Behaviorism theory
From The Learning Engineer's Knowledgebase
Behaviorism theory is a learning theory that states that learning occurs as a result of a change in observable behaviors, and that behaviors change as a result of stimulus and reinforcement.
Definition
Behaviorism is a learning theory that predicts that learning occurs as a result of continued practice in tasks with readily available reinforcement and feedback that is provided after every action (or behavior). Positive or negative feedback is provided to the learner based on their performance, which in turn teaches the learner to choose different approaches if they did not perform correctly, or proceed to the next task if they performed correctly.
Additional Information
Behaviorism theory suggests that the focus of people’s learning should be only on the behavior of people. If you can change people’s actions and abilities to perform a task, you are successfully teaching.
This theory holds that people learn primarily by stimulus and reinforcement. This method, known as operant conditioning, says that learners change their behaviors only by being exposed to positive and negative reinforcement through continual practice. Thus, if a person keeps practicing work and performing tasks within a learning environment, you give positive reinforcement, incentives, or praises when they do something correctly, and you give negative reinforcement when they do not.
Over time, the person will develop habits to do desired tasks properly. There are undoubtedly many things going on in someone’s brain, such as thinking about the activity or other psychological factors. However, to those who subscribe only to the behavioral theory, other psychological aspects do not matter. What matters is that the learning exercise provides regular opportunity to practice a task, give reinforcement to train the brain into doing things correctly, and providing gradually more difficult examples to practice with.
Behaviorism also holds that observable behavior is necessary for learning. Without observable behavior, it is impossible to provide feedback and the necessary stimulus or reinforcement to improve performance. This is compared to unobservable or covert behavior, like a person's thoughts, where it is impossible to see or identify whether they performed the task properly. In behaviorism, all behaviors can be represented as observable behaviors - even thinking and knowledge. Such unobservable behaviors are converted into tasks that are well defined, such as when questions about knowledge or someone's thinking process have only a single correct answer.
Although few psychologists and educational designers today subscribe solely to the behaviorist theory of learning, there are many influences that are still present in educational design. This is not to say that the behaviorist theories are completely wrong, but instead to illustrate that the methods of operant conditioning and reinforcement through practice have been shown to be effective in some areas of achieving learning objectives, particularly those that require learners to perform discrete tasks with clear, correct answers.
Tips and Tricks
- Even though behaviorism is not the most popular theory behind learning and psychology, it is one of the oldest. Much work has been done in the field based on behaviorism theory and it still can inform many aspects of how people practice and come to improve their performance on specific tasks or behaviors.
- One benefit of behaviorism is that designers can consider how the tasks that learners are performing in the learning environment might be supported with regular practice and feedback on the performance. Feedback and operant conditioning are still frequently used approaches for teaching and instruction in educational products because they still tend to work well for specific tasks in which feedback can be provided immediately and have concrete, specific correct answers. Behaviorism tends to work less well at predicting learning when the learning objectives are more open-ended or there are multiple correct ways of doing something.
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