Learning Theories Week 3
This week we looked at two Learning theories in detail, Behaviourism and Cognitivism.
Behaviourism
We looked at behaviourism and the different theories from Pavlov, Thorndike, Skinner, Bandura, Watson and Gagne.
- Pavlov’s dog experiment shows classic conditioning, where an external stimuli evokes a response, can be used to achieve specific goals.
- Thorndike’s Law and Effect model states that association is followed by a “satisfying state of affairs”.
- Skinners Operant Conditioning looks at changes in behaviour with positive/negative reinforcements.
- Bandura’s Observational Learning looks at changes in behaviour from observing others.
- Watson through his behaviourist approach conducted research on animal behaviour, child rearing, and advertising.
- Gagne’s devised a nine step approach to events instruction.
Cognitivism
We looked at different tools such as Bloom’s Taxonomy, Bloom’s Psychomotor Domain, SOLO Taxonomy. Cognitivism is about information processing and retention in short term or long term memory. everything passes through the short term memory but only important things are encoded and committed to long term memory. Authors discussed in this section included Miller, Baddeley, Clarke and Mayer, Sweller, Bartlett, Meyer and Land, Piagert, Vygotsky, Knowles and Perry.
Marton & Saljo, entwistle and Ramsdens work on Deep and Surface Learning was discussed.
Cognitivism calls on previous knowledge and creates links between these block of knowledge.
Reflection
Difference between these two theories is that Behaviourism looks at the physical action only where as Cognitivism tries to look at the mental processes used to perform tasks.
As discussed in previous reflective pieces on this blog it is becoming more apparent that no one learning theory can be used in isolation. different audiences and learning environments present unique challenges that must be over come. There is no one size fits all and any training programme devised needs to take account of all theories.
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