Revision:Perspectives in Education
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Behaviourism
- Based on behavioural changes. Focuses on a new behavioural pattern being repeated until it becomes automatic
- Tried to explain learning without referring to mental processes - focuses on observable behaviour and how an organism adapts to the environment
- Knowledge is viewed as given and absolute (objective knowledge)
Pavlov - Classical Conditioning
- Classical conditioning
- Explains how reflexes are associated firstly with specific stimuli, and then generalised to other similar situations
- Dogs/bells - association of unconditioned stimulus (e.g. food) which produces unconditioned response (e.g. salivation) with conditioned stimulus (e.g. bell) such that response is eventually produced on presentation of conditioned stimulus alone, so becoming a conditioned response
Evaluative Issues
- Makes sense that creating pleasant associations with material to be learned will improve learning
- Also makes sense that creating a pleasant environment (physically and emotionally) will create an environment more conducive to learning
- Scientific - based on empirical observation carried out in controlled experiments - could be a strength, but also a weakness, as humans do not behave in predictable scientific ways
- Reductionist - assumes that most, if not all, human behaviour is learnt through interacting with the environment, not inherited - most likely that behaviour is a result of interaction of nature and the environment
- Egalitarian - assumes that people are born the same as each other; what makes us different in terms of personality is the different stimulus-response associations we learn
- Determinist - sees individuals are having no control over the reactions we have learnt through classical conditioning. In theory, all human behaviour could be predicted, and it can't be, so this is a weakness
Skinner - Operant Conditioning
- Operant conditioning - if, when an organism does something, the consequences of that behaviour are reinforcing, it is likely to do the same again
- Pigeons/box - association of response (lever pressing) with an unconditioned stimulus (food pellet) to produce a conditioned response (lever pressing) in the absence of he unconditioned stimulus
- Behaviour that is positively reinforced will reoccur - intermittent reinforcement is particularly effective
- Information should be presented in small amounts so that responses can be reinforced ('shaping')
- Reinforcements will generalise across similar stimuli ('stimulus generalisation'), producing secondary conditioning
- Reinforcer - anything that strengthens desired response - e.g. verbal praise, good grade, feeling of increased accomplishment/satisfaction
- Negative reinforcer - any stimulus that results in increased frequency of response when it is withdrawn (different from punishment (adversive stimuli) - result in reduced responses)
- Behaviour rewarded on an intermittent and variable schedule is less liable to extinction - simply reinforcing every instance of desired behaviour is bribery, not promotion of learning
- Withdrawal of reinforcement eventually leads to the extinction of the behaviour
- Concerned with concept of whole class teaching - teacher would concentrate on average student whilst ignoring needs of more able students. Solutions - using computers - programmed learning?
- Felt that teachers needed to be clear regarding what is taught, to have clear objectives, teach first things first, and to allow students to progress at their own rate. Believed in errorless learning - i.e. a programme should avoid the possibility of the individual experiencing failure, but does not reflect the real world - important that students learn to cope with failure and setbacks positively
Evaluative Issues
- May only explain increased likelihood of a learned response, not initial learning in itself - response needs to have occurred before it can be reinforced
- Based on lab experiments with animals - how far can research based on animals be applied to humans?
- Scientific - humans do not behave in predictable scientific ways
- Environmentalist - assumes that most, if not all, human behaviour is learnt through interacting with the environment - reductionist
- Reductionist - doesn't take into account hidden, unobservable cognitive and emotional factors in learning - but could be a strength - not always possible to ask an individual what they think/how they feel - analysis of behaviour can lead to successful interventions and educational strategies
- Egalitarian - assumes that people are born the same as each other
- Application to everyday life - strategies that involve teacher consciously analysing behaviour of students - but time-consuming and involves careful observation and record-keeping
- Putting theory into place - effectiveness for learning, considerations of individuality of students - possibly too simplistic and superficial - e.g. reinforcing for one, not so for another, etc
- Believed that children need to be activie in learning process in order to receive constant evaluation and reinforcement - not always achievable in a large classroom
- Intrinsic vs. extrinsic reinforcement - intrinsic benefits might not always be immediately apparent, so extrinsic reinforcement needed at first. But if no intrinsic reward at all, behaviour is likely to stop very quickly once the extrinsic rewards are withdrawn
- Positive vs. negative reinforcment - negative reinforcement linked to some kind of punishment, which can then be removed in order to reward the child. Negative implications of punishment - can have effect of teaching children to avoid or escape from unpleasant situations. Important for teachers to be consistent in the way they reinforce behaviour - students faced with unpredictable teachers become confused about which behaviours get rewarded and which get punishment - become reluctant to make contributions to lessons in case they get into trouble. Arbitrary control may initially be an effective way of dominating classroom and makes students listen quietly, but makes students resentful and harms their education in the long run
- Student has to produce a response in the first place - so theory may not be effective for those who are quiet, or who choose not to contribute either verbally or in writing
- Teachers not necessarily in control in some power reinforcers - e.g. peer acceptance, parental approval - have to use slightly weaker reinforcers - e.g. teacher approval, grades
Bandura
- Observational (Social) Learning Theory - children learn through observation and imitiation
Evaluative Issues
- Assumes that teachers know best re. models, imitations and rewards
- Assumes much about your role models are, and that they will be copied
- Models out of teachers control
O'Leary study
- Examined efficacy of teacher reprimands - suggested that giving soft reprimands to disruptive pupils might have a greater effect than loud reprimands (e.g. does not single out child and make behaviour noticeable to others)
- 'Method
- Baseline measures of disruptive behaviour of individual pupils, with teacher using normal loud, public reprimands
- Measures of disruptive behaviour when teacher used soft reprimands (condition 1)
- Measures of disruptive behaviour when teacher returned to loud reprimands
- Measures of disruptive behaviour when teacher returned to soft reprimands again (condition 2)
- Observations of six disruptive pupils (ages 7-8) - 3 different classes
- Each child observed for 20-minute period each day during maths lesson - observing for 20 seconds, then recording for 10 seconds
- 9 categories of disruptive behaviour - e.g. child out of chair, noisy, not getting on with task, aggressive
- Controls - asked teachers to keep number of reprimands to target children relatively constant to control effects of other possible influences on behaviour; all other behaviours constant - e.g. amount of praise given (usually relatively low)
- Results reported in terms of average number of disruptive behaviours per day (no. of disruptive behaviours divided by no. of observations)
- Results
- Soft reprimands showed reduction in frequency of disruptive behaviour for all six children in condition 1
- Condition 2 - 5 children showed further reduction
- Shows effect of changing teacher's behaviour on level of disruptive behaviour in class - soft reprimands more effective than loud reprimands
- Maybe loud reprimands reinforce disruptive behaviour?
Evaluative Issues
- Very small sample
- What counts as disruptive behaviour?
- Student-teacher relationship
- Influence of the presence of observers
- Narrow age-range
- Repeated measures design - order effect
- Reliability - extent to which it gives consistent measurements - checked by having second observer in class for some of sessions and measuring amount of agreement - generally about 80% agreement, although once as low as 64%
Cognitivsm
- Based on thought processes behind behaviour. Changes in behaviour are observed, but only as an indicator to what is going on in the learner's head.
- Focus on mental processes of the learner
- Knowledge still viewed as given and absolute (like behaviourism)
Bruner
- Discovery learning
- Active form of learning – students always engaged in tasks, finding patterns, solving puzzles, etc – constantly need to exercise existing schemata, reorganising and amending these concepts to address challenges of task
- Learner is an active information processor who needs to simply and make sense of their environment through the formation of concepts or categories
- Role of teacher - offer guidance and support as learners discover for themselves – this means a more student-centred approach
- Teacher should circulate classroom and work with individual students – guiding students
- Curriculum should be organised in spiral manner so that student continually builds upon what they have already learned - revisit particular concepts over and over again during educative experience, each time building their understanding and requiring more sophisticated cognitive strategies (and thus increasing the sophistication of their understanding)
- Start off by teaching something really simple, and then going over the concepts over and over again, but adding something more so that as children understand better and get older, they learn more
- Teacher has to be aware of four factors – set (predisposition to act in certain ways), need state (level of arousal or alertness, e.g. bright colours), mastery of specifics (extent of learner’s knowledge of specific relevant information), and diversity of training (exposure to material in variety of forms - books, computers etc))
Piaget
- Constructivist theory on how individuals actively build knowledge and understanding
- Proposed that children’s thinking does not develop entirely smoothly – instead there are certain points at which it ‘takes off’ and moves into completely new areas and capabilities – for Piaget, these transitions take place at about 18 months, 7 years and 11/12 years – taken to mean that before these ages, children are not capable (no matter how bright) of understanding things in certain ways – this has been used as the basis for scheduling the school curriculum
- Key ideas:
- Adaptation – adapting to world through assimilation and accommodation
- Classification – ability to group objects together on basis of common features
- Class inclusion – understanding – more advanced than simple classification – that some classes or sets of objects are also sub-sets of a larger class (e.g. class of objects called dogs, also class called animals – all dogs = also animals, so class of animals includes that of dogs)
- Schema (or scheme) – representation in mind of a set of perceptions, ideas, and/or actions, which go together
- Demonstrated empirically that children’s minds were not empty, but actively processed material with which they were presented, and postulated mechanisms of accommodation and assimilation as key to this processing
- Cognitive structures change through the processes of adaptation: assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation involves the interpretation of events in terms of existing cognitive structure, whereas accommodation refers to changing the cognitive structure to make sense of the environment.
- Developed notion of schemata – mental ‘structures’ which act as frameworks through which the individual classifies and interprets the world – e.g. allow us to distinguish between horses and cows by looking for key characteristics.
- As we grow and mature, our schemata become increasingly more complex and intricate, allowing us access to more sophisticated understandings and interpretation of the world
- Need to maintain equilibrium – state of balance between internal schema and external environment – i.e. ability to fully understand what’s going on around us using our existing cognitive maps. But on occasions, new environmental information is encountered which doesn’t match neatly with existing schemata – we must consequently adjust and refine these schema using assimilation and accommodation:
- Assimilation – the process by which new information is added to an existing schema. New information might throw a child into a state of disequilibrium – mental schema not matching exactly to environment. In order to bring about balance, child must incorporate (assimilate) this new information into existing schema framework
- Accommodation – process by which schemas are restructured or new schemas created – e.g. if characteristics contradict schema, this new information will cause a state of disequilibrium – in order to bring about balance, a new schema must be created which allows child to distinguish these characteristics
- Learning materials and activities should involve the appropriate level of motor or mental operations for a child of given developmental stage – teachers should avoid asking students to perform tasks that are beyond their current cognitive capabilities
Implications
- Explains how a person can learn more about the world, as schemata becomes more specialised nd refined until they can perform complex abstract cognitions
- Says children of different ages are capable of different cognitive processes – before they reach a certain stage in their development, they are not capable of understanding things in certain ways, no matter how bright they are
Evaluative Issues
- Mainly used clinical case-studies – conducted hundreds of observations and interviews with children and, based on this data, drew conclusions about the abilities of his participants at different ages – based on these conclusions, he devised a series of tasks which aimed to test different cognitive abilities, and pin down the age at which they develop
Vygotsky
- Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)
- The potential for cognitive development is limited to a certain area known as the ‘Zone of Proximal Development’ – full development during the ZPD depends upon full social interaction
- Teacher has to be aware of each learner’s ZPD in order to be able to offer the right support at the right time, and in order to maximise learning - can be achieved through use of variety of assessment techniques that test learner’s understanding and ability – used to establish what their actual ability is
- Constructivist theory
- Observed that when children were tested on tasks on their own, they rarely did as well as when they were working in collaboration with an adult – not always that adult was teaching them how to perform task, but that process of engagement with adult enabled them to refine their thinking or performance to make it more effective
- Scaffolding – process in which framework is provided within which learners are able to learn effectively for themselves
- Learning experiences must be presented in such a way as to actively challenge existing mental structures and provide frameworks for the formation of new ones
- We acquire language through social interactions. With language comes knowledge of the culture in which we live, and at the same time, culture influences the language and knowledge that we acquire. Thought, or higher mental functioning, only comes with the acquisition of language
- So for the teacher, the key to successful learning is providing learners with the language to deal with complex concepts
- Full cognitive development requires social interaction
Applications
- Curriculum – since children learn much through interaction, curriculum should be designed to emphasise interaction between learners and learning tasks
- Instruction – with appropriate adult help, children can often perform tasks that they are incapable of completing on their own – so scaffolding – where adult continually adjusts level of help in response to child’s level of performance – is an effective form of teaching – produces immediate results, but also instils skills necessary for independent problem-solving in the future
- Assessment – methods must take into account zone of proximal development – what children can do on their own is their level of actual development, what they can do with help is their level of potential development. Two children might have same level of actual development, but given appropriate help from an adult, one might be able to solve more problems than the other. Assessment methods must target both level of actual development and level of potential development
Ausubel
- Constructivist theory
- Learning is not a passive process in which teacher imparts knowledge on students – learner is an active agent, who engages with and interprets information, and incorporates it into existing cognitive schemata
- Role of teacher is not just to present new information, but to do so in a meaningful way – taking account of learner’s prior experience
- Expository learning
- Where teacher gives learner all the information they require in its finished form
- Distinguishes reception (expository) learning from rote and discovery learning – former because it doesn’t involve subsumption and latter because learner must discover information through problem-solving
- Schema are hierarchical representations (or stores) of knowledge – general concepts at top, increasingly specific sub-concepts forming a tree beneath. E.g. learn general concepts, then add/subsume more specific sub-concepts as we develop
- Primary process in learning is subsumption in which new material is related to relevant ideas in the existing cognitive structure on a substantive, non-verbatim basis.
- Subsumption can only occur where similarities and links are found between past concepts and new ones – but students must be able to discern differences between new and previous concepts – makes storage and recall more likely
- Forgetting occurs because these differences are not made explicit and learners are unable to properly integrate new information into their schema
- Most general ideas of a subject should be presented first, and then progressively differentiated in terms of detail and specificity
- Instructional materials should attempt to integrate new material with previously presented information through comparisons and cross-referencing of new and old ideas
- Make learning meaningful – teachers should only teach material if learner has been properly prepared to learn – in other words, before proceeding to teach a particular concept, teacher should provide learner with sufficient background information to make understanding of that concept possible
Evaluative Issues
- Applied specifically to classroom setting
Humanism
- Focus on individual/self - highly value-driven
- Emphasises 'natural desire' of everyone to learn
- * Learning is not an end in itself – it is the means to progress towards the pinnacle of self-development – Maslow’s ‘self-actualisation’
- A child learns because he/she is inwardly driven, and derives their reward from the sense of achievement that having learned something affords
- Intrinsic rewards – rewards from within oneself – e.g. satisfaction of a need
- Students should be able to choose what they want to learn – students will be motivated to learn a subject if it’s something they need and want to know – students’ learning to be self-directed
- Grades are irrelevant – only self-evaluation is meaningful
- Key techniques used – student-centred, open classroom, learning-styles driven, integrated day, co-operative learning
- Open Classroom – all students at school might be taught by all teachers in same space at same time – student-centred; students have freedom to choose what they will study, and are encouraged to engage in discovery and research activities; study subject areas that are integrated across curriculum; students work individually or in small groups, and are free to move about classroom; access to wide variety of learning materials; teachers act as facilitators who guide students in their work and de-emphasise grades and standardised tests, rather than telling students what they need to know
- Learning Styles Approach – allows student to use learning style that suits them – e.g. working on soft carpet or around table; highly structured lessons, peer teaching, computer-assisted instruction, self-learning; subjects rotated, to be taught at different times of day
- Co-operative learning – students often in competition with each other or have to work individually towards achieving their personal goals; decreases dependence on teachers; decreases divisiveness and prejudice; improves academic performance; eradicates feelings of alienation, isolation, purposelessness and social unease amongst students; promotes positive attitudes to schools. Advantages – requires no major restructuring of school day, co-operation among students of different abilities, ethnic backgrounds, ages and sexes. But requires careful preparation of materials, worksheets, questions, resource materials, etc; some students waste time talking about irrelevant matters; some members dominate, others are ignored
- Integrated day – timetables/formalised ways of changing activity abandoned; flow of student’s learning activities broken/changed informally, often individually – large element of children’s own choice governing matters; variety of contrasting activities likely to be in progress simultaneously in room/area
Evaluative Issues
- Highly dependent upon capabilities of teacher – subjective
Rogers
- Experiential learning
- Distinguished between two types of learning – cognitive (meaningless) and experiential (significant) – former = academic knowledge e.g. learning vocabulary or multiplication tables, latter = applied knowledge e.g. learning about engines in order to repair a car. Experiential learning addresses needs and wants of learner
- Experiential learning – personal involvement, self-initiated, evaluated by learner, pervasive effects on learner, equivalent to personal change and growth
- Process of learning more important than end-products – performance-orientated approach of education = artificial and reductionist – only ascertains degree to which student has memorised ‘important facts’, ignoring equally important aspects of education e.g. learning to care for others, gaining insight about oneself, developing positive values
- Theory of self-actualisation (the end towards which all humans strive)
- All humans have a natural propensity to learn – role of teacher is to facilitate such learning. This includes:
- Setting a positive climate for learning
- Clarifying the purposes of the learner(s)
- Organising and making available learning resources
- Balancing intellectual and emotional components of learning – emphasis on emotional (affective) and social development
- Sharing feelings and thoughts with learners but not dominating
- Significant learning takes place when the subject matter is relevant to the personal interests of the student
- Self-initiated learning is the most lasting and pervasive
- Education should fit the learner, rather than trying to fit learners into education system in a way which often results in rebellion or crushing of creative and critical thought
Maslow
- Hierarchy of needs
- Self-actualisation needs
- Aesthetic needs – goodness, beauty, truth, justice
- Cognitive needs – knowledge, symmetry
- Self-esteem needs – competence, approval, affection
- Love and belongingness needs (affiliation, acceptance, affection, etc)
- Safety needs (security, psychological safety)
- Physiological needs (food, drink, etc)
- Needs are motivators – the need to self-actualise is the motivation behind behaviour – don’t need a list of needs, drives or goals, just the need to self-actualise
- A student won’t be motivated by any higher-level needs until their lower-level ones have been satisfied
- Helping students plan their own study (setting goals, having regular breaks, etc)
Implications
- Shows teachers how best to motivate students – considering children’s emotional needs as well as cognitive needs – e.g. circle time exercises, etc, to fulfil belonging needs
Evaluative Issues
- Makes sense in general terms – e.g. if you are pre-occupied with physical needs, you are not usually going to be interested in self-esteem needs, etc – but doesn’t always work
- Individualistic
- Does not allow for altruism
Griggs & Dunn
- Sample:
- Visited 10 learning styles-driven schools
- Results:
- Learners performed well on a variety of measures of academic performance
- Many passed subjects, previously failed
- Most loved school
Iszatt & Wasilewska
- Do nurture groups work?
- Retrospective study
- Sample:
- 308 children placed in six nurture groups in London Borough of Enfield
- Method:
- Recorded progress of children
- Compared to control group of 20 children – similar to children placed in nurture groups, but no nurture group placement found
- Results:
- 86% able to return to mainstream classrooms after an average placement of less than one year
- 83% required no further special educational need support
- 35% ended up in special schools; 55% in mainstream school without support
Evaluative Issues
- Small scale
- Not very systematic
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