Theories of Learning: Behaviorism to Constructivism

Introduction to Learning Theories

Theories of learning can be categorized into three distinct groups: behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism. Behaviorism refers to the student's interaction with the environment and focuses on the external aspects of learning—specifically on what encourages learning, such as positive reinforcement on the one hand and punishment on the other. Cognitivism, on the other hand, focuses on attitudes, motivation, and ideas, and refers to the brain's interaction with the academic environment and with the subjects taught. Finally, constructivism represents and describes the situation in which the learner actively builds new ideas or constructs new learning situations.

Other approaches include humanism—where the focus is placed on respecting and motivating the individual student as encouragement to learning—and social/situational theories, which hold that situational and social constructs interact in shaping a student's motivation and classroom attitude.

Behaviorism

Behaviorism holds that external actions and behavior dominate, if not replace, cognition. Radical behaviorists believe that mind and cognition are non-existent entities. For a change in behavior to occur, it must come about through changes in the environment. Deliberate modifications in experience—that is, in external manifestations through the actions of others or modifications in the environment—cause changes in behavior. A person is who they are because of their environment, and learning occurs through changes in that environment. The cognitive stance, by contrast, asserts that learning is a change in mental associations accrued as a result of experiences. Whereas behaviorists place the accent on external manifestations—behavior and the environment—internalism (or mentalism) accents the internal: cognition and the mental. Stimulus necessarily equals response, and some behaviorists maintain that if no observable change occurs, then no learning has taken place.

Behaviorists believe that individuals are born as blank slates, and since each person has different learning experiences, each therefore evidences a different set of personality traits and character, as each individual's differential learning experiences permanently impress their behavior in a particular manner. In essence, humans become conditioned by their environment, and learning has a permanent impact on behavior (Ormrod, 1999).

Cognitivism focuses on the array of mental products that go into the learning process. These include perception, intelligence, social role acquisition, memory (both short-term and long-term), cognitive load, insight, and information processing.

Cognitivism

Mental schemas—otherwise known as mental abstractions—automatically compel us to categorize facets of our environment, such as objects, personality traits, the self, social roles, and social groups, in particular ways, consequently driving the student's responses. The central hypothesis of cognitive science is that thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and the computational procedures that operate on those structures. Most work in cognitive science assumes that the mind has mental representations analogous to computer data structures and computational procedures similar to computational algorithms. Some of these heuristics include mental shortcuts such as "representativeness" (where a percept is associated with a similar item), the "framing effect" (understanding something in terms of its context), and "availability" (that which most readily springs to mind).

In terms of education, learning is viewed as an internal mental process that, in order to be best acquired and internalized, requires skills and methods that develop the student's intelligence and present the learning in such a way that his or her cognitive abilities can master and engage with the subject.

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