are not.

Many learners require external reinforcers to engage in certain classroom activities that they do not find naturally reinforcing. For such children, external reinforcers have an important role to play. They can accomplish two things. Behavioral scientists refer to this process as conditioning Horcones, Conditioning a Natural Reinforcer. Over the past decade, the Communidad Los Horcones Horcones, , , , has developed a strategy for transferring the control of extrinsic reinforcers to that of natural, or intrinsic reinforcers.

This process as a whole is referred to as intrinsic reinforcement. Positive Consequences: A Final Comment. Behavioral scientists emphasize that there is nothing wrong with extrinsic reinforcers, particularly when they are used as a means to get learning started and to condition natural reinforcers.

But there are drawbacks to their use. They are not always available for all learners at the same time nor available for individual learners when they are needed. This is not the case with natural reinforcers. Moreover, extrinsic reinforcers can be effective only when they are consistently delivered by another person. It is impractical to expect teachers to reinforce the most important behaviors of all learners at the right moment.

Natural reinforcers allow for this possibility. We will return to the subject of reinforcement when we study motivational theories in future chapters. We will end our discussion of the use of the behavioral science approach with the final type of consequence teachers can use: negative consequences. Here are some examples of negative consequences:. These are all examples of negative consequences, things that teachers or other adults do to learners after inappropriate behaviors in the hope that such behaviors will not occur again.

Types of negative consequences typically used in schools are these:. Negative consequences may or may not be punishers. Our focus on your success starts with our focus on four high-demand fields: K—12 teaching and education, nursing and healthcare, information technology, and business.

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