Behavioural Learning Theory

Learning can occur when experience causes a relatively permanent change in an individual’s knowledge or behaviour. The change may be deliberate or unintentional, correct or wrong. Changes caused by maturation such as growing old or taller do not quality as learning and so does temporary change resulting from illnesses. Behavioural view generally assumes the outcome of learning is change in behaviour and emphasizes the effects of external agents on the individual.

Classical and operant conditioning

The principle of contiguity states that whenever two or more sensations occur together often enough, the will become associated. For example of the sensations become a stimulus and the other becomes a response. In classical conditioning the involuntary emotional or physiological responses such as fear, increased muscle tension, salivation, etc are sometimes known as respondents because these sensations respond to stimuli.

The concept of classical conditioning developed by Pavlov.

This idea of classical condition was developed by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov quite unexpectedly due to some complications which he had to tackle while doing some experiments with digestive system of dogs. What Pavlov did was to sound a tuning fork and observe a dog’s response. As expected there was no salivation of the dog initially. At this stage the sounding fork becomes a neutral stimulus. The dog was then fed and there was a response of salivation. Now this is an unconditioned stimulus because no prior training or conditioning was required for this to happen. The salivation could be seen as an unconditioned response. The dog was then fed by pairing the tuning fork with the food. After sounding the tuning fork the dog was fed repeatedly. After that the dog began to salivate after hearing the dound but before receiving the food. The sound had become a conditioned stimulus and the salivating is now seen as a conditioned response. The experiment demonstrated that humans too can be conditioned through behavioural modifications.

The idea of operant conditioning by B.F. Skinner gives the idea that many voluntary responses from animals and humans are strengthened when they are reinforced and weakened whey they are either ignored or punished. The skinner box demonstrates this idea. A rat is placed in the box and when in the course of exploring its new environment, the rate approaches and then presses the bar, it is rewarded when a food pellet. The rat then presses the bar more frequently than it did before. But if the food pellets are not given after the rat presses the bar, that behaviour stops, or is extinguished. Therefore, the basic idea behind operant conditioning: all behaviours are accompanied by certain consequences, and these consequences strongly influence whether these behaviours are repeated and at what level of intensity. Depending on the conditions these consequences either increase or decrease the likelihood that the preceding behaviour will recur under the same or similar cirumstances. When consequences strengthen preceding behaviour, reinforcement has taken place. When consequences weaken a preceding behaviour punishment and extinction have occurred.

The Skinner Box: the concept of operant conditioning was demonstrated by Skinner.

Reinforcement could be positive or negative. Positive reinforcement involves strengthening a target behaviour that is increasing and maintaining the probability that a particular behaviour will be repeated by presenting a stimulus, called a positive reinforcer, immediately after the behaviour has occurred. Praise, recognition, and the opportunity for free play are positive reinforcers for most students. The term positive should be remembered as ‘adding’; it does not refer to the pleasant nature of the stimulus itself.

The goal negative reinforcement is the same as positive reinforcement – to increase the strength of a particular behaviour. The method however is different. Instead of supplying a desirable stimulus, one removes an unpleasant or aversive stimulus whenever a target behaviour is shown. Just as positive refers to adding, negative refers to the act of removing a stimulus. By removing something unwanted, you encourage the student to learn new behaviours. For example the child goes to school to stop parents scolding, a driver wears the seat belt to get the buzzer to stop making the sound.

Positive and negative reinforcements both encourage the duration and frequency of the target behaviour.

Punishment

A punishment is also known as Type 1 punishment or presentation punishement. Punishment is defined by operant psychologists as the presentation of an aversive stimulus (such as scolding, paddling, ridiculing, etc). From an operant perspective we can claim only if we have punished someone else only if the target behaviour is actually reduced in frequency. Many confuse negative reinforcement with punishment. Both involve the use of an aversive stimulus but the effects of each are opposite. Negative reinforcements strengthens target behaviour, whereas punishment weakens or eliminates a behaviour.

How could we apply operant conditioning then?

Students study to avoid a low grade or even sometimes to avoid ridicule in the classroom. The may take a long time handing over the homework or the teacher may give or not give feedback at all and some of the lessons are not organized and are not target to reach a specific goal. Skinner became convinced, even we do, that if the principles of operant conditioning were systematically applied to education, all such weaknesses could be either reduced or eliminated.

To summarize a long prescription short I will just list out the important points that we could bear in our minds to make sure that we are applying the principles laid out by Skinner.

1. Be clear about what is to be taught. This comes even from our basic lesson planning but it is regrettable that even this is not done most of the time.
2. Teach first things first. This would mean starting from a basic level and to introduce difficult concepts as the students start to gather confidence.
3. Allow students to learn at their own rate. This may not be very pragmatic in our classrooms as teachers have limited time to introduce and get the lessons delivered. However, we could do little to see if the students are confortable in the pace that we are going. Even the school administration may want to conduct remedial classes if there are a large number of students who need more time and help. What we could understand from this concept is that, rushing will never gain us anything in terms of educating the students if they cannot absorb the knowledge that we rely.
4. Program the subject matter. This became the basis for two educational applications” an approach to teaching that we now call computer-assisted instruction and a set of procedures for helping students learn appropriate classroom behaviours that is referred to as behaviour modification.

I hope this post will have looked at some of the theoretical aspects of behavioural learning that we could master to apply them in our classroom.