Chapter 7: Behavioral Views of Learning

Learning
- experience (including practice) causes a relatively permanent change in a person’s knowledge,
behavior, or potential for behavior
- brought about by experience

Temporary changes NOT qualified as learning

- maturation— growing taller, turning gray
- changes resulting from illness, fatigue, drugs, or hunger

Behavioral Learning Theories

- focused on behavior and emphasizes effects of external events on the person
- potential for behavior— learning can take place even if the individual does not always act on the
change
- mentalisms: early behaviorists’ belief that thinking, intentions, and other internal mental events cannot
be studied so they should not be included in explaining learning

Punishment
- negative effects: model for aggressive responses, and encourages negative emotional reactions
- unnecessary and unethical

How we remember things together (Aristotle)

1. Similar
2. Contrast: when 2 or more sensations occur together often enough, they become associated
3. Contiguous (most important— included in all explanations of learning by association)

Classical Conditioning (Ivan Pavlov)

- learning of involuntary emotional or physiological responses (ex. fear, salivation, sweating)
- respondents: automatic responses to stimuli

> neutral stimulus: originally gets no response

(tuning fork)
> unconditoned stimulus: naturally gets response
(food)
> conditioned stimulus: trained to elicit effect
(tuning fork)
> conditioned response: happens when neutral stimulus predicts the appearance of the unconditioned
stimulus
(salivation)

White Coat Syndrome

- people whose blood pressure (involuntary response) goes up when it is tested in the doctor’s office,
usually by someone in a white coat

Operant Conditioning (BF Skinner)

- learning to behave in certain ways as we operate on the environment
- behavior: what a person does in a particular situation
- operants: deliberate actions
- 2 sets of environmental influences
> antecedents: precede behavior
> consequences: after behavior
- antecedent-behavior-consequence (A-B-C)
> as behavior is ongoing, a given consequence becomes an antecedent for the
next A-B-C sequence

Classical Conditioning
- the conditioned response disappears when the conditioned stimulus appears, but the unconditioned
response does not follow
ex. sound, but no food
Operant Conditioning
- person will not persist in a certain behavior if the usual reinforcer is withheld long enough
ex. if you repeatedly text someone and never get a reply, you may give up texting

Types of Consequences
- consequences: determines to a great extent whether a person will repeat the behavior
> strengthens or weakens behavior

A. Reinforcement
- any consequence that STRENGTHENS the behavior it follows
1. Positive Reinforcement
- behavior leads to the appearance / presentation of a new stimulus
- since nagustuhan mo yung outcome, uulitin mo yung behavior
2. Negative Reinforcement
- the consequence that strengthens the behavior is the removal of a stimulus
- since ayaw mo yung magiging outcome pag di mo ginawa, gagawin mo nalang
- ex. car seatbelt buzzer— once you put on seatbelt, the irritating noise stops

B. Punishment
- WEAKENS behavior
1. Type I Punishment / Presentation Punishment
- when presenting a stimulus following the behavior has the effect of decreasing the behavior
- ex. when teacher reprimands students
2. Type II Punishment / Removal Punishment
- removing stimulus
- ex. removing privileges when a child behaves inappropriately
Reinforcement Schedules
1. Continuous
- reinforcement after every response
- learning will be faster
2. Intermittent
- reinforced every now & then instead of every time
> Interval: based on amount of time that passes between reinforcers
 > Ratio: based on number of responses learners give between reinforcers

5 Kinds of Reinforcement Schedules

• Continuous: reinforcement after every response
> rapid learning of response
ex. turning on TV
• Fixed-Interval: reinforcement after a set period of time
> response rate increases as time for reinforcement approaches, drops after
reinforcement
ex. studying as weekly quiz approaches
• Variable-Interval: reinforcement after varying lengths of time
ex. pop quizzes
• Fixed-Ratio: reinforcement after a set number of responses
> rapid response rate, pause after reinforcement
ex. cheat day after 5 days of workout
• Variable-Ratio: reinforcement after a varying number of responses
ex. slot machines

Effective Instruction Delivery (EID)

- instructions are clear, concise, specific, and communicate an expected result are more effective
- statements are better than questions

Cueing
- providing an antecedent stimulus just before a specific behavior is supposed to take place
- setting the stage for behaviors that must occur at a given time but are easily forgotten

Applied Behavior Analysis

- application of behavioral learning principles to change behavior
- ABAB design:
> A: researches take a baseline measurement of the behavior
> B: apply intervention (B)
> A: stop intervention to see if behavior goes back to baseline level
> B: reintroduce intervention

Methods for Encouraging Behaviors

1. Reinforcing with Teacher Attention

- accentuate the positive: praise students for good behavior, ignore misbehavior
- differential reinforcement: ignoring inappropriate behaviors, while being sure to reinforce appropriate
behaviors as soon as they occur
- effective praise: contigent on behavior, specifies clearly the behavior being reinforced, sincere /
believable

2. Premack Principle
- a preferred activity can be an effective reinforcer for a less-preferred activity
- Grandma’s Rule: first, do what I want you to do, and then you may do what you want to do”
3. Shaping
- successive approximations: reinforcing progress instead of waiting for perfection
- task analysis: taking the final complex behavior and break it down into small, manageable steps

4. Positive Practice
- students replace one behavior with another
- appropriate for dealing with academic errors
- correct mistake as soon as possible and practice correct repsonse
- positive practice overcorrection: correct behavior is practiced until it becomes almost automatic

5. Contigency Contacts
- teacher draws up an individual contract with each student, describing exactly what the student must do
to earn a particular privilege / reward
- “negotiating process”

6. Token Reinforcement System

- allowing all students to earn tokens for both academic work and positive classroom behavior
- students exchange tokens for the reward

7. Group Consequences
- teacher bases reinforcementfor the class on the behavior of selected target students
- ex. if Evan and May stay on their mats until the end of nap time, we will all have a special class
- group behavior game: more structured— teachers and students discuss what would make the
classroom a better place > class rules are developed > class is divided into teams > each time a
student breaks a rule, the student’s team is given a mark

Handling Undesirable Behavior

1. Negative Reinforcement

2. Reprimands
- soft, calm, private reprimands are more effective

3. Response Cost
- for certain infractions of the rules, people must lose some reinforcer (money, time, privileges)
- ex. first warning, second warning, suspension

4. Social Isolation
- timeout
- removing a student from the classroom for 5-10 mins, and placed in an uninteresting space alone

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Functional Behavioral Assessment (FBA)
- process of understanding the “why” of a problem behavior
- procedures that map the A-B-C’s of the situation
Positive Behavior Supports (PBS)
- actual interventions designed to replace problem behaviors with new actions that serve the same
purpose for the student
- Individuals with Disabilities Act 2004

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Self-Management

1. Goal-setting
- setting specific goals and making them public

2. Self-evaluation
- elements most handled by the students
- making a judgement about quality

3. Self-reinforcement
- rewarding yourself for a job well done

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Social Learning Theory

- enactive learning: learning by doing and experiencing the consequences of your actions
- observational learning: vicarious learning (learning by observing others)

Chapter 9: Complex Cognitive Processes

LEARNING STRATEGIES
- can be cognitive, metacognitive, or behavioral

1. Deciding what is important

2. Summaries

3. Underlining and Highlighting

- 2 of the most frequent but INEFFECTIVELY USED strategies among college students
- common problem: underline / highlight too much
* we should ACTIVELY TRANSFORM the information into our own words as we underline / take notes

4. Taking Notes

5. Visual Tools for Oranizing

- concept maps: graphical tools for organizing and representing knowledge and relationships within a
particular topic
- venn diagrams: how ideas overlap
- tree diagrams: how ideas branch off each other
- time line: sequence (history / geology)

6. Retrieval Practice
- “testing effect” / “active retrieval”
- actively recalling key ideas from readings— testing yourself about what you read / heard in lectures
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Reading Strategies

1. READS
- for grade levels above elementary
- review, examine, ask, do (read), summarize

2. CAPS
- characters, aim, problem, solution

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Applying Learning Strategies

Procedural Deficiencies
- students learn strategies but do not apply them when they could / should
- executive control processes are underdeveloped

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Robust Knowledge: deep, connected and coherent

Deep Knowledge: underlying principles
Connected Knowledge: separate bits of information are linked
Coherent Knowledge: consistent and has no contradictions
Searching for Possible Solution Strategies

A. Algorithm
- step-by-step prescription for achieving a goal
- usually domain-specific— tied to a particular subject area

B. Heuristics
- general strategy that might lead to the right answer
• Means-End Analysis: problem is divided into subgoals, then a means of solving each subgoal is
figured out
• Working-Backwards Strategy: begin at the goal and move back to the unsolved initial problem
• Analogical Thinking: limits search for solutions to situations that have something in common with the
one you currently face

Factors that Hinder Problem Solving

• Functional Fixedness: missing out on a good solution because they fixate on conventional uses for
materials
• Response Set: getting stuck on one way of representing a problem
• Representativeness Heuristics: make judgements about possibilities based on our prototypes (what
we think is representative of a category)
• Availability Heuristic: when judgements are based on the availability of information in our memories
• Belief Perseverance: tendency to hold on to our beliefs, even in the face of contradictory evidence
• Confirmation Bias: tendency to search for information that confirms our ideas and beliefs

* Our automatic use of heuristics to make judgements generates overconfidence.

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Stages of Transfer for Strategies

1. Acquisition
- student receives instruction about strategy, and rehease the strategy, practice being aware of when
and how they are using it
2. Retention
- more practice with feedback helps student hone their strategy use
3. Transfer
- student is given new problems that they can solve with the same strategy