Instead of covering the basic principles of operant conditioning and reiterating Pavlov through Skinner, a more historical view of education and its influences may be helpful in putting it into some kind of perspective. We are less interested in behaviorism, per se, than its influence on instructional technology, so if you are rusty you may want to find an old psychology textbook. Even prior to behaviorism, however, there were influences in common. For at least four centuries, teacher-centered and student-centered approaches to classroom instruction have struggled for dominance in education, although teacher-centered programs have prevailed. The advent of the microcomputer has the promise for some major changes in favor of student-centered approaches, but it may be a long time before this is achievable. A number of notable figures have influenced both views, including but not limited to Comenius,Locke,Kant,Rousseau,Pestalozzi,Froebel, Piaget, Montessori,Dewey,Thorndike,Watson, and Skinner. Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay on education, offers a glimpse of the teacher at work in the "good old" days:
. . . in their distress the wisest [teachers] are tempted to adopt violent means, to proclaim martial law, corporal punishment, mechanical arrangements, bribes, spies, wrath, main strength and ignorance, in place of that wise and genial providential influence they had hoped, and yet hope in some future date to adopt.Faculty Psychology or Formal DisciplinePierre Schlag tells us:
In 1840, phrenology was a confident science, promising clear and certain knowledge concerning the mental attributes and behaviors of human beings. It was a time of exhilarating new possibilities, of discoveries compounding discoveries. There were conferences and symposia. There were professional associations. There were lengthy learned tomes and scholarly journals. The first issue of the American Phrenological Journal had just appeared in October of 1838. And when George Combe, the renowned phrenologist, came to deliver his lectures in New Haven in February and March of 1840, he drew a large crowd. The audience, "for numbers and respectability, [was] such as rarely falls to the lot of a public lecturer in [that] city." It seemed as if the new discipline would go on forever. This discipline of phrenology was devoted to the identification of basic brain functions and their manifestations in cranial features. The basic principles and framework were established by Dr. Franz Joseph Gall. By sifting through an impressive array of empirical data, Gall sought to uncover the fundamental affective, moral, and intellectual faculties of human beings. He believed that the identification of these faculties - everything from "Benevolence" to "Individuality" to "Causality" - enabled the classification of various human types and behaviors, and provided a fundamental explanation of human behavior.In 1840, phrenology was considered a mature science, reaching its zenith 29 years before Darwin publishedThe Origin of the Species and coinciding with the birth of the Victorian Era, the young Queen having just ascended the throne in 1837. It was presumed that the brain was made up of many parts, each of which was thought to have some "faculty" corresponding to it. A faculty was an aptitude. The mind and body were regarded as separate and, in the beginning, the mind was considered to have three powers: will, emotions, and intellect. Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) expanded on the faculties, which were thought to be reflected in the size of protrusions or lack of them on the skull. While different theorists had different lists, the major faculties associated with cranial bumps were these: Comparison, Human Nature, Constructiveness, Locality, Individuality, Eventuality, Firmness, Self-esteem, Approbativeness, Destructiveness, Cautiousness, Veneration, Spirituality, Benevolence, Ideality, Conscientiousness, Affection, Acquisitiveness, Secretiveness, and Amativeness. Widely accepted, Phrenology became a way to assess one's character, to choose mates, and was used for educational theory and vocational assessment.In effect, the mind was regarded like a muscle that could be exercised for growth and improvement. The purpose of education was to to induce exercises that could exert control over the the will and emotions. The educational theory based on this belief was mental discipline, a pedagogy based on drill and repetition for young children and on classical philosophy, literature, and languages for older students. The purpose was not to learn the subject matter of the curriculum as much as to strengthen the mind, dominate the will, and teach control of the emotions. To this day, as will be pointed out below, faculty psychology still influences education in the conventional wisdom that difficult subject matter and rigor are important.
American education was dominated by faculty psychology or formal discipline, which even then had a "nature-nurture" division. In one view, organs/compartments in the brain and/or mind were thought to be associated with human capacities subject to training. Others believed that the faculties were fixed, which reflected racism among the learned phrenologists. Many "lesser" humans, including the Irish, were considered to have characteristic patterns of lumps and bumps that explained the reasons why there were inferior human beings. In Whiteness of a Different
Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998) by Jacobson, we are told:The racially inflected caricatures of the Irish at mid-century are well known, as when Harper's depicted the 'Celt' and the 'Negro' weighing in identically on the scales of civic merit, but in the 1890's even the Irish novelist John Brennan could write that the Irishness of the emigrants' children showed in their 'physiognomy,' or the color of their countenances (p. 4).In the more generous view, some believed that by exercising the "faculty" through certain activities, a faculty could be improved. Believing the "mind" to be comprised of various faculties, it was accepted that a mind must be trained to choose between good and evil. Any difficult subject, peppered with drill, memorization, and harsh discipline could create such a mind. The content of study was not necessarily as important as the exercise applied, so the best education was harsh discipline and boring drills. Faculty psychology was also thought to prepare for "transfer of reasoning" to any problem that might be encountered in the future. The ability to reason depended upon memory, which was achieved through "strong impression" and appropriate regular habits. Lest there be any doubt about the influence of phrenology or faculty psychology on American education, consider this statement by Horace Mann:I look upon Phrenology as the guide to philosophy and the handmaid of Christianity. Whoever disseminates true Phrenology is a public benefactor.A former Calvinist, Mann's adoption of phrenology seems logical, because the Calvinistic view, prominent in the Presbyterian church and other denominations, was the belief that God pre-destines certain souls to go to Heaven and the rest to Hell. The basis of Mann's blueprint for American education was phrenology. Horace Mann led a fight for the "common school in part to Americanize immigrants because of conflict between Protestants and Catholics, and he and others believed the Catholic Irish and other immigrants would destroy the nation unless they were taught to conform. The desire for the common school was to provide both an education and a form of moral indoctrination for all children, but especially for immigrants. At one point the German-speaking population was so great that it threatened to challenge English in some states. Teaching English was a major concern. Faculty psychology was the tool for conformity. Supporters of the common school (like Horace Mann) believed that public education was a means for both social and economic advancement of children as well as a way to Americanize children of diverse cultural backgrounds. The antipathy between catholics and protestants so predominant in the 1800s is lacking today, which may explain part of the reason for less support of the common school and more acceptance of public funding for religious schools.Formal discipline, faculty psychology, or mental discipline, by whatever name, was not limited to public schools. Gerald Graff said, "The most frequently stated justification for the way the classics were taught [in American colleges] was the theory of mental discipline,' which was rooted in the mechanistic faculty psychology of the nineteenth century. The theory presumed that, like the body, the mind and character are strengthened by strenuous, repetitive exercise on disagreeably difficult tasks."
Craig A. Cunningham explains this in more detail:
By the middle of the 1800s, the emerging science of pedagogy began to offer some justification for this faith in education as a cure for moral diversity. The theory of "mental discipline," supported by an emerging "faculty psychology" suggested that the person was made up of "faculties" such as reason, emotion, self-control, and chivalry, and that these faculties could be trained through rigorous discipline, i.e. through practice. Together with the Christian idea that children were inherently depraved, faculty psychology led to a pedagogy which stressed endless repetition of routine tasks, and a sense of morality in which the child must learn, through practice, to subvert his own impulses to the dictates of the teacher. The idea of teaching "moral reasoning" would have struck those who adhered to these beliefs as oxymoronic, as an anonymous Chicago teacher wrote in 1856: "morality pertains to the feelings, not to the intellect, and all efforts to make men better by merely teaching what is right and what is wrong, must necessarily fail". . . To those who believed in faculty psychology, the mind, the conscience, and the heart were separate entities, each of which needed specific training through practice.Dewey was later to write:A theory which has had great vogue and which came into existence before the notion of growth had much influence is known as the theory of "formal discipline." It has in view a correct ideal; one outcome of education should be the creation of specific powers of accomplishment. A trained person is one who can do the chief things which it is important for him to do better than he could without training: "better" signifying greater ease, efficiency, economy, promptness, etc. That this is an outcome of education was indicated in what was said about habits as the product of educative development. But the theory in question takes, as it were, a short cut; it regards some powers (to be presently named) as the direct and conscious aims of instruction, and not simply as the results of growth. There is a definite number of powers to be trained, as one might enumerate the kinds of strokes which a golfer has to master. Consequently education should get directly at the business of training them. But this implies that they are already there in some untrained form; otherwise their creation would have to be an indirect product of other activities and agencies. Being there already in some crude form, all that remains is to exercise them in constant and graded repetitions, and they will inevitably be refined and perfected. In the phrase "formal discipline" as applied to this conception, "discipline" refers both to the outcome of trained power and to the method of training through repeated exercise.The faculties were concepts that Wundt dismissed as classificatory but not explanatory of the mental processes, and Thorndike later disproved by showing that general habits of the mind are not formed by general mind training; Thorndike demonstrated that habits or skills are best learned in specific situations (transfer of learning). While the theory of faculty psychology was unclear, teaching was concerned with rigor, drill, and discipline, and these traditions, which had pre-dated phrenology, were sustained by the new "science" and remain to this day in the educational theories of some, standing at the core of beliefs that serve as the foundation for classical education, back to basics, instructvism, and even the notion of a liberal arts education.The Rousseauian Revolution
The precursors of faculty psychology were widespread in Europe before migration to American shores.Rousseau stimulated the development of a child-centered approach with condemnation of the poor treatment of children. The Rights of Man, theRights of Children, Emile, and The New Heloise served as the foundation for alternatives to harsh theories and practices of child rearing. Rousseau advocated a child-centered school based on the developmental needs and interests of children. In Emile he openly questioned the assumption that education should be based on what an adult should know:
What is to be thought, therefore, of that cruel education which sacrifices the present to an uncertain future, that burdens a child with all sorts of restrictions and begins by making him miserable, in order to prepare him for some far-off happiness which he may never enjoy?. . . What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness? Love childhood, indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts. . . Why rob these innocents of the joys which pass so quickly, of that precious gift which they cannot abuse? Why fill with bitterness the fleeting days of childhood, days which will no more return for them than for you?The child would learn through experience and have no reading or verbal instruction. Teaching about morality would wait until adolescence. The child would learn from the environment and from mistakes, rather than punishment and direction from a teacher. He advocated sensory training, as recommended later by Montessori, by exposure to nature rather than equipment, unlike Montessori. For Rousseau "man" is good by nature, the child "an angel" rather than an "imp" to be restrained; whose senses are not "instruments of Satan" but "doors to illuminating experiences." Education was to be gained from objects and natural experience, not books and lectures. Classrooms should not be prisons. Learning should "unfold" with solicitation of "inherent curiosities." The "stuffing of the memory with facts, the stifling of the mind with dogmas, were to be replaced by training in the arts of perceiving, calculating, and reasoning" (Durant, 1967).Emile was ordered to be burned by the French parliament and he was to be arrested, but he escaped and lived in different countries for a time under the protection of others. He wrote the Social Contract, which held that all men are born free and equal, and this became a guiding force in the French Revolution and the source of his ultimate revenge upon the French elite.
The Descendants of Faculty Psychology and Rousseau's Philosophy
Through a circuitous route, both teacher-centered and student-centered learning can be traced to the very old influences of faculty psychology and Rousseau.
A contemporary of Rousseau,Pestalozzi, a Swiss, was impressed with Rousseau's educational philosophy and incorporated it into his teaching. The first premise of Pestalozzi's approach is to treat each child individually. He operated a school for boys, where he taught without rote or books, an influence of Rousseau.
In How Gertrude Teaches Her Children (1801), Pestalozzi explained that the purpose of instruction is to develop the whole "man" completely for "manhood" rather than as a scholar. The basis of the curriculum was training the hand, the head and the heart (manliness), which is today a motto of Berry College in Georgia. In Leonard and Gertrude (1781-87), Pestalozzi provided a description of verbal instruction only as a means to support sense training. The foundation of education was learning by "contact" or sensory training rather than by rote. Verbal instruction was to be avoided as a method of instruction, only to be used to support learning.
Many modern theories that base educational experiences on concrete objects stem from the emphasis of Pestalozzi on the concrete, in particular Montessori and a number of programs for the mentally retarded and children with learning disabilities. In another section is a description of the influence of Itard, who worked with a boy named Victor, considered to be a feral child. Almost all of his work with Victor was based on sensory training and this became very popular, especially as it came to be used with retarded children and other disabilities. Pestalozzi was influential because of emphasis on concrete approaches and because he offered advise to mothers about how to prepare their children during the formative years before they entered school. He may be thought of as the first "Dr. Spock" because of this practical indoctrination of mothers.
Froebel emphasized individualization, language, form, number, and directed play. He also rejected books in school. His approach was highly teacher directed but child-centered compared to the prevailing methods of the time. Instruction was limited to the use of a few objects, such as a cube and a cylinder, and games, songs, and a variety of activities were built on the use of these objects. Froebel apparently believed the cube and the cylinder had special implications for learning that could, using Rousseau's theory, "unfold" intelligence through some kind of natural process. Froebel proposed a "stage theory" of development but believed children are corrupted by negative experiences. He believed that it is harmful to children to grow up too quickly, a view shared by Piaget and Piagetian scholars today.
Since World War I, American education has experienced a waxing and waning of teacher-centered and student-centered educational philosophies. In the 1920s, E.L.Thorndike successfully challenged the notion there is general "transfer of learning," a direct assault on faculty psychology/formal discipline. Although research has since shown that there is a basis for general transfer, Thorndike was able to bring a formal end to faculty psychology as a philosophy, although its traditions have never been fully eliminated from education. Direct instruction, strong discipline and character education remained popular in classrooms, despite the abandonment of faculty psychology by academics. Today, after a period of considerable decline, character education is becoming quite popular again. Titus says:
The decline of character education curricular programs may have been precipitated by research conducted between 1924 and 1929 at Teachers College, Columbia University...No relationship was discovered between membership in organizations which taught honesty and honest behavior. The results of this study led many educators to conclude that formal character education programs were ineffective.As a substitute for the family, some educators would return to direct instruction in classrooms to develop "sound ethical behavior." But as Dune notes:Obviously, measuring subtle behavior is more difficult and measuring verbally expressed moral choices/reasoning is still controversial; but unless both can be done, one is left with only "overall" self-reports of students, administrators and teachers. While these reports are a valuable piece of evidence, much more is needed to insure scientific validity and practical applicability. If the field of moral education is to claim any justification for conducting studies or any relationship with a "scientific" approach, it must do far better than in the past.Character education has been important in the past to socialize immigrants for American life. Today it is popular again, pushed by conservative school boards, think tanks, and political organizations. It is interesting, too, that its resurgence coincides with a significant increase in the number of minority children in American schools. The National PTA has defined character education as "a long-term process to help young people develop core ethics such as fairness, honesty, compassion, personal responsibility and respect." Many groups are advocating a values based education, reflecting faculty psychology trends of the past. With minor departures over the last several decades, teacher-centered instruction has remained in effect, and corporal punishment is still employed in some states.Thorndike's destruction of the theory of faculty psychology had a temporary effect of creating a fertile ground for the growth of progressive education led by Dewey. However, education would later turn to another branch of Thorndikean influence, associationism, in the form of the behaviorism of J.B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, which supported teacher-centered instruction if not faculty psychology.
Montessori based her curriculum on three principles: (a) children are all different and must be treated individually; (b) children must wish to learn, and (c) given proper conditions, they prefer educating themselves. Montessori emphasized that knowledge comes from experiences with the world, not through vicarious descriptions of it by the teacher. As a European method, it was slow to be accepted in American education, and because it was concerned with very young children, it did not have a major impact on K-12 classrooms. With children working independently, Montessori education was criticized because, it was said, children should have closer relationships with the teacher and with other children. She also suffered attacks because of her disdain for storytelling and use of myth, nursery rhymes, and fairy tales, activities that teacher-centered professionals enjoy and from which moral lessons are derived. Some of the most significant criticism of Montessori education during her time was focused on the training materials and exercises. The materials are self-correcting, and designed to effect a proper sequence of activities through feedback the child receives while manipulating objects. But children in the Montessori program developed reading and calculating skills much faster than children in traditional programs or no programs at all, which stifled much of the criticism of her methods.
A contemporary of Montessori, Dewey is perhaps the most directly influential figure in modern American education and he is still criticized by conservative groups today, many years after his death. Some have accused him of being a communist and others that he was a malevolent force. For example, in warnings to Christian parents, Dewey's influence is characterized; in humanism unmasked:
Be on guard. Be not deceived when you see those fine sounding phrases of "Changes in education for excellence" or "higher order thinking" or "critical thinking"; because most of those actions covered by those words are used to destroy faith in God.Dewey was criticized in the 1930s and 1940s for being a pragmatist. Dewey was opposed not only to the use of punishment and humiliation, but also to the strictures of faculty psychology. Dewey's pragmatism was a reaction to lecture, reading, and the emphasis on memorization. For Dewey, education depends on action. Knowledge and ideas emerge only from a situation in which learners have to draw them out of experiences that have meaning and importance to them (Dewey, 1916). These situations have to occur in a social context such as a classroom, where students join in manipulating materials and meanings, and thus create a community of learners who build their knowledge together.Dewey was a philosopher, holding positions at the University of Chicago and Columbia University. His influence was felt partly because his theories coincided with the industrialization of America. Many used the factory model as a metaphor for education, such as Bobbitt (1918) who argued for bureaucratic efficiency in school management and curriculum. He referred to teachers as "educational engineers" and students as "raw material" for the school. The curriculum model devised by Ralph Tyler (1949) maintained this industrial view, using "scientific management" principles. The reforms Dewey urged were similar to the recommendations of Rousseau, which, in effect, were asking that children have a childhood and that schools not be seen as factories.
Dewey stressed that the importance of a school that is child centered promotes self-realization, and building toward citizenship and responsibility, a moral community. Dewey's views are best understood within the temper of his times, if not today, because he was reacting to the industrial model of school management and the fact that industrial America was changing society from its pastoral past. Dewey's curriculum was the school environment, a living society of people working together, building on each student's personal experiences. In such a curriculum, it is the environment, the community, created by the interaction between learners and teachers that provides students with a context for learning. The child would not be a raw product in a factory, or a memorizer, but a reasoning human being. Taking Dewey's writings and interpreting them in the current political and social climate of post-industrial and post-modern America makes it possible for critics to judge him harshly, and they do.
Dewey's influence was quickly displaced by another influence of Thorndike (associationism) in the form of the behaviorism of J.B. Watson and B.F. Skinner. Thorndike developed the "law of effect" or the association between a stimulus and a response. Watson and B.F. Skinner advanced this development to a comprehensive theory of behaviorism. Skinner viewed behaviorism as the only science of psychology and believed that he could discover all the laws for understanding and predicting human behavior. Behaviorism became appealing in education as a way to control behavior and also to increase student achievement. Behaviorism attempted to explain all learning and to codify strategies to change behavior through task analysis, shaping, modeling, token economies, contracting, time-out, satiation, punishment, and extinction. Of primary interest to behaviorists are operant behaviors, those that operate on the environment and are changed by subsequent events. In other words, an operant behavior is one that occurs as a result of a specific stimulus, so behavior can be manipulated by using the correct reinforcers. For many reasons, behaviorism extended and reaffirmed the teacher-centered model of instruction.
Process-Product Research
The predominant form of teacher training for the last three decades has been based on "process-product research," which has dovetailed nicely with behaviorism and the teacher-centered classroom. In the typical classroom the predominant teaching model is direct instruction, meaning that the teacher's central role in the classroom is that of transmitting knowledge to learners (Rosenshine & Stevens, 1986). Effective teachers are said to make presentations that hold attention, move quickly, and are punctuated with relevant questioning and exchanges. They review, introduce new content, link the content, and provide an organizational framework to help students associate new information.
It is from this tradition, bolstered by behaviorism, that the terms "instructivism" and "instructionism" have originated. Tasks of the teacher in direct instruction (process-product) have been documented in the research literature under four classifications: classroom management practices, time management practices, lesson presentation, and management of student work.
The emphasis during classroom activities is placed on lesson presentation. Rosenshine suggested an instructional sequence that proceeds in small steps, involves detailed, redundant oral instruction, punctuated with numerous examples and non-examples, and many questions. Stress is placed on the teacher's oral instructions in managing the class and presenting the lesson. The process-product literature implies that effective teachers actively teach classroom rules, follow through on their expectations, monitor compliance, and provide appropriate consequences for behavior. The heart of instruction is lesson presentation.
Rosenshineclaims that teacher-directed learning is not politically correct or romantically correct. He calls for general instructional procedures, such as the use of frequent review, teaching in small steps, and checking for student understanding. This model was not powerful enough to answer instructional questions such as how does one teach reading comprehension or how does one teach writing. For teaching "higher" tasks, he recommends a procedure called "scaffolding" in which one supports or scaffolds learners as they develop internal structures. Providing concrete prompts, modeling their use, thinking aloud, and guiding practice are all examples of scaffolding. Rosenshine maintains that teacher-directed learning is research based and that methods popular today are nothing more than recycled methods fromWilliam Heard Kilpatrick's project method of 1918, discovery learning of the 1950's and of the open classrooms of the 1970's.
Researchers try to show the precise impact (affects) that types of teacher behaviors (questions, mastery learning, cooperative learning, homework, seatwork) have on achievement scores. The result is that teacher training programs attempt to teach those skills consistently associated or correlated with certain kinds of classroom performance. The results of this research, which seems to be a no nonsense approach to teaching, is easily adopted by politicians and critics. As Shulman noted, although this tradition is very popular with policy makers, it is losing "intellectual vigor within the research community" because the aggregation of results divorced them from the naturally occurring classroom events that generated them.
Skinnerian behaviorism was prominent in teacher preparation programs and in some kinds of instructional materials in the 1960s. Rejection of behaviorism may be more symbolic than real, for it is impossible to say that behaviorism made significant inroads in classrooms beyond the use of behavioral objectives and as a method in some special education classrooms. Constructivism today is not universally accepted in classrooms, and a visit to most classrooms will find that instruction unfolds along the lines described and recommended by Rosenshine. As a social and political issue, however, constructivism has been used to condemn education for rejection of direct instruction. As polemics among professors, debates about instructivism, behaviorism, and constructivism would escape the attention of the public. As propaganda for public consumption, complaints about the condition of education are symbolically very powerful.
Constructivism and Instructivism
Today the child-centered and teacher-centered approaches may be referred to as constructivism and instructivism, respectively. Constructivism may be related to Dewey and "progressivism" of the past, and linked to the Rousseau tradition. Instructivism can be linked to faculty psychology and to the research-based programs of the last few decades known as process-product research and to behaviorism.
- Constructivists seek change and have defined themselves and their beliefs. They generally reject " mastery learning," "direct instruction," "behavior modification," and "explicit teaching." A constructivist philosophy is recognizable as part of the child-centered tradition dating back to Rousseau. Constructivists claim that teacher-directed instruction is ineffective because it ignores the learner's cognitive processes and emphasizes memorization.
Unlike the past, however, there is a much less civil tone in the writings of advocates and proponents on either side, especially as education has become politicized over the last decade. Perhaps the entire culture is more coarse, which may be evidenced by the tendency of traditional news media to employ tabloid standards in their reporting. Rather than academic disputations, often the descriptions used to characterize education on one side or the other are couched in propaganda techniques, such as referring to child-centered philosophy as "romantic developmentalism" or teacher-directed instruction as a "drill and kill." Narratives found on the Internet are much less sanguine, even degenerating into name calling, constructivists called "Satanists" and instructivists called "Nazis," for example. The most egregious example deals with the topic of Whole Language. Some have called it a conspiracy to intentionally undermine education, and one writer on the Internet called for capital punishment for teachers who use this method! At the core, the disagreement concerns who should make decisions about learning, the curriculum, materials, and what teachers should do.
- Instructivists seek a teacher-centered approach, and the roots are in faculty psychology, wanting hard work, standard, rigor, and testing, and these also coincide with the American Puritan ethic about hard work. Instructivists are just as disturbed about "whole language instruction," "inquiry learning," "developmentally appropriate," "self-esteem," and "accommodation of student diversity." Instructivists claim that child-centered philosophies are fanciful, unproved, and faddish.
Hirsch (1996) finds American education to be the worst in the world and blames poor performance of schools for not transmitting "core knowledge" to students. More or less in keeping with the book by Bloom a few years ago on the "closing" of the American mind, constructivism is seen as a "feel-good" theory. Hirsch's book has become a manual for parent groups organizing against constructivism and Whole Language in the schools. He criticizes child-centered education as an ideology that was propagated by Dewey and Romanticism, and is particularly critical of programs that want to improve self-esteem. The essence of a good education is a core set of standards, rigor, hard work, and testing, something originally practiced in Rousseau's time and at the heart of faculty psychology. Educators, he believes, have forsaken rigorous, subject-based instruction for unproved practices, such as critical thinking, project-oriented, hands-on, developmentally appropriate, and multiple intelligences. These sentiments are shared by many political writers on the subject of education. The debate about learning by construction versus instruction has an empirical base, but appealing to prejudice is more efficient.
Direct instruction, especially the DISTAR method, has been criticized soundly and some professional organizations want to ban its consideration among professionals. When the Chicago Public Schools considered requiring DISTAR, parents and teachers joined to get the policy changed to voluntary use. DISTAR was called rote learning, a special program for the "poor," against solid practice, authoritarian, requiring a dependency upon adults, and highly controlled.
On each side, theorists hold fundamentally different ideas about how the human brain operates. Their debate centers on the answer to this question: How do we best learn knowledge and skills? A constructivist might use a theme or topic, especially one that interests the students, assess what children already know about the theme, link new information with their prior knowledge, connect related content, and introduce the content through products created by the students, including projects, plays, experiments, writing and other activities.
By contrast, direct instruction is based on the theory that effectiveness of a teaching strategy can be measured by test scores. Poor performance is explained as unclear or disorganized instruction. The first step is to identify the specific skills the student will learn, present the information to be learned, test for knowledge, then re-teach until the student is successful. Learning is the result of high expectations, training, practice, and persistence.
Instructivists and constructivists are critical of American education, but for different reasons. Instructivists believe schools are failing and need to work harder and be held accountable. The instructivists believe that school has abandoned effective, scientific teaching methods for experimental programs. Instructivists see education as a way to transmit cultural heritage, and regard education as a storehouse of tradition. As politicization has occurred, the tendency is for each side to see the other point of view more as an ideology than an empirical question or difference of opinion.
Stone (1996) sees it as unfortunate that Dewey and Piaget remain highly influential with mainstream educators because of the "restrictions on teachers" and the lessening of parental insistence on study and effort in school. Stone would have direct instruction because he believes constructivism encourages tolerance and acceptance of immaturity, irresponsibility, and failure. Further, the child who fails to exhibit expected social and academic progress is excused as a victim, what he refers to as a cultural archetype.
The constructivists believe schools are failing but need to work differently and prepare children with new kinds of skills. Constructivists want schools to use student-centered approaches they believe will result in greater achievement and student satisfaction and a moral community. Constructivists tend to see education as a way to improve the individual and society, to advance the human condition, to make progress. Successful learners are responsible for their own learning. Rather than depending upon the teacher for validation, students are self-regulated and interested in evaluating their own achievement.
The desire for the common school was to provide both and education and a form of moral indoctrination for all children, but especially for immigrants. At one point the German-speaking population was so great that it threatened to challenge English in some states. Teaching English was a major concern. Horace Mann led a fight for the "common school to Americanize immigrants because of conflict between Protestants and Catholics, and he and others believed the Catholic Irish and other immigrants would destroy the nation unless they were taught to conform. Public schools began as instruments of religion and gradually became instruments of the state. Today the diversity of the public--by culture, ethnicity, religion--in an increasingly politicized school environment assures that any curriculum or philosophy will generate criticism on one side or the other. Differences between instructivists and constructivists are less significant as educational theories than for what they have become in the political landscape.
While some provide data to show that school failure is a myth and a media hype, and the instructivists and constructivists debate how to improve education, one wonders how much most schools have really departed from the pattern of teacher-led lesson, drill, and worksheets.
Review of Behaviorism
For a brief review of the main concepts and historical development of behaviorism, see this page based on the work of R.W. Kentridge.
Beginning with the work of Pavlov, the fundamental concept in behaviorism is the belief that behavior results from stimulus-response interaction. Knowing this it is possible to change behavior. All behavior is regarded as the result of simple or complex form of stimulus-reponse interactions. Controlling stimuli can lead to control of responses. There are two kinds of responses:
There are two forms of conditioning based on the stimulus and response conditions:
- elicited response - occurring in the presence of a stimulus
- emitted response - a response emitted that can be paired with a stimulus. Skinner named this type of response "operant," meaning the subject operates on its environment.
E.L. Thorndike, the "father" of educational psychology, challenged the theory that the brain is a muscle and, through a series of investigations, was able to demonstrate that mental discipline training did not actually exercise various mental faculties. He developed the theory of associationism and students who completed courses in Latin or Geometry were no better at solving logical problems than students who had not taken these courses. The emphasis was shifted to transfer of learning, the theory that the knowledge bases must be specifically applied to problems, and that those who are well-grounded in a knowledge base will more easily solve novel problems. In the process, Thorndike developed the "law of effect" or the association between a stimulus and a response. He put cats and dogs in boxes and, through various methods, studied their learning curves for escaping confinement. He generalized his findings to humans. He laid the basis for associationism.
- respondent or classical conditioning - Learning involves a former, learned response to be evoked by a new stimulus. The classical work of Pavlov was to pair the sound of a bell with meat powder to evoke salivation in dogs. After several pairings the bell, alone, is sufficient to cause salivation in the absence of meat powder. operant or instrumental conditioning - the main interest of Skinner who used reinforcement to reward a specific kind of behavior.
J.B. Watson believed that virtually all intelligence, personality, and behavior could be formed by reinforcement techniques. His most famous statement, repeated in most psychology texts, describes his belief that he could mold healthy infants to become anything by using conditioning. Watson advanced associationism, later to be regarded as behaviorism. Watson was caught in a tryst with a secretary and was dismissed from his university position. However, he resurfaced as a success in advertising. Watson called for an objective science psychology, meaning to use principles of animal psychology with humans. He argued strongly against the use of the "mind" in describing mental behavior, because it could not be observed. Rather, he suggested that only observable behavior could be examined because it could be verified. The theory was appealing, particularly in America, for several reasons, perhaps the most important being the belief that social control could be achieved easily by means of simple procedures. It is noteworthy that behaviorism was also highly appealing in Russia and later in the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, the appeal of behaviorism in education has been for this reason.
The most famous behaviorist was B.F. Skinner, who was just as resolute about behaviorism as Watson. Skinner viewed behaviorism as the only science of psychology and believed that he could discover all the laws for understanding and predicting human behavior. Skinner and other behaviorists viewed the brain as a "black box" that is beyond study because it is unobservable, so they rejected cognitive theories outright.
Behaviorism became appealing in education, if not widely accepted or accurately practiced, as a way to control behavior and also to increase student achievement. Behaviorism attempted to explain all learning and to codify strategies to change behavior through task analysis, shaping, modeling, token economies, contracting, time-out, satiation, punishment, and extinction. Of primary interest to behaviorists are operant behaviors, those that operate on the environment and are changed by subsequent events. In other words, an operant behavior is one that occurs as a result of a specific stimulus, so behavior can be manipulated by using the correct reinforcers.
Concepts and Terms
- Primary and Secondary Reinforcers - The basic principle in behaviorism is that behavior can be reinforcedby either a primary reinforcement, such as food, or a secondary reinforcer that acquires properties associated with primary or social reinforcement, such as tokens, money (which are tokens), praise, power, esteem, and so forth. Central to the theory of operant conditions are the types of reinforcement conditions.
- A positive reinforcement follows a stimulus and must be something the organism wants (laying bricks may not be desirable, although it could be to some people).
- A negative reinforcement is removal of a stimulus, following a R, that the person does not like, such as mowing the lawn.
- A negative punishment and positive punishment involve either making someone do something they do not like or taking away something they do like.
- Stimulus Generalization - Given similar stimulus situations (S), a person responds in similar ways (R), expecting a reinforcement.
- Stimulus Discrimination - Given similar stimulus situations (S), a person discriminates and responds only to the one that yields a reward.
- Premack Principle - Also known as "Grandma's Law," you get something you want after you do something else, such as getting ice cream if you eat your Brussels sprouts.
- Shaping Behavior- One of the goals of behaviorists is to use the principles of learning to shape behavior. Also called successive approximation, shaping is done by reinforcing behaviors that approximate the desired behavior and ignoring behaviors that are not desirable, although punishment is sometimes used. As the behavior gradually approximates what is desired, the consequences of reward are more strict. That is you have to get closer to the desired behavior before a reward is forthcoming.
The strength and schedule of reinforcers are important. These may be considered as follows:Strengthor intensity are important. People are likely to work for large rewards but not small ones, such as $5 versus $100 or $1000. (An interesting twist on this is the theory of cognitive dissonance; people paid to do really boring useless tasks will often justify the task as important or a contribution).
Immediacy - Depending upon many factors, in general the time between a response and a reinforcement is important. It is especially important to provide rewards soon after a desired response. For some students, semester grades or a diploma are deferred rewards. Most organisms respond to immediate, small reinforcement better than to delayed reinforcement.
Schedules of Reinforcement
As indicated above, schedules of reinforcement affect behavior differently. There are general kinds of reinforcement schedules: ratio and interval.Whilecontinuous, immediate reinforcement gets high levels of responses, the behavior can be more easily extinguished. People or rats may work for food only as long as they are hungry. Intermittent reinforcement tends to create a strong association, as in the case of a slot machine.Variable and fixed reinforcement results in different response patterns because of the predictability or unpredictably of delivery of the reinforcement. (Pigeons seem to be able to tell time on a fixed schedule, if rewarded every two minutes for pecking; they wait until time for the reward to appear and begin to peck.)Punishment
One of the popular uses of behaviorism in school programs was to replace punishment with operant conditioning. There are scientific reasons to support this. Punishment will typically eliminate or suppress the undesired behavior in the presence of the authority figure but the behavior does not necessarily disappear. The undesired behavior may occur again after the punishment is over in a different context. Resentment on part of the punished may cause other undesirable behaviors, such as passive aggressive behavior. Also, the subject usually associates the punishment with the punisher, which can cause an intense dislike of the person who administers the punishment, or fear and not respect. Teachers have been impatient with behaviorism and tend to resort quickly to punishment.Conclusion
As a psychological theory and method of teaching, behaviorism is diminished in status today because of a shift to cognitive psychology. It may grow stronger in the future because there is a tendency for many trends to wax and wane. As a teaching method behaviorism is still popular with some special educators, especially for children with the most severe disabilities. Behaviorism was influential in schools for its emphasis on behavioral objectives and teaching methodologies that employed rewards. Many teachers and parents never accepted reinforcement because they considered rewards to be bribes. Although behaviorism has dropped off in popularity in recent years due to the emergence of cognitive theories, many of the formalities associated with it are still in effect, such as the use of behavioral objectives and task analysis in classroom instruction and instructional technology. As will be indicated in another section, there is a sense of confusion in IT about what to do in the face of the competing forces of behaviorism and constructivism.
At the beginning of a new century, control of children in school is as important as it was in the past. Where faculty psychology was once the method for control and changing behavior, process-product research and behaviorism were the most recent successors to this tradition. The attempts of constructivism to shape different philosophies in education are not likely to succeed, and with rising concern about safe schools, violence in schools, and achievement test scores, the recent trends toward "accountability" and character education may lead us back to a well-worn path in education as variations on teacher-directed classrooms.
Other Related Terminology Associative learning: Learning about the association or relationship between two events that occur simultaneously.
Behavior modification: Sometimes used interchangeably with operant conditions, the application of behavioral principles in education and psychology to change behaviors or improve achievement.
Classical conditioning: (Pavlovian) The increase in the response to a conditioned stimulus (CS) due to association with an unconditioned stimulus (US).
Conditioned response: The increase in the response to a conditioned stimulus by association of a conditioned stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus.
Conditioned stimulus: A stimulus that is associated with an unconditioned stimulus to elicit a response.
Extinction: To extinguish a conditioned response by withholding reinforcement.
Instrumental conditioning: Another term for operant conditioning.
Law of Effect: From Thorndike--the increase in a response by strengthening of a reward and the response
(association).Negative reinforcement: Removal of an aversive stimulus.
Operant: An operant is a response of a subject (a behavior).
Premack principle: A reward is contingent upon some behavior.
Primary Reinforcer: A primary reinforcer is a related to biological need, such as food or water.
Punishment: An aversive stimulus used to decrease or prevent a behavior.
Secondary reinforcer: A reinforcer that becomes useful because it represents a primary reinforcer (e.g., money). A token economy is an example, where tokens may be earned for performance and exchanges for primary reinforcers.
Unconditioned response (UCR): A response elicited by an unconditioned stimulus.
Unconditioned stimulus (UCS): Elicits a response without learning, such as food.
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