Behavioral School Of Thought

What is Behavioral?

Behaviorism is an approach to psychology that focuses on an individual's behavior. It combines elements of philosophy, methodology, and psychological theory. It emerged in the early twentieth century as a reaction to depth psychology and other more traditional forms of psychology, which often had difficulty making predictions that could be tested using rigorous experimental methods.

theoretical frameworks was develop in the early century 20th with the animal learning experiment of Ivan Pavlor, Edward Thondike, Edward C. Tolman, B.F.Skinner and others.

Behavior In Education

Behaviourism focuses on one particular view of learning: a change in external behaviour achieved through using reinforcement to shape the behavior. Skinner found that behaviors could be shaped when the use of rewards was implemented. Desired behavior is rewarded, while the undesired behavior is punished. Incorporating behaviorism into the classroom allowed educators to assist their students in excelling both academically and personally. In the field of language learning, this type of teaching was called the audio-lingual method, characterised by the whole class using choral chanting of key phrases, dialogues and immediate correction.

Within the behaviourist view of learning, the "teacher" is the dominant person in the classroom and takes complete control, evaluation of learning comes from the teacher who decides what is right or wrong. The learner does not have any opportunity for evaluation or reflection within the learning process, they are simply told what is right or wrong. The conceptualization of learning using this approach could be considered "superficial" as the focus is on external changes in behaviour i.e. not interested in the internal processes of learning leading to behaviour change and has no place for the emotions involved the process.

Operant Conditioning

Operant conditioning was developed by B.F. Skinner in 1937 and deals with the modification of "voluntary behavior" or operant behavior. Operant behavior operates on the environment and is maintained by its consequences. Reinforcement and punishment, the core tools of operant conditioning, are either positive (delivered following a response), or negative (withdrawn following a response). Skinner created the Skinner Box or operant conditioning chamber to test the effects of operant conditioning principles on rats. From this study, he discovered that the rats learned very effectively if they were rewarded frequently. Skinner also found that he could shape the rats' behavior through the use of rewards, which could, in turn, be applied to human learning as well.

Classical Conditioning

Although operant conditioning plays the largest role in discussions of behavioral mechanisms, classical conditioning is also an important behavior-analytic process that need not refer to mental or other internal processes. Pavlov's experiments with dogs provide the most familiar example of the classical conditioning procedure. In simple conditioning, the dog was presented with a stimulus such as a light or a sound, and then food was placed in the dog's mouth. After a few repetitions of this sequence, the light or sound by itself caused the dog to salivate. Although Pavlov proposed some tentative physiological processes that might be involved in classical conditioning, these have not been confirmed. The idea of classical conditioning helped behaviorist John Watson discover the key mechanism behind how humans acquire the behaviors that they do, which was to find a natural reflex that produces the response being considered.

Social Learning

 Social learning is also called observational learning. Its main tenet is that you can learn a lot by watching others. According to its chief theorist, Bandura (1986), for observational learning to be effective, learners must attend to someone’s behavior, retain what they observed the “model” doing, imitate or reproduce the behavior they saw, and experience reinforcement or satisfaction as a consequence. We know learners are most likely to model persons who are somewhat like themselves and whom they perceive as competent, warm, or powerful. Thus, primary children frequently identify with parents or with television or movie characters, especially superheroes, and mimic what they do.

Social learning also occurs when we see something good or bad happen to another person. For example, if we were to see a friend praised for her schoolwork, we might try to imitate what she does so we can be praised, too. Conversely, we might avoid doing what another student does if her behavior is not well received.