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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