Behaviorism in Education: Definition, Pros and Cons

learning must be Observable

For Behaviorists, learning is only considered to occur when we can observe it.

Behaviorists want to see a change in behavior. That’s the whole goal of the behaviorist theory!

What does this mean about, say, if you watch a YouTube video and learn a new way to tie a know? Well, behaviorists don’t care … yet. They don’t really believe you’ve learned anything yet.

They only really believe that you have learnt to tie a knot once you show them a knot that you tied!

So, in order to prove learning has occurred, behaviorists want to see it.

The Cause and Effect (Stimulus and Response) Rule

Behaviorists believe that we can be ‘trained’ into changing our behaviors.

Yep, just like a dog.

If we provide a ‘stimulus’, we expect a certain response.

If someone comes up behind you and pinches your back, you bet you will respond angrily! The pinch was the ‘stimulus’ and the angry response was the ‘response’.

Let’s look at a few examples of cause and effect in action:

• I get yelled at for making a mess (stimulus), so I don’t make a mess next time (response).
• I get a treat for cleaning my room (stimulus), so I clean my room more often (response).

Rewards and Punishments produce Desirable Outcomes

Rewards and punishments can be used to change behavior in a process called respondent conditioning. This is really simple and relates to my point above:

• If you praise someone for a certain behavior, they’re more likely to repeat that behavior;
• If you yell at someone for a certain behavior, they’re less likely to repeat that behavior.

This is why behaviorst theorists in schools are very likely to come up with clear rules and rewards. A behaviorist might encourage behaviors by:

• Giving a treat (food is powerful because it’s considered a primary reinforcer);
• Giving praise;
• Giving an early mark to lunch;
• Letting a student choose where to sit;
• Letting a student choose the next activity

But, behaviorists are also likely to have rules that punish some behaviors to discourage them for being repeated. These are things like:

• Giving a detention;
• Using the cane (back in the day!);
• Taking away play time;
• Making you sit in the corner for 5 minutes;
• Sending you to the principal’s office

The blank slate (Tabula Rasa)

Behaviorists think anyone can learn anything. All they need is the right rewards and punishments.

Therefore, Behaviorists think a lot like Aristotle and John Locke. They think children are born blank slates: no knowledge in their minds!

The way people learn, then, is through their experiences. The experiences people have (the rewards and punishments they get through life) will shape how they behave.

Classical vs Operant Conditioning

Classical conditioning is associated with the theorists Pavlov and Watson. They are discussed lower down in this article.

Classical conditioning is a type of behaviorism that is concerned with involuntary responses to stimuli. It’s also known as associative learning.

For example, we often have involuntary fears and phobias.

I’m really scared of bears. When I see a bear when hiking my heart begins to race really, really fast and I get anxiety. I can’t help it!

Many children are scared of the dark. They can’t help it. It’s a phobia they have.

When we’re focusing on increasing or decreasing involuntary reactions to stimuli, we’re talking about classical conditioning.

Operant conditioning is associated with the theorists Thorndike and Skinner. They are discussed lower down in this article.

Operant conditioning is a type of behaviorism that is concerned with voluntary response to stimuli.

For example, my dog voluntarily chases the stick when I throw it because he knows he’ll get a reward for doing it. He made the choice to chase the stick, so it’s operant conditioning.

Another example of operant conditioning is when we punish a child with 5 minutes in the time out corner. We are trying to teach the child to voluntarily change their behavior by making better choices in the future to avoid a punishment.

Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) and his Dog

Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) is a Russian psychologist who is a very important behaviorist theorist you need to know about.

Pavlov is the father of classical conditioning through his discovery of the Pavlovian response.

Pavlov observed a dog’s learning to show how learning happens. Pavlov was observing that a dog salivates when it is being fed food.

However, his big breakthrough came when he noticed that the dog would salivate simply when the assistant who regularly fed the dog entered the room.

So, what did he deduce from this? He found that:

• The assistant (stimulus) caused salivation (response).

The dog had learned to do something based upon a stimulus (the assistant entering the room). There was cause and effect!

Pavlov didn’t stop there. Next, he rung a bell every time the dog was about to eat to see whether the bell would also cause the dog to salivate.

Soon enough, Pavlov could ring the bell any time he wanted and the dog would salivate immediately. Pavlov didn’t even need to have food to give to the dog. The bell alone started causing the salivation!

Now, let’s zoom in a little on some of Pavlov’s important terms in the next few points!

The Neutral Stimulus

Pavlov invented the term ‘neutral stimulus’ to explain something that doesn’t cause a response.

When Ivan Pavlov (see above) first rang the bell to train his dog to react to the bell, nothing happened. The dog didn’t know what the bell meant!

When a learner does not associate the stimulus (the bell) with anything, it’s not really going to achieve anything!

Do you salivate whenever a bell rings? No – of course not! You haven’t learnt that ‘trick’ yet. And neither did the dog.

At this stage, the bell is considered a neutral stimulus because it doesn’t cause an effect.

What is a ‘Neutral Stimulus’?

Pavlov invented the term ‘neutral stimulus’ to explain something that doesn’t cause a response.

When Ivan Pavlov (see above) first rang the bell to train his dog to react to the bell, nothing happened. The dog didn’t know what the bell meant!

When a learner does not associate the stimulus (the bell) with anything, it’s not really going to achieve anything!

Do you salivate whenever a bell rings? No – of course not! You haven’t learnt that ‘trick’ yet. And neither did the dog.

At this stage, the bell is considered a neutral stimulus because it doesn’t cause an effect.

The Conditioned Stimulus

‘Conditioned Stimulus’ and ‘Conditioned Response’ are two more key words in behaviorism invented by Ivan Pavlov (see Point 4).

Pavlov would ring a bell just before he fed his dog food.

After a while, the dog began to associate the bell with food. Soon, the dog would start salivating even if he didn’t eat the food!

Because the dog learnt that the bell meant ‘food’ (and didn’t naturally just know it already), we call the bell a ‘conditioned stimulus’ and the food to be a ‘conditioned response’.

A clear parallel examples is that school children associate a bell with break time. The bell doesn’t naturally mean ‘break time’, we’ve just come to teach people that that’s what it’s for! So, the bell is again a conditioned stimulus and packing up our books is a conditioned response.

Contiguity

This is an important term and I really like when I see my students using it in their assignments.

That’s because students usually don’t use the term ‘contiguity’! I’m impressed when I see a student use this term because I know they’ve done some deep research.

What I’m saying is: if you’re a university student writing a paper about behaviorism in education, use this term in your assessment to impress your professor.

So, what is contiguity?

1. ‘Contiguity’ is the term we use to explain the associations we develop between two things.

When an association has developed between a bell and food, we have achieved contiguity. You could also say it like: ‘contiguity has occurred!’

2. ‘Contiguity’ also assumes that only one of those two things have to occur in the future for the others to be remembered.

In Pavlov’s example, the dog now salivates when the bell rings even if the food hasn’t been served!

Some other examples of contiguity include:

• When we memorize the alphabet, we say ‘a-b-c’ and we automatically expect people to respond ‘d-e-f’
• When we memorize the times tables, we automatically know the answer to “2 x 2” or “8 x 8” without actually doing the sums. We’ve practiced enough to have been conditioned into responding with the right answer. Contiguity has occurred!

Stimulus Discrimination

Pavlov used the term ‘discrimination’ to explain how he can teach his dog even more tricks!

We already know Pavlov taught his do to associate the sound of a bell (actually, it was a tuning fork) with food.

But next, Pavlov changed the pitch of the bell.

Guess what’s crazy? He could teach the dog to only associate one pitch with food!

When we can learn to associate one version of a stimulus (in this case, the pitch of the bell) with a response, but not other versions of the stimulus (like a different pitch), we have achieved discrimination!

Clearly, this is a very clever dog!

I remember at school three bells meant ‘lunch time’ but a constantly ringing bell meant ‘fire evacuation!’

Here, my classmates an I learnt to discriminate between different bells and knew that different bells required a different response.

Generalization

Generalization is the exact opposite of discrimination.

Discrimination means we can differentiate between different types of the same stimulus and respond differently for each type.

Generalization means that we simply respond the same way to all types of the same stimulus.

So, generalization would have happened if the dog associated any pitch of the bell with food, no matter what.

Here’s some other examples in real life:

• Once I got bitten by a British Shorthair cat (stimulus). I then got scared of the cat (response). But, I also generalized my fear of cats so now I’m scared of all breeds of cats, not just British Shorthair cats!
• Once an old lady robbed me on the subway. Now, I’m scared of all old ladies!

Extinction

When we forget the relationship between a stimulus and a response, we call it ‘psychological extinction’.

Extinction would have occurred with Pavlov’s dog if he trained the dog to no longer associate the bell with food.

He could do this by ringing the bell and not giving the dog food. If he did this over and over again the dog would eventually no longer salivate because he would stop expecting food.

John Watson’s Little Albert Experiment

Even though Pavlov was the forefather of behaviorism, it was actually John Watson (1879-1958) who invented the term.

While Pavlov came up with some of the concepts of behaviorism in animals, John Watson was the one to apply these same ideas to humans.

Remember, Pavlov was interested in ‘classical conditioning’ which is concerned with increasing and decreasing involuntary behaviors like salivating.

Watson was also interested in classical conditioning. He was interested in increasing and decreasing phobias like fear of animals in children.

Watson’s experiments on children’s phobias were quite unethical.

Watson did two major experiments that you need to know about. We call these experiments the ‘Little Albert’ experiment and the ‘Little Peter’ experiment.

The Little Albert Experiment

Watson taught a child named Little Albert to become afraid of a white rabbit. He induced fear in a child – how mean!

Initially, the 11-month-old boy was not afraid of the rabbit.

But Watson would place the rabbit in front of the child then sneak up behind the child and bang a hammer against a steal bar to scare Albert! He did this over and over and over again until Albert associated the rabbit with the loud scary noise.

I’m sure you know what happened next. Albert became scared of the rabbit even when Watson didn’t hit the bar.

I’m sure you remember what that’s called: Contiguity!

Something else happened, too.

Albert suddenly became scared of cotton wool, Santa’s beard and even Watson’s white hair!

Do you remember what this was called?

Generalization!

Watson had shown Pavlov’s theory worked not only with animals, but humans, too!

The Little Peter Experiment (Systematic Desensitization)

Little Peter was the opposite of Little Albert.

Little Peter was already sensitized to a rat, exhibiting strong fear of it. So, Watson decided he’d get rid of Little Peter’s fear.

Watson decided that he would place a rabbit in a cage near Little Peter whenever he ate lunch. First, the rabbit was placed at the opposite end of the room to Little Peter.

Each lunch time, the rabbit was placed closer and closer to Little Peter until one day, Little Peter was able to eat lunch with the rabbit sitting on his lap!

When a phobia like this is slowly but surely reduced and finally removed from a person’s mind, we call it ‘systematic desensitization’.

Thorndike’s ‘Law of Effect’

Edward Thorndike (1874-1949) was an operant conditioning theorist.

Thorndike would put cats into a box. The cats could see food outside their box but couldn’t access the food unless they pressed a lever to open their box door.

At first, the cats would scratch around to find a way out. Finally, and by accident, they would hit the lever and be released.

After several repeated attempts at this trick, the cats learned that hitting the lever was their way out of the box. Before long, the cats would go straight to the lever, hit it, and get their food.

So, what’s different between Thorndike’s experiment and Pavlov or Watson’s?

For Thorndike’s experiment, the cats had to actively do something: they had to hit the lever themselves!

Therefore, it’s operant conditioning.

To explain the need for a voluntary action to occur here, Thorndike created the ‘Law of Effect’. This law argues that any action that leads to a positive ‘effect’ (or outcome) will increase the likelihood of that action to re-occur.

This law also shows us that trial and error leads to learning.

Making mistakes isn’t a bad thing, because you’re eliminating the actions that don’t lead to a positive outcome! Thanks, Edward Thorndike.

B.F. Skinner

B.F. Skinner believed that learners were not just passive learners but also active learners.

So, unlike classical conditioning theorists, Skinner was interested in changing voluntary behaviors through reward and punishment.

Skinner extended Thorndike’s experiments (see above) to show how he can train animals like rats and pigeons, and even children, to do just about anything if he gave the right rewards and punishments.

Skinner taught rats to escape boxes that are famously now called ‘Skinner Boxes’ and even trained pigeons how to play the piano!

The reason Skinner is so famous is that he really reinforced the fact that ‘reinforcements’ in the form of rewards and punishments lead to the outcomes that he desires.

Here’s how Duchesne et al. (2013, p. 167) describe Skinner’s achievements:

“Skinner had successfully shown that a pattern of action very quickly emerges in response to the feedback – or reinforcement – received.”

Skinner also demonstrated important concepts in educational psychology such as dishabituation, habituation, and desensitization.

Reinforcement Schedules

Skinner realized that if you provide a positive reinforcement every single time a person (or animal) does the right thing, the power of the positive reinforcement will decrease.

If you praise a child for saying “Thank you” every single time you give them something, the child is less likely to repeat it than if you randomly praise them.

However, if you rarely or never praise the child at all, they’ll never learn!

So, what’s the best way to give praise to achieve the desired effect?

Skinner experimented with constant praise, rare praise, praise at a fixed ratio (say, every 5^th time the child says thank you), and random praise.

Below is a table of the results. This table is adapted from Gray and McBlain (2012, p. 37):

The Premack Principle

The Premack Principle was invented by David Premack (1925-2015).

Premack extended operant conditioning by proposing that desirable activities should be used as a reward for completing undesirable activities.

Here, activities themselves act as rewards.

The clearest example of this is eating your vegetables before having your desert.

Parents will often tell their children that they aren’t allowed to have their desert (the reward) until they have eaten their vegetables (the undesirable activity).

Simply put, the Premack Principle is a powerful method of cueing activities in a way that creates incentives for completing undesirable activities.