Week 4 Behaviourism

ADE605 Theory & Approaches in Art Education

Learning Theory
BEHAVIOURISM
Syamsul Nor Azlan Mohamad

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Students will be able to:
1. define learning
2. understand the behavioral theories of
learning by
Pavlov, Watson, Thorndike and
Skinner
3. apply the theories in classroom setting

DEFINITIONS OF LEARNING
a. Kimble (1961): Learning is……

“….. a relatively permanent change in behavioral
potentiality that occurs as a result of reinforced
practice”.

Key concepts:
1. Learning is indexed by a change in behavior
2. The behavioral change is relatively permanent
3. The change in behavior need not occur
immediately following the learning experience.
4. The change in behavior (or behavior
potentiality) results from experience or practice.
5. The experience, or practice, must be reinforced


b. Woolfolk (2004): Learning….
“……occurs when experience causes relatively
permanent change in an individual’s knowledge
or behavior.”

Key concepts:
1. The change may be deliberate (intentional) or
unintentional, for better or worse, correct or
incorrect, and conscious or unconscious.

2. To qualify as learning, this change must be
brought about by experience – by the
interaction of a person with his or her
environment.

b. Woolfolk (cont)

Key concepts:

3. Changes simply caused by maturation – such as growing
taller do not qualify as learning.

4. Temporary changes resulting from illness, fatigue, or
hunger are also excluded from a general definition of
learning.

5. This definition specifies that the changes resulting from
learning are in the individual’s knowledge and behavior.


Fontana (1995):Learning is ...
a relatively persistent change in an individual’s potential
behaviour due to experience

Key concepts:
1) learning must change the individual in some way
- can be at a relatively simple level eg: tying a
shoelace or a more complex one eg: applying theories
of learning in teaching.
2) this change comes about as a result of experience
- change must come about as a result of
experience. This therefore excludes the kinds of
changes that occur from maturation and physical
development, or other reasons.


Fontana (cont)

Key concepts:

3) it is a change in his/ her potential behaviour
- it is a change in potential rather than necessary in
actual performance. We may learn something, but
give no hint of this learning in actual performance.

THEORIES OF LEARNING – BEHAVIORISM

 One of the earliest explanations of learning
came from Aristotle (384-322 B.C.).
 He said that we remember things together:
- When they are similar
- When they contrast
- When they are contiguous

This last principle is the most important, because it is
included in all explanations of learning by
associations.

BEHAVIORISM – CLASSICAL
CONDITIONING

Overview :

 Focuses on the learning of involuntary emotional
or physiological responses such as fear,
increased muscle tension, salivation, or
sweating.
 These sometimes are called respondents
because they are automatic responses to stimuli.
 Through the process of classical conditioning,
humans and animals can be trained to react
involuntarily to a stimulus that previously had no
effect – or a very different effect – on them.

BEHAVIORISM – CLASSICAL
CONDITIONING

Overview (cont):

 The stimulus comes to elicit, or bring forth, the
response automatically.

 In understanding the process of classical
conditioning, the works of Pavlov and Watson
are the two most influential theories of learning
to be considered.

1. CLASSICAL CONDITIONING: PAVLOV

• Classical conditioning was discovered
(accidentally) by Pavlov in the 1920’s.

• In his laboratory, Pavlov carried out experiments
on the digestive system of dogs.

• He was trying to determine how long it took a
dog to secrete digestive juices after it had been
fed, but the intervals of time kept changing.

• At first, the dogs salivated in the expected
manner while they were being fed.

• Then the dogs began to salivate as soon as they
saw the food.

• Finally, they salivated as soon as they saw the
scientists enter the room.

• The white coats of the scientists and the sounds
of their footsteps all elicited salivation.

• Pavlov decided to make a detour from his
original experiments and examine these
unexpected interferences in his work.

• In one of his experiments, Pavlov began by
sounding a bell and recording a dog’s response.

• As expected, there was no salivation.

• At this point, the sound of the bell was a neutral
stimulus (NS) because it brought forth no
salivation.

• Then Pavlov fed the dogs. The response was
salivation.

• The food was an unconditional stimulus (UCS)
because no prior training or conditioning was
needed to establish the natural connection
between food and salivation.

• The salivation was an unconditional response
(UCR), again because it occurred automatically –
no conditioning required.

• Using these three elements – the food, the
salivation, and the sounds of the bell, Pavlov
demonstrated that a dog could be conditioned to
salivate after hearing the sound of bell.

• He did this by contiguous pairing of the sound
with food.

• At the beginning of the experiment, he sounded
the bell and then quickly fed the dog.

• After Pavlov repeated this several times, the dog
began to salivate after hearing the sound but
before receiving food.

• Now the sound had become a conditioned
stimulus (CS) that could bring forth salivation by
itself.

• The response of salivating after the tone was
now a conditioned response (CR).

CLASSICAL CONDITIONING: PAVLOV

Before


Unconditional

Unconditional
Stimulus Response

Result in


During Conditioning:

 === ===  
Unconditional C onditional Unconditional
Stimulus Stimulus Respon

Result in

====== paired with


After Conditioning:

 
C onditional Conditional
Stimulus Response

Result in

d. Other Processes in Classical Conditioning

i. Generalization

• Responding in the same way to similar stimuli

• E.g. After the dogs learned to salivate in
response to hearing one particular sound, they
would also salivate after hearing similar tomes
that were slightly higher or lower.


ii. Discrimination

• Responding differently to similar, but not
identical stimuli.

• E.g. Pavlov could also teach the dogs to
respond to one tone, by making sure that food
always followed only one tone, not any others.


iii. Extinction
• Gradual disappearance of a learned response

• Occurs when a conditioned stimulus (a
particular tone) is presented repeatedly but is not
followed by the unconditioned stimulus (the
food).

• The conditioned response (salivating)
gradually fades away and finally is
“extinguished” – it disappears altogether.

2. CLASSICAL CONDITIONING: WATSON

b. Basic Concepts

• To Watson, personality was a collection of
conditioned reflexes.

• Human emotion was a product of both heredity
and experiences.

• According to Watson, we inherit three
emotions – fear, rage and love.

Basic concept (cont)
• Through the conditioning process, these basic
emotions become attached to different things for
different people.
> Speech is behavior that results from the
movement of the muscles in the throat.
> Thinking is implicit speech
• Watson was also a radical environmental determinists
– he believed that as humans, at birth, we are equipped
with a few reflexes and a few basic emotions.
• Through classical conditioning, these reflexes become
paired with a variety of stimuli.
• He opposed to the idea that we are born with any
mental abilities.


• Watson’s famous statement (1926):

“ Give me a dozen healthy infants, well formed,
and my own specified world to bring them up in
and I’ll guarantee to take one at random and train
him to become any type of specialist I might select
– doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant, chief, and yes,
even beggarman and thief, regardless of his
talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities,
vocations, and race of his ancestors”.

c. Watson’s Experiment With Little Albert
• To demonstrate how inborn emotional reflexes
become conditioned to neural stimuli, Watson and
Rosalie Rayner (1920) performed an experiment
on an 1-month-old infant called Albert.
• In addition to Albert, the other ingredients in the
experiment were a white rat, a steel bar, and a
hammer.
• At the onset of the study, Albert showed no fear of
the rat. He even reached out and tried to touch it.
• During the initial part of the experiment, when
Albert saw the rat and reached for it, the
experimenter took the hammer and struck the
steel bar behind the infant, making a loud noise.

• In response to the noise, Albert jumped violently,
and fell forward.
• Again, Albert saw the rat and reached for it, and
again, just as his hand touched the rat, the bar
was struck, making a loud noise.
• Again, Albert jumped violently, and began to
whimper.
• Because of Albert’s emotional sate, the
experiment was suspended for one week so Albert
would not become too disturbed.
• After a week, the rat was again presented to
Albert. This time Albert was very cautious of the
animal and watched it very carefully.


• At one point, when the rat came into contact with
his hand, Albert withdrew his hand immediately.
• There were several more pairings between the rat
and the sound, and eventually Albert developed
strong fear of the rat.
• Now when the rat was presented to Albert again,
he began to cry and almost instantly he turned
sharply to the left, fell over, raised himself on all
fours and began to crawl away rapidly.
• It was also shown that Albert’s fear generalized to
a variety of objects that were not feared at the
onset of the experiment: a rabbit, fur coat, cotton,
and Santa Claus mask.


• Thus, Watson showed that our emotional
reactions can be rearranged through classical
conditioning.
• In this experiment, the loud noise was the US, fear
produced by the noise was the UR, the rat was the
CS, and the fear of the rat was the CR.
• Albert’s fear of all white and furry objects showed
that generalization also took place.

d. Summary of Watson’s Experiment

Before Conditioning:

 
Unconditional Stimulus Unconditional Response

“Results in”


During Conditioning:

 ====  
Conditional Unconditional Unconditional
Stimulus Stimulus Response

“Results in”
======= “Paired with”


After Conditioning:

 
Conditional Stimulus Conditional Response

“Results in”

BEHAVIORISM – OPERANT CONDITIONING

 So far we have concentrated on automatic
conditioning in involuntary responses such as
salivation and fear.
 Clearly, not all human learning is so automatic
and unintentional.
 Most behaviors are not elicited (brought out) by
stimuli; they are emitted (produced) or voluntarily
enacted.
 People actively “operate” on their environment to
produce different kind of consequences.
 These deliberate actions are called operants.

BEHAVIORISM – OPERANT CONDITIONING

 The learning process involved in operant behavior
is called operant conditioning because we learn to
behave in certain ways as we operate on the
environment.
 Thorndike and Skinner both played major roles in
developing knowledge of operant conditioning.

1. OPERANT CONDITIONING: THORNDIKE

• Thorndike’s (1913) early work involved cats that
he placed in puzzle boxes.
• To escape from the box and reach food outside,
the cats had to pull a bolt or perform some other
task; they had to act on their environment.
• During the frantic movements that followed the
closing of the door, the cats eventually made the
correct movement to escape, usually by accident.
• After repeating the process several times, the cats
learned to make the correct response almost
immediately.


• On the basis of these experiments, Thorndike
formulated several laws of learning.
i. Laws of Learning
> Thorndike’s conception was that some nerve
pathway had been established in the brain of
the learning animals.
> So that when a particular stimulus was
registered by the sense organs, it became
connected by this pathway to the organs that
produced the response that had proven to be
effective.


ii. Law of Exercise
> The link between a given stimulus and
response becomes stronger, the more the
pathway is activated.
> In other word, the more the behavior is
practiced or exercised, the more strongly it
will be established or “learned”.
> E.g. The more times the cat practices
escaping from the box, the better it will be
able to do it.


iii. Law of Effect
> Stated that if the response to a stimulus has
a pleasing effect, then the probability would
increase of the learner repeating that
response when confronted with the same
stimulus.
> E.g. If the response – the escaping – has
pleasant consequences, such as access to
fish, then if the cat is placed in the same
stimulus situation gain, it is more likely to
repeat the rewarded response.

c. Thorndike on Education

• Educational practices should be studied
scientifically.
• There should be a close relationship between
the knowledge of the learning process and
teaching practices.
• The lecture technique of teaching is not
suitable for classroom learning “as telling is
not teaching”.
• Good teaching involves knowing what you
want to teach – if you do not know exactly what
is it you want to teach you will not know what
material to present, what responses to look for,
and when to apply.

c. Thorndike on Education
• Thorndike (1922) suggest seven rules for teaching:
i. Consider the situation the pupil faces
ii. Consider the response you wish to connect
with it.
iii. Form the bond between the two
iv. Do not form bond that will have to be
broken.
v. Do not form two or three bond when one will
serve.
vi. Form bonds in the way that they are
required later to act.
vii. Favor the situations which life itself will
offer, and the responses which life itself
will demand

OPERANT CONDITIONING: Skinner

Overview :

 Learning is a function of change in overt
behavior
 Changes in behavior are the result of an
individual's response to events (stimuli) that
occur in the environment.
 The distinctive characteristic of operant
conditioning is that the organism can emit
responses instead of only eliciting response due
to an external stimulus.
 Reinforcement is the key element in Skinner's
S-R theory.


Overview :

 A reinforcer is anything that strengthens the
desired response e.g. verbal praise, a good grade
or a feeling of accomplishment or satisfaction
 negative reinforcers - any stimulus that results in
the increased frequency of a response when it is
withdrawn (different from adversive stimuli -
punishment)
 schedules of reinforcement (e.g. interval versus
ratio) has effects on establishing and maintaining
behavior


Implication in education :

 Question (stimulus) - answer (response) shd be
practised gradually
 the learner shd be given immediate feedback
 Maintain a gradual step in the difficulty of the
questions so, the response is always correct and
hence a positive reinforcement
 good performance in the lesson is paired with
secondary reinforcers such as verbal praise,
prizes and good grades


Principles :

 Behavior that is positively reinforced will
reoccur; intermittent reinforcement is particularly
effective.
 Information should be presented in small
amounts so that responses can be reinforced
("shaping").
 Reinforcements will generalize across similar
stimuli ("stimulus generalization") producing
secondary conditioning.
 The quality of the consequence influences
further actions.


Reinforcements :

 The principle of reinforcement is, when a given
act is followed closely by a reinforcer, the
organism tends to increase the frequency of that
act under the same or similar conditions.
 Reinforcer - the object or the event which
increases the frequency of the performance it
follows.


 E.g. two students are offered a set
amount of money for every hour that they
study after school.
- If there is no increase in the
frequency of studying after school,
the money is considered a reward.
- If the student increases the hours
of study, the money is considered a
positive reinforcer.


Models of Reinforcement :

i. - Positive Reinforcement
- Negative Reinforcement


i. Positive Reinforcement :

 The goal of positive reinforcement is to increase
the target behavior through the presentation of a
(usually appetative) stimulus.
 Positive reinforcement occurs when a stimulus
tends to maintain or accelerate the behavior that
it follows.
 Skinner claims that positive reinforcement is the
most effective control and its ethical use is the
best means for producing a happy and
productive society.


>Examples of Positive Reinforcement :
> The rat will continue to go through the maze
and press the bar for food. The rat knows that
it will receive food each time it presses the
bar.
> A child that is beginning to talk will receive
positive attention from his parents when he
begins to say mamma or daddy. The child
experiences a satisfying fact by producing a
certain verbal sound, thus the child will repeat
the sound.


ii. Negative Reinforcement :

 NR occurs when the rate of a behavior is observed
to increase following the removal of a stimuli.
 The termination or removal of an aversive stimulus
is likely to increase the target behavior.
 NR is also associated with escape or avoidance
behaviors. The target behavior increases in order to
escape or avoid the possible aversive
consequences.


 Both positive and negative reinforcements
strengthen the associated behavior.

 Negative reinforcement is not the same as
punishment with which it is often confused.


Examples of NR:

 The rat will increase the frequency of pressing
the bar when it has learned that this will remove
the electric shock.

 A child picks up her clothes in order to stop her
parents from nagging.

 A person who first experiences a headache and
by taking aspirin succeeds in getting rid of the
pain, will take another aspirin upon later
occurrence of a headache.

The mediocre teacher tells
The good teacher explains
The superior teacher demonstrates
The great teacher inspires.

William Arthur Ward

Week 4 Behaviourism

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