Learning Theories

• Learning

  is a process that brings together personal and environmental experiences and influences for acquiring, enriching or modifying one’s knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, behaviors, and worldviews.
• Learning theories

  develop hypotheses that describe how this process takes place
• Learning

  is defined as a persistent change in human performance or performance potential
• John Broadus Watson

  • was an American psychologist whose research was published in the early part of the twentieth century.
• John B. Watson was dominant in American psychology for half a century from the 1920s to the 1960s and remains one of the most important schools of American psychology.
• Behaviorism

  • is a perspective that focuses almost exclusively on directly observable things to explain learning
• • That which is directly observed and believed most relevant to learning are the immediate things in the learner’s environment, and most closely contiguous in time and place to the targeted learning— the so-called stimulus conditions for learning. 
• • The response of the learner to the stimulus is also directly observable and serves as an indicator of learning
• The learning process is a gradual attempt and error until the consistent success is attained.
• The key to learning success depends on reinforcement
• Learning involves a stimulus–response sequence.
• Edward L. Thorndike (1905)

  • developed an stimulus–response (S-R) theory of learning.
• knowledge is defined as a learner’s collection of specific responses to stimuli that are represented in behavioral objectives
• a response to a stimulus is reinforced when followed by a positive rewarding effect
• a response to a stimulus becomes stronger by exercise and repetition
• Different reinforcement patterns (i.e., continuous or intermittent) have been shown to have a different impact on learning outcomes
• Behaviorism puts emphasis on the importance of the environment during individual learning.
• Teaching is to control the learning environment to achieve the desired results, and
• the main method of controlling learning behavior is to strengthen the correct response.
• Operant conditioning = Burrhus F. Skinner (1953)
• Operant conditioning - type of learning in which the strength of a behavior is modified by the behavior’s consequences
• Stimuli are present when a behavior is rewarded or punished to control that behavior.
• The probability of the behavior occurring in this scenario is enhanced by the reinforcement.
• • Learning is understood as the step-by-step or successive approximation of the intended partial behaviors by the use of reward and punishment.
• Programmed instruction - a method of presenting new subject matters for students in a graded sequence of controlled steps
• Learners could achieve their goals through certain learning procedures.
• In programmed instruction, instruction is self-paced
• The learning essence of behaviorism is the change of the external behavior caused by the environment.
• Impacts on teaching are that the desired results could be achieved through controlling the learning environments
• Skinner box 

  • developed by B. F. Skinner 
• Skinner box - also known as operant conditioning chamber 
• Skinner box - is an enclosed apparatus that contains a bar or key that an animal can press or manipulate in order to obtain food or water as a type of reinforcement 
• cognitivism initiated in the late 1950s and became dominant in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. 
• Arose within psychology as behaviorism was proved to be insufficient to explain complex human learning, such as language learning.
• In order to explain some human behaviors, psychologists turned to investigate the information processing in the mind which is considered as unobservable black box by behaviorists (Spector, 2016). 
• People are no longer viewed as collections of responses to external stimuli as understood by behaviorists, but as information processors.
• In cognitive psychology, learning is conceptualized as the acquisition of knowledge:
• Learning is not a stimulus–response sequence, but the formation of cognitive structures. 
• Cognitivism has its roots in cognitive psychology and information processing theory. 
• Information processing theory involves how people receive, store, integrate, retrieve, and use information.