A Crucial Element of Democracy

This is a blog by Robert Gutierrez ...
While often taken for granted, civics education plays a crucial role in a democracy like ours. This Blog is dedicated to enticing its readers into taking an active role in the formulation of the civics curriculum found in their local schools. In order to do this, the Blog is offering a newer way to look at civics education, a newer construct - liberated federalism or federation theory. Daniel Elazar defines federalism as "the mode of political organization that unites separate polities within an overarching political system by distributing power among general and constituent governments in a manner designed to protect the existence and authority of both." It depends on its citizens acting in certain ways which Elazar calls federalism's processes. Federation theory, as applied to civics curriculum, has a set of aims. They are:
*Teach a view of government as a supra federated institution of society in which collective interests of the commonwealth are protected and advanced.
*Teach the philosophical basis of government's role as guardian of the grand partnership of citizens at both levels of individuals and associations of political and social intercourse.
*Convey the need of government to engender levels of support promoting a general sense of obligation and duty toward agreed upon goals and processes aimed at advancing the common betterment.
*Establish and justify a political morality which includes a process to assess whether that morality meets the needs of changing times while holding true to federalist values.
*Emphasize the integrity of the individual both in terms of liberty and equity in which each citizen is a member of a compacted arrangement and whose role is legally, politically, and socially congruent with the spirit of the Bill of Rights.
*Find a balance between a respect for national expertise and an encouragement of local, unsophisticated participation in policy decision-making and implementation.
Your input, as to the content of this Blog, is encouraged through this Blog directly or the Blog's email address: gravitascivics@gmail.com .
NOTE: This blog has led to the publication of a book. The title of that book is TOWARD A FEDERATED NATION: IMPLEMENTING NATIONAL CIVICS STANDARDS and it is available through Amazon in both ebook and paperback versions.

Friday, August 26, 2016

THE S-R CONNECTION

A thing of horror, or perhaps science fiction, was an early image of behaviorism; well, not held by everyone, but among many in the general population.  This disturbing perception of this psychology was promulgated by a vision of what its practitioners could do, at least by reputation.  By manipulating a person’s immediate environment, an evil psychologist could get that person to do whatever the psychologist wanted.  This view was even satirized in an early 1970s movie, Clockwork Orange.  In that film, the behavior modification technique attributed to behaviorism was performed on a criminal who had engaged in and was treated for sadistic offenses.  Of course, the effort goes awry – after all, humans aren’t machines.  Those were the days of the Communist threat; a threat from an enemy that was adept at mind control and other mind altering procedures.  At least that was the image our propaganda foisted upon us.  If you are too young to know about this or, perhaps, to appreciate the eeriness of it, let me fill in some of the blanks[1] – I emphasize “some” since the amount of information one can gather concerning behaviorism can fill many a cavernous hole.

To begin, the simplest illustrative image of behaviorism at work is the classic Pavlovian experiments.  Ivan Pavlov, a Russian (of course) psychologist, is best known for inducing dogs to salivate.  He could make a dog drip with saliva just by ringing a bell.  No, he couldn’t do it upon meeting a particular dog; the dog would have to be “taught” to do this trick.  Pavlov, over time, would simply ring a bell as he presented food to a dog.  The sight of the food would cause the dog to salivate, a natural reaction to seeing the food – I do it every evening at about six o’clock.  Eventually, the dog would experience the sound of the bell without the food and, sure enough, the animal would salivate on cue.  The trick is that by repeatedly presenting the two, the food and the ringing of the bell, the connection between them is reinforced and the dog associates the sound of the bell with the food. 

From those modest beginnings sprang an entire school of psychology and eventually ideas of being able to get animals and humans to do whatever one wanted followed.  Again, this dehumanizing view was basically accomplished by teaching people to associate a stimulus (bell) with a desired response (a moistened mouth or whatever the desired behavior might be).  What the ensuing years wrought is the understanding that humans and even animals are more complicated than this simple experiment indicated, but that did not completely debunk behaviorism.  Instead, the challenge was to work through the complications with further experiments and theorizing; such work would get at exactly the way associations and connections are made so that a person can successfully learn a skill.  How?  By experimentally working with different animals, different stimuli, different reinforcement protocols, and different sought-after responses.

Needless to say, the obvious connection to education was quickly appreciated and established.  In the psychology field, a list of pioneering work was to follow and much of it would be applied to educational challenges.  Among those who labored to advance our understanding of how stimuli (S) and responses (R) were connected, the names of Edward Thorndike (founder of behavioral psychology), James Watson, and B. F. Skinner are prominent.  In this short space, I will not attempt to review all of this work.  Instead, I will describe the major challenges with which this run of research has tangled.  I will also highlight the work of two behaviorists who have had major influences on education:  Skinner and Robert Gagne.

One of these challenges is to deal with how specific or general associations or connections are between stimuli and responses.  That is:  does the power of a stimulus only extend to specific responses or does the human’s (and perhaps to a more limited degree, the animal’s) mind make connections to categories of things?  Can connections be made – “taught” – across conceptual linkages?  Are human capacities to learn stagnant or do they change over time?  Following the lead of Thorndike, behaviorists ask whether a subject is only able to learn an association when the preparatory conditions are met or can it be made more fluidly under various conditions? These are the types of questions behaviorists and those who applied behaviorist principles wanted – and still want – answered.

Two developments affected the advance of behaviorism during the twentieth century.  One was the development of two sorts of conditioning:  classical conditioning and operant conditioning.  The classical variety occurs when responses can be traced to identifiable stimuli; operant occurs when they cannot be traced to identifiable stimuli.  This discovery is attributed to Skinner.  Working with mice and pigeons, Skinner studied the responses and identified two types or categories:  elicited and emitted. 

Elicited are responses that are observed from identifiable stimuli.  Emitted are those observed from unidentifiable stimuli.  Elicited responses are called respondents; emitted responses are called operant.  Skinner’s work led to insights revealing that the effects of stimuli are, by their nature, less definite.  He also discovered it helpful to rank reinforcers as being primary, secondary, or general.  Primary reinforcers refer to “teaching” techniques that assist in the satisfaction of basic drives (food, water, sex); secondary reinforcers are those that depend on human or animal wants not directly associated with basic drives (social approval, money, awards); and general reinforcers are those that are secondary but are chosen from a variety of options.  Teachers have such varieties of reinforcers as they attempt to teach – reinforce – a given skill. 

The other attribute of all of this research is focused not on what a subject is thinking or concerned with changing what a subject is thinking – these concerns were believed to be beyond observation and measurement and therefore unscientific.  What was sought after and what was measurable was behavior; hence the name of this psychology.

The other behaviorist I want to highlight is Robert Gagne.  As an aside, I once shared an elevator with this distinguished educational psychologist.  It occurred at Florida State University where Gagne spent a significant number of years during his professional career.  I was a graduate student.  I think our conversation consisted of the in-depth inquiry which was communicated by one of us saying:  “floor?”  Who asked the question, I don’t remember, nor do I remember the answer.  But beyond that interlude, Gagne was highly productive. 

He developed a significant model that was useful and highly used around the world in the work of instructional development.  The model identifies a hierarchical taxonomy of learning in which each stage of the model identifies what has to be learned or mastered before the higher stage can be addressed and successfully accomplished.  The model has eight stages.  The first five stages can be described as pure behavioral associations; the next two are a combination of behavioral and cognitive (internal brain/mental operations), and the last one is only cognitive. 

The eight are:
1.      Signal learning – learning a simple response to an identifiable stimulus; an example would be fear of a rat (classical conditioning)
2.     Stimulus response (S-R) – learning a response to a given stimulus; an example would be a response to a command by someone in authority (operant conditioning because one cannot be sure what exactly is the stimulus)
3.     Motor chain – the linking of two or more S-R connections; an example would be doing housework
4.     Verbal association – the linking of two or more concepts or notions; an example would be identifying valid synonyms and antonyms of a word
5.     Multiple discriminations – demonstrating different responses to different cases of a given set; an example would be distinguishing different types of vehicles (taxis, passenger cars, school buses)
6.     Concepts – demonstrating the ability to form abstract responses to a stimulus; an example would be correctly using categories such as vehicles, sports, academic subjects
7.     Rules – demonstrating the ability to chain two or more stimuli or ideas; an example would be discovering it’s safer to look left than right (in the US) before crossing a street
8.     Problem solving – demonstrating the ability to combine rules and/or principles in order to solve problems; an example would be figuring out the optimal arrangement of floor space in developing an architectural plan

These eight stages are clearly described and explained in Gagne’s classic text, The Conditions of Learning.[2]  The use of this model has had an enormous effect on the field of programming instruction.  With its use, designers are led to think of detailed sequences of instructional activities that are known for their minute character – nothing, it seems, is taken for granted.  They are heavy users of such tools as flow charts that take on intricate forms.

In everyday classrooms, I would judge the average teacher is a behaviorist, perhaps without even knowing it.  Stated another way, the average teacher manipulates the time-honored practice of issuing rewards (smiles, pleasant decisions, good grades, humor) to elicit desired behaviors from his/her students or punishments (frowns, unpleasant decisions, poor grades, scorn) to discourage unwanted behaviors.  These techniques were used way before Pavlov acquired his first dog.  They might be exposed to more sophisticated models of disciplinary strategies – I’ve been exposed in my teaching career to varying behaviorally inspired, in-service training.  What I would point out is that the behavioral view of learning, while still very much in place among the learning and instructional approaches utilized in professional training programs, has been modified by the influence of more cognitive approaches. 

Clockwork Orange, I suspect, would seem foreign to most audiences today.  One field outside of teaching that seems to have melded the behavioral and cognitive perspectives is behavioral economics.  For those so interested, the Great Courses has a course on behavioral economics.  While that course is geared toward business leaders, many of its insights can be translated to address many of the challenges teachers and school administrators face.  As for cognitive psychology, that will be my next topic.




[1] Again, I will base most of the factual accounts of this psychology on the work of Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins.  See Ornstein, A. C. and Hunkins, F. P.  (2004).  Curriculum:  Foundations, principles, and issues.  Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon.

[2] Gagne, R. M. (1987).  The conditions of learning.  New York, NY:  Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

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