2.3 Psychological Approaches to Learning

Three Psychological Approaches to Learning

There are many theories about how we learn new ideas, concepts, and behaviors. Because learning approaches involve observable, measurable phenomena, they can then be scientifically tested. In contrast to other approaches, the learning approaches focus only on observable behavior. This module will focus on three learning perspectives: behavioral, constructive, and cognitive.

Behavioral Perspective

Behaviorists do not believe in biological determinism: They do not see personality traits as inborn. Instead, they view personality as significantly shaped by the reinforcements and consequences outside of the organism. In other words, people behave consistently based on prior learning. B. F. Skinner, a strict behaviorist, believed that the environment was solely responsible for all behavior, including the enduring, consistent behavior patterns studied by personality theorists.

Skinner proposed demonstrating consistent behavior patterns because we have developed certain response tendencies (Skinner, 1953). In other words, we learn to behave in particular ways. We increase the behaviors that lead to positive consequences, and we decrease the behaviors that lead to negative consequences. Skinner disagreed with Freud’s idea that personality is fixed in childhood. He argued that personality develops over our lives, not only in the first few years. Our responses can change as we encounter new situations; therefore, we can expect more variability over time in personality than Freud would anticipate. For example, consider a young woman, Greta, a risk taker. She drives fast and participates in dangerous sports such as hang gliding and kiteboarding. However, after she gets married and has children, the system of reinforcements and punishments in her environment changes. Speeding and extreme sports are no longer reinforced, so she no longer engages in those behaviors. In fact, Greta now describes herself as a cautious person.

Risk-taking behaviors like extreme mountain climbing may be modified due to changing circumstances and situations.

Operant conditioning is an aspect of learning theory that uses consequences to modify the occurrence and form of behavior. Operant conditioning deals with the modification of voluntary behavior through the use of consequences.

Reinforcement, and punishment, the core ideas of operant conditioning, are either positive (introducing a stimulus to an individual’s environment following a response), or negative (removing a stimulus from an individual’s environment following a response). Under the concept of operant conditioning, it is essential to know that reinforcement can be either positive or negative, not in terms of being “good or bad,” but rather as additions or subtractions. For instance, a student receiving a reward for getting good grades in school would be considered positive reinforcement, which would ensure that the behaviors associated with getting good grades are reinforced by the addition of the reward. On the other hand, say a student struggles to get good grades because there are too many distractions during his study time. The student begins to eliminate distractions, and his grades begin to improve. The removal of the distractions results in increased behaviors, leading to improved grades (negative reinforcement). Punishment is the introduction of adverse stimuli used to decrease or eliminate the undesired behavior.

Skinner’s Operant Conditioning: Rewards & Punishments by Sprouts  (YouTube)

Cognitive Perspective

Albert Bandura, a Canadian-born American psychologist and originator of social cognitive theory probably best known for his modeling study on aggression, agreed with Skinner that personality develops through learning. However, he disagreed with Skinner’s strict behaviorist approach to personality development because he felt that thinking and reasoning are essential learning components. He presented a social-cognitive theory of personality that emphasizes both learning and cognition as sources of individual personality differences. In social-cognitive theory, reciprocal determinism, observational learning, and self-efficacy play a part in personality development.

Reciprocal Determinism

In contrast to Skinner’s idea that the environment alone determines behavior, Bandura (1990) proposed the concept of reciprocal determinism, in which cognitive processes, behavior, and context all interact, each factor influencing and being influenced by the others simultaneously (see image below). Cognitive processes refer to all characteristics previously learned, including beliefs, expectations, and personality characteristics. Behavior refers to anything that we do that may be rewarded or punished. Finally, the behavior’s context refers to the environment or situation, which includes rewarding/punishing stimuli.

Consider, for example, that you are at a festival, and one of the attractions is bungee jumping from a bridge. Do you do it? In this example, the behavior is bungee jumping. Cognitive factors that might influence this behavior include your beliefs and values, as well as your past experiences with similar behaviors. Finally, context refers to the reward structure for the behavior. According to reciprocal determinism, all of these factors are in play.

Observational Learning

Bandura’s key contribution to learning theory was that much learning is vicarious. We learn by observing someone else’s behavior and its consequences, which Bandura called observational learning. He felt that this type of learning also plays a part in developing our personality.

Based on the behaviorists’ ideas about reinforcement, Bandura suggested that whether we imitate a model’s behavior depends on whether we see the model reinforced or punished. Through observational learning, we learn what behaviors are acceptable and rewarded in our culture. We also learn to inhibit deviant or socially unacceptable behaviors by seeing what behaviors are punished.

We can see the principles of reciprocal determinism at work in observational learning. For example, personal factors determine which behaviors in the environment a person chooses to imitate, and those environmental events, in turn, are processed cognitively according to other personal factors.

Social Learning Theory: Bandura’s Bobo Beatdown Experiments by Sprouts (YouTube)

Self-Efficacy

Bandura (1977, 1995) has studied a number of cognitive and personal factors that affect learning and personality development, and most recently has focused on the concept of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is our level of confidence in our own abilities, developed through our social experiences. Self-efficacy affects how we approach challenges and reach goals. In observational learning, self-efficacy is a cognitive factor that affects which behaviors we choose to imitate as well as our success in performing those behaviors.

People who have high self-efficacy believe that their goals are within reach, have a positive view of challenges seeing them as tasks to be mastered, develop a deep interest in and strong commitment to the activities in which they are involved, and quickly recover from setbacks. Conversely, people with low self-efficacy avoid challenging tasks because they doubt their ability to be successful, tend to focus on failure and negative outcomes, and lose confidence in their abilities if they experience setbacks. Feelings of self-efficacy can be specific to certain situations. For instance, a student might feel confident in her ability in English class but much less so in math class.

Self-Efficacy and Mental Health: We Can Do Hard Things | Brenna Horton (YouTube)

Social Learning Theory integrates behavioral and cognitive theories of learning to provide a comprehensive model that could account for the wide range of learning experiences that occur in the real world. As outlined by Bandura, the key tenets of Social Learning Theory are as follows:

1. Learning is not purely behavioral; rather, it is a cognitive process that takes place in a social context.
2. Learning can occur by observing a behavior and by observing the consequences of the behavior (vicarious reinforcement).
3. Learning involves observation, extracting information from those observations, and making decisions about the performance of the behavior (observational learning or modeling). Thus, learning can occur without an observable change in behavior.
4. Reinforcement plays a role in learning but is not entirely responsible for learning.
5. The learner is not a passive recipient of information. Cognition, environment, and behavior all mutually influence each other (reciprocal determinism).

Constructive Perspective

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) is best known for his work related to cognitive development. Piaget is considered a constructionist, as he believed learning builds new ideas or concepts based upon current and past knowledge and experiences. He is best known for his theories on cognitive development.

Piaget’s (1936) theory of cognitive development explains how a child constructs a mental model of the world. He disagreed with the idea that intelligence was a fixed trait and regarded cognitive development as a process that occurs due to biological maturation and interaction with the environment. Before Piaget’s work, the common assumption in psychology was that children are merely less competent thinkers than adults. Piaget showed that young children think in strikingly different ways compared to adults. According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all subsequent learning and knowledge are based.

Piaget’s theory differs from others in the following ways:

• It is concerned with children, rather than all learners.
• It focuses on development, rather than learning per se, so it does not address learning of information or specific behaviors.
• It proposes discrete stages of development, marked by qualitative differences, rather than a gradual increase in number and complexity of behaviors, concepts, ideas, etc.

The goal of Piaget’s theory is to explain the mechanisms and processes by which the infant, and then the child, develops into an individual who can think and reason. To Piaget, cognitive development was a progressive reorganization of mental processes as a result of biological maturation and environmental experience. Children construct an understanding of the world around them, then experience discrepancies between what they already know and what they discover in their environment.

Piaget said that children develop schemata (commonly referred to as schemas) to help them understand the world. Schemas are concepts (mental models) that are used to help us categorize and interpret information. By the time children have reached adulthood, they have created schemas for almost everything. Piaget viewed intellectual growth as a process of adaptation – adjustment to the world. When we learn new information, we adjust our schemas through two processes, assimilation and accommodation.

First, we assimilate new information or experiences in terms of our current schemas:

• Assimilation is when we take in information that is comparable to what we already know. In other words, assimilation is the adjustment of a schema by additional information similar to what we already know.
• Accommodation describes when we change our schemas based on new information. This process continues as we interact with our environment.
• Finally, is the idea of equilibrium, which Piaget believed to be the child’s attempt to strike a balance between assimilation and accommodation. Piaget believed it to be the mechanism children use in order to move from one stage of thought to the other.

For example, 2-year-old Thomas learned the schema for dogs because his family has a Labrador retriever. When Thomas sees other dogs in his picture books, he says, “Look mommy, dog!” Thus, he has assimilated them into his schema for dogs. One day, Thomas sees a sheep for the first time and says, “Look, mommy, dog!” Having a basic schema that a dog is an animal with four legs and fur, Thomas thinks all furry, four-legged creatures are dogs. When Thomas’ mother tells him that the animal he sees is a sheep, not a dog, Thomas must accommodate his schema for dogs to include more information based on his new experiences. Thomas’s schema for dogs was too broad, since not all furry, four-legged creatures are dogs. He now modifies his schema for dogs and forms a new one for sheep.

Piaget’s Schema: Accommodation and Assimilation of New Information by Sprouts (YouTube)

Thought and Language

Sociocultural theory was first proposed by Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934). Lev Vygotsky was a psychologist with a constructivist orientation to learning. The “constructivist stance maintains that learning is a process of constructing meaning; it is how people make sense of their experience” (Bierema & Merriam, 2014, p. 291). Vygotsky is recognized for his practice in social constructivism, which rationalizes that when individuals communicate through problem-solving and skills practice, they create new learning and experience cognitive development. Vygotsky introduced a unique framework to the theory of development, the sociocultural theory, in which he explored and highlighted the fundamental role of social interaction as a contributing factor to cognitive development in children. Specifically, Vygotsky is known for three major theoretical contributions:

1. Sociocultural importance of interaction,
2. How language and thought enable cognitive development and
3. His two theories of Zone Proximal Development (ZPD), and More Knowledgeable Other (MKO).

Background: Sociocultural Development

Vygotsky’s theory proposes that social interaction is fundamental to cognitive development. In contrast to Jean Piaget’s understanding of child development (which might suggest that development precedes learning), Vygotsky believed that social learning precedes development.

To conceptualize Vygotsky’s theories, it is highly important to note the emphasis his theories placed on the relationship between guided learning events and sociocultural interactions children experience and how it affects them at both the social level (between others) and the individual level (within themselves). Vygotsky (1978) states, “Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later on the individual level; first, between people and then inside the child. This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals.”

According to Vygotsky, a child’s basic mental abilities and functions are as follows: (1) attention, (2) sensation, (3) perception, and (4) memory (McLeod, 2007). Through the sociocultural interactions children have with their environment, these mental functions develop further into refined mental strategies, referred to as higher mental functions. An example of a higher mental function is the ability to store learning as memory and repeat the learned information by demonstration. For example, as a child in your natural environment and cultural experience, you may have observed your mother’s steps to boil water and modeled those steps. A child from a more rural background or an area without indoor plumbing may have very different steps to follow to obtain and prepare water for boiling. These steps may involve walking 3 miles to get water, carrying the water in a container back to her village, and then building a fire to boil the water. Vygotsky believed that the environment in which a child is raised will shape how they conceptualize and view the outside world.

Vygotsky believed that language was a powerful tool for intellectual development and that it evolved from social interactions. He believed that language played a critical role in cognitive development. One of the roles is to provide a means for children to communicate with others in their environment. He argued that “a word without meaning is an empty sound, no longer a part of human speech.” His theory further emphasizes the direct correlation that verbal language has with cognitive thought and perception, stating, “since word meaning is both thought and speech, we find in it the unit of verbal thought we are looking for.”

Vygotsky’s theory puts forward the idea that children experience three forms of language:

• Social Speech
  The first form of language a child learns is social speech, which is exposed and external communication displayed in children around the age of two years. Children and parents use this form of communication to transmit information to one another.
• Private Speech
  The second form of speech is private speech (self-talk), which is hidden and is considered direct speech with oneself. This form of speech is visible in small children, and they appear to be “thinking out loud.” In most cases, they are indeed doing just that. This is when a child is developing cognitive skills and processing learned and new information out loud, and in many cases, problem-solving tasks through private speech. Vygotsky sees this as a way for children to plan activities and strategies for learning and as a method to support their development. As a child grows up and reaches the approximate age of seven, private speech diminishes and is replaced by the third form of speech.
• Silent Inner Speech
  The third is silent inner speech. This is the more sophisticated cognitive development where a child begins to analyze and form conscious private discussions in their mind.

Vygotsky believed that thought and language highlight the significant cohesive process language has with thought and cognitive development. Thus, cognition and thought development are determined by language and the sociocultural experience of the child.

Vygotsky’s Theory of Cognitive Development in Social Relationships by Sprouts (YouTube)

In order to gain a more complete understanding of Vygotsky’s theories on cognitive development, we need to review two important principles:

1. More Knowledgeable Other (MKO) – The MKO refers to anyone who has a better understanding or a higher ability level than the learner with respect to a particular task, process, or concept. The MKO is normally thought of as being a teacher, coach, or older adult. The MKO could also be a peer, a younger person, or even a computer.
2. Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) – The ZPD is the distance between a child’s ability to perform a task under adult guidance and/or with peer collaboration and the child’s ability to solve the problem independently. According to Vygotsky, learning occurs in this zone.

More Knowledgeable Other (MKO)

Vygotsky proposed that the learning that a child encounters is done so with the presence of a skillful individual, referred to as the More Knowledgeable Other (MKO). The MKO refers to someone who has a better understanding or a higher ability level than the learner with respect to completing specific tasks or is more knowledgeable in a particular concept. This skillful MKO could be a tutor, teacher, peer, or parent so long as they fit the criteria of being more knowledgeable on the topic. Vygotsky believed that children were inquisitive creatures who actively sought out their own learning and were engaged in the process.

The MKO plays a significant role in the cognitive development of the child by providing instruction and modeling behavior to the child during the learning process. For example, a child may work on a drawing using crayons, where the task is to color within the lines of the page. In this example, the child and the MKO work together in a cooperative and collaborative manner to complete this task. The MKO’s role is to be very patient and encouraging while providing support to the child and demonstrating how to complete the task; thus contributing to the development of higher mental functions. For the child, higher mental functions and independence are achieved from the interaction of both individuals, the learner and the skillful individual. The presence of the MKO is applied to the theory of the Zone of Proximal Development.

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

Vygotsky is notably known for his Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) theory. This theory correlates the difference between a child’s level of performance when working independently and what a child can achieve when guided, supported, and/or encouraged by a skilled partner, referred to as the MKO. The ZPD helps a child transition from the area of the set skills they have learned or mastered towards expanding to the area they have not yet mastered. The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is where the More Knowledgeable Other (MKO) models and guides support in order to ease the child toward the level of potential.

The Zone of Proximal Development in a Social Context

The ZPD exists between the potential and actual levels of a student’s development.

Level of Potential Development refers to what a student cannot do independently but can do under adult guidance or in collaboration with more competent peers. Teaching should not happen at this level as it would not result in effective learning.

The Zone of Proximal Development refers to the area between the level of actual development and the level of potential development. Also known as the instructional level, it is where instruction should be focused to drive the greatest learning gains for each student.

Level of Actual Development, also referred to as the independent level, encompasses skills a student has already mastered and can perform independently. Instruction focused here would not provide a sufficient challenge for students.

That is to say that the ZPD should challenge the learner by going beyond the skills or knowledge they already possess but should not extend to something they cannot do without guidance or help. In the former case, students are not being challenged to learn because they already know what they are doing. In the latter case, students are not learning effectively because they are not doing the “heavy lifting” of the learning experience but are relying on others instead.

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