Behaviorism
Learners:- Learners don’t control the ultimate outcomes because the outcomes are shaped by the environment
- Learners are not passive, and actively engages in response to educators
Learning:- Shaping of learners’ behaviors to get what an educator wants to achieve (learning objectives)
- Conducted through reinforcements for repeated actions and punishments for wrong actions
- Involves an organism and an environment with, deliberate or accidental, variable conditions
- At initial stages, small steps towards goal are taken. To receive reinforcements, behaviors will become more and more complex before finally achieving
- Assumptions: Educators have control over reasonable rewards and reinforcements
Representation:In a study where pigeons in boxes were pecking disks for food, food will be dispensed when the light’s green. However, when it’s red, a shock will be released or nothing will come out instead. This is a simple representation mentioned in the article where humans similarly response to the environment and learning is the process of changing our behavior so that we get more good stuff and less bad stuff.
Different Types of Problems:In parenting, rewards are given to children for encouraging right actions. The government enacts laws to punish criminals while and academic institutions evaluate students’ performance through the process of grading.
Usefulness for development of 21st Century skills:The Internet is one of the key defining features of the 21st century. It is now a requirement for those seeking employment to be able to use the Internet for various purposes, one of which is the email for exchange of information and communication purposes.
For this skill, the reinforcement of knowing how to use the Internet with a certain level of expertise would actually be better employability opportunities as well as the ability to connect/ communicate with people. In a working environment, the employer acts as the educator by developing learning goals and educating staff in adopting a more efficient workflow.
Cognitivism
Learners:- Not forced but encouraged by educators to think and learn in new ways
- Based on individuals’ own representations as they actively trying to make since of the world
- Do not merely react, presence of a process between stimulus and response
Learning:- Studying of the processes involved in people developing theories, concepts, expectations, plans
- Set up contexts that learners are unfamiliar with to encourage new ways of thinking
- As compared to behaviorist approach, the individual plays a more important role of making sense of new problems, while educators play more of a facilitating role
- Mental representations can either be innate or build over a period of time based on various experiences
Representation:A child is provided with a bunch of interesting things to play with. After educator scaffolds with a few puzzles, the child is then left to play around with the stuffs in ways based on their own representations. The child is then left to figure out and make sense of what is to be done.
Different Types of Problems:Problems that involve analysis, evaluation, solving and application of theories, concepts, expectations and planning will involve cognitive learning. There are many problems involving cognitive thinking in the context of academic institutions.
After disseminating a set of instructions of principles, educators will achieve their learning objectives by engaging learners to exercise their cognitive thinking through a series of tasks. For example, the introduction of project work into the school curricular for secondary and junior colleges spurs students on to consider issues that affects the school and coming up with solutions to solve these problems.
Usefulness for development of 21st century skillsIn the case of webpage designing, for example, educators may introduce principles of visual design to learners. However, when it comes to the designing of webpages, the learner gets to use these skills and principles to develop websites based on their own representations.
Therefore, learners may actually come up with new designs and structure that are able to better capture the attention of their audience. They will use cognitive learning skills to resolve limitations posed by the software and circumvent these problems with new solutions.
Socialculturalism
Learners- Dependent on other people, tools and the learning context
- Need to interact with others and objects in the world to complete tasks
Learning- The unit of analysis is bigger than an individual learner, it involves a whole system of people, objects and organization
- Involves the use of aid/ devices to offload cognitive burden
- Social tools, such as language, used to mediate various thoughts (i.e. abstract concepts such as capitalism) through interaction
RepresentationA study of battleship explains how the crew works to pinpoint the location of the battleship. Different people have different tasks and use tools to calculate and plot the location on a map. This collective knowledge will then identify the battleship’s location to the captain.
Different Types of Problems:Huge tasks which involves people with different areas of expertise to collaborate and solve the problem. For example, in an events management company, it employs people with different expertise on various aspects, e.g. marketing, logistics, advertising, public relations etc. Therefore, with this synergy among the employees, the overseer will be able to evaluate if a particular plan is feasible as his/her employee give feedback on the various limitations involved. If an individual fails to do his work, the whole campaign might not be able to take off successfully or with ease.
Usefulness for the development of 21st Century Skills:Some applications in the world wide web work on the basis of socioculturalism where collective knowledge is being harnessed. For example, open source software allows individuals from all parts of the world to edit the code and improve and upgrade the program for the benefit of more people.
In addition, Wikipedia also involves collective knowledge where individuals give their input on certain topics. If it is used properly, others will benefit from the knowledge provided by a subject matter expert’s point of view. Therefore, this will develop individuals’ skills by learning from the skills of others through the facilitation of the Internet.
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Theories of Learning in...A (sociocultural approach), B(ehavioristic apprach), C(ognitivistic approach)Behavioristic approach... Pigeons pecking...Just to share a pretty random illustration (for this approach) which struck me...When I was having lunch in school, I saw the prescription of such an approach by the cleaners for Arts Deck. I observed the metal shelves we sent our trays to after our meals have been modified over the semesters. There were yellow streaks of plastic chains dangling from each segments of the shelves, there were nasty-looking nails placed on top of these shelves as well.My friends and I made a guess and it was spot-on, the explanation for modifying these shelves to exude such an ominous presence was simply to keep birds away from the plates of leftovers. Therefore, the birds, if they were to land on these nails and suffer the painful consequences, will learn through experience that the Arts Deck cleaners are not to be messed around with.In this instance, the educator aka the Arts Deck cleaners have a goal in mind - to shape the behavior of the birds and ensure they do not further add on to their workload.I personally do not concur with the behavioristic point of view where, in its radical and extreme form, regards humans as merely reacting to an unintelligent system. Comparing animals to humans, in my view, is equivilant to comparing apples with oranges. Albeit both of them are fruits, but are different on many levels, the only similarity which I might consider drawing them together would probably an intelligent creator who has designed an intelligent system.The simplistic form of explaining human behavior disregards the various thought processes which includes the free will to make complex, informed decisions based on past experiences and knowledge.However, sad to say, I do agree that the human sense of superiority should be punctured!Despite having head knowledge and free will to make wise choices, we often land up in a situation where "history repeats itself" and end up making wrong decisions that lead to dire consequences.The cognitivism approach takes it a step further from merely recognizing stimulus-response to the study of the intention and context of various situations. Therefore, similar stimulus may actually result in different responses considering every individual's own experiences in their own contexts.A key tenet which identifies behaviorism and cognitivism is that the unit of analysis is the individual. Moving on to the socio-cultural apporach, which takes into consideration the big picture, identifies learning where social tools enables and empowers complex ways of thinking individually and augments participation in an environment as a whole.To connect these approaches with E-learning, we can see that at the advent of personal computers, it appears that the educators adopted the behaviouristic approach, using computers as a learning tool for "drill and practice".As E-learning develops further, the cognitivistic approaches were implemented where learners were able to participate and provide feedback to their educators. Various systems can also be programmed to gain an insight on the internal mental representations of the individual after a learning exercise.This goes on until networks becomes widespread, and the collective knowledge of indivudals are being harnessed, thus explaining the socio-cultural approach where information transcends time and space and converge on a common ground where knowledge can be fully exploited to a certain extent (limited by the digital gap due to various socio-cultural-economic factors).
