Bandura and Social Cognitive Theory

Bandura and Social Cognitive Theory

Social Cognitive Theory revolves around the process of knowledge acquisition or learning directly correlated to the observation of models. The models can be those of an interpersonal imitation or media sources. Effective modeling teaches general rules and strategies for dealing with different situations. The tenets of Social Cognitive Theory are applied in many different arenas, mass media, public health, education, and marketing to name a few, and have been the subject of many research studies.

The first article examined in this paper is by Albert Bandura and discusses Social Cognitive Theory and self- agency. The second article is by Jack Martin and looks at Social Cognitive Theory and its implications for the educational community. The final article is by Yvonne Malone and reflects some of the differences between Social Cognitive Theory and William Glasser's Choice Theory.

Albert Bandura and Social Cognitive Theory

Social Cognitive Theory: An Agentic Perspective, by Albert Bandura

This article discusses the basic principles of Social Cognitive Theory. Psychology has under gone many paradigm shifts in its brief history. Bandura (1999) holds that advances in science happen through two kinds of theories, those that identify correlations between observable events without regard to linkable events, and those that specify the mechanisms between observable events.

In Social Cognitive Theory people are "agentic operators in their life course, not just on-looking hosts of brain mechanisms orchestrated by environmental events." Environmental issues appear in three forms, imposed environment, selected environment and constructed environment. The theory subscribes to a model of emergent interactive agency. Bandura describes the human mind as generative, creative, proactive, and self-reflective. People's behavior and decisions are influenced by triadic reciprocal causation. In this model factors in the form of cognitive, affective, and biological events influence one another bi-directionally. Thoughts serve as determinative functions. This theory also holds that human agency involves self-organization, along with proactive, self-reflective and self-regulative mechanisms. Human agency is implemented through direct personal agency, through proxy agency, relying on the efforts of others, and by collective agency. These influences cause individuals to assess thoughts about future courses of action to suit ever-changing situations, organize and deploy the selected options, evaluate the adequacy of their thinking based on the effects which their actions produce, and make whatever changes may be necessary to produce the optimal outcome.

Self-regulated Learning, Social Cognitive Theory, and Agency, by Jack Martin

Jack Martin (2004) describes two conceptions of the learner, a constructivist based on Piagetian theory that emphasizes the active character of a learner's interactions in learning tasks that result in the construction and reorganization of knowledge structure internal to the learner and a socialculturalist conception of the learner that emphasizes a learner's embeddedness in sociocultrual practices of teaching and learning that constitute both the child or adolescent as a learner and the knowledge that is available for appropriation. Agency concerns the capability of persons to make choices and act on these choices.

Martin describes Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory of agency as the individual's capability for self-determination reflective of the agent's capacity for self-regulation chiefly determined by self-efficacy. Agency for self-regulation is both determined and determining and emerges from the participation of a developing human being in the physical and sociocultural world. If both self and the capacity of self to deliberate on and determine goals for acting emerge developmentally, it is plausible to believe that self-regulation arises from activity in the physical and sociocultural world.

Teaching methods tend to be highly structured and teacher directed. Bandura's theory suggests an alternative form of classroom practice with respect to fostering student agentic self-regulation. Under typical developmental conditions young children acquire rudimentary agentic capability through everyday participation in sociocultural events and contexts. The development of agentic self-regulation by students can be developed through active engagement within richly furnished curricular settings with the support of teachers who encourage student risk taking and active, self-directed experimentation with alternative possibilities. The teacher becomes a facilitator of learning instead of a dispenser of knowledge.

Social Cognitive Theory and Choice Theory: A Compatibility Analysis, by Yvonne Malone

This paper is an examination of Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory (SCT), and William Glasser's Choice Theory (CT). The concurrent theme of both these theories is that individuals are active participants in their own development. SCT contends that learning is accomplished by vicarious reinforcement, symbolic activities, forethought activity, self-regulatory capabilities, self-reflecting capabilities, self-efficacy and self-reinforcement. Both theories subscribe to the premise of individual responsibility, but there are major differences in terminology. SCT believes in rewarding oneself, while CT followers would argue that rewarding oneself for "staying on the straight and narrow" is not the same as getting what you want and feeling good about getting what you want.