Summary of educational theories

Behaviorism

Ivan Pavlov: Stimulus response pattern. Stimulus lead to behavior.

B. F. Skinner: Operant conditioning, learning is controlled and results in shaping behavior through the reinforcement of stimulus-response patterns. Reinforcement is a powerful motivator. Negative stimulus will lead to extinguished response.

Albert Bandura: Social cognitive theory, motivational factors and self-regulatory mechanisms contribute to a person’s behavior. Imitate from Observational modeling. Self-efficacy, environment, behavior, psychological processes.

  In behaviorists’ view, human learning is purely an objective and experimental branch of natural science and independent thinking paly no essential part of its teaching methods.

  They ignore the significant role which internal cognitive thinking played in learning and classify human with animal together that learning begins solely through a system of positive and negative rewards.

  Enormous educational research and experience of teaching practice have proved, cognitive thinking cannot be ignored in the whole process of learning and the stimulus response pattern is just one of the external ways for motivating learning in a short time. For further consistent learning, internal stimulus is necessary for learners.

  Behaviorism inspired cognitivists to discover the internal function in human’s brain to see how the learning began and remained for a long time. In addition, behavior reflecting to thinking is the most important point that the behaviorism told us.

Cognitivist theory  

Allan Paivio: Presenting information in both visual and verbal form enhances recall and recognition.

Dual coding theory: processing of images and language. Equal position, but now the research shows that images tend to endure longer in human’s memory.

Robert Gagne: Cognitive learning hierarchies which involves the development of skills based on a building-block principle.

Five major categories of learning: verbal information, intellectual skills, cognitive strategies, motor skills and attitudes.

Nine events of instruction: gain attention of the learners, inform learner of the objective, stimulate recall of prior learning, present the stimulus or lesson, provide learning guidance and instruction, elicit performance, provide feedback, assess performance, enhance retention and transfer.

Howard Gardner: intelligence is the ability to gain knowledge, apply knowledge, manipulate one’s environment and think abstractly.

Multiple intelligences: linguistic-verbal, logical-mathematical, spatial-visual, body-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist

He suggests that instructional methods should include a variety of activities that support other intelligences, such as physical education, role-playing, arts, cooperative learning, reflections, and creative play.

Benjamin Bloom: three domains in learning: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor.

Cognitive: intellectual level, how students organize ideas and thoughts.

Affective: emotions, interests, attitude, attention, and awareness.

Psychomotor: motor skills and physical abilities.

Six level of acquiring knowledge about a topic: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation. Taxonomy of objectives.

Mastery learning theory: students gain information and knowledge consistently, working through modules or teacher instruction only after they have mastered the content of the previous modules.

  Cognitive psychologists view thinking, deciding, remembering and other activities in terms of how they underlie behavior.

  They suggest that educators need to take into account the differences in students’ multiple intelligences in learning process and use them as a guide to personalize instruction and assessment in designing appropriate instructional strategies in order to maximize students’ learning efficiency.

Constructivism

Jean Piaget: children construct new knowledge as they moved through different cognitive stages or schema, building on what they already knew.

Sensorimotor, birth to 2 2years, learning take place from senses and motor actions.

Preoperational, 2 to 6/7 years, begin to use symbol and images.

Concrete operational, 6/7 to 11/12 years, think logically.

Formal operational, 11/12 years through adulthood, from concrete thinking to more abstract. Children or adolescents begin to formulate their own beliefs and morals.

Adaptation, assimilation, accommodation.

Jerome Bruner: learner constructs new ideas or concepts based on his current or past knowledge.

Learner selects and changes information to understand and make decisions, relying on higher-order thinking skills to solve a problem.

Spiral curriculum, learning should be discovery.

Lev Vygotsky: social cognition, learning was influenced significantly by social development.

Children have a zone of proximal development, which is the difference between the problem-solving ability that a child has learned and potential that the child can achieve from collaboration with a more advanced peer or expert, such as a teacher.

Teachers should discover the level of each child’s cognitive/social development, and build or construct their learning experiences from that point.

Anchored instruction.

John Dewey: Education begins with experience, learning should encourage and expand the experiences of the learners.

Teachers need to reflect on strategies and create activities that combine concrete and practical relevance to students’ lives.

He viewed school as a community that represented a large picture and learning as student-directed with a teacher serving as a guide for resources.

Educate the whole child physically, mentally, and socially, and not on just the dispensation of facts and information.

  Constructivists agree that students learn by doing. When students actively participate in the learning process by using critical-thinking skills to analyze a problem, they will create, or construct, their own understanding of a topic or problem.

  They are pragmatists and proposed that learning need to be connected with prior experience and each student has a potential to achieve higher level of objective by collaborating working or learning from experts like teacher.

  They also support student-directed education and suggest that teacher’s role should be to encourage students through exploration and inquiry by providing activities that guide students and create opportunities for discussion, think critically and articulate and defend their points or views.