The Basics of Behaviorism

Brenda Mergel

Behaviorism, as a learning theory, can be traced back to Aristotle, whose essay "Memory" focused on associations being made between events such as lightning and thunder. Other philosophers that followed Aristotle's thoughts are Hobbs (1650), Hume (1740), Brown (1820), Bain (1855) and Ebbinghause (1885) (Black, 1995).

The theory of behaviorism concentrates on the study of overt behaviors that can be observed and measured (Good & Brophy, 1990). It views the mind as a "black box" in the sense that response to stimulus can be observed quantitatively, totally ignoring the possibility of thought processes occurring in the mind. Some key players in the development of the behaviorist theory were Pavlov, Watson, Thorndike and Skinner.

 Pavlov (1849 - 1936)

For most people, the name "Pavlov" rings a bell (pun intended). The Russian physiologist is best known for his work in classical conditioning or stimulus substitution. Pavlov's most famous experiment involved food, a dog and a bell.

• Before conditioning, ringing the bell caused no response from the dog. Placing food in front of the dog initiated salivation.
• During conditioning, the bell was rung a few seconds before the dog was presented with food.
• After conditioning, the ringing of the bell alone produced salivation
  
  (Dembo, 1994).

Food	Unconditioned Stimulus
Salivation	Unconditioned Response (natural, not learned)
Bell	Conditioned Stimulus
Salivation	Conditioned Response (to bell)

 

• Stimulus Generalization: Once the dog has learned to salivate at the sound of the bell, it will salivate at other similar sounds.
• Extinction: If you stop pairing the bell with the food, salivation will eventually cease in response to the bell.
• Spontaneous Recovery: Extinguished responses can be "recovered" after an elapsed time, but will soon extinguish again if the dog is not presented with food.
• Discrimination: The dog could learn to discriminate between similar bells (stimuli) and discern which bell would result in the presentation of food and which would not.
• Higher-Order Conditioning: Once the dog has been conditioned to associate the bell with food, another unconditioned stimulus, such as a light may be flashed at the same time that the bell is rung. Eventually the dog will salivate at the flash of the light without the sound of the bell.

Edward Thorndike did research in animal behavior before becoming interested in human psychology. He set out to apply "the methods of exact science" to educational problems by emphasizing "accurate quantitative treatment of information". "Anything that exists, exists in a certain quantity and can be measured" (Johcich, as cited in Rizo, 1991). His theory, Connectionism, stated that learning was the formation of a connection between stimulus and response.

• The "law of effect" stated that when a connection between a stimulus and response is positively rewarded it will be strengthened and when it is negatively rewarded it will be weakened. Thorndike later revised this "law" when he found that negative reward, (punishment) did not necessarily weaken bonds, and that some seemingly pleasurable consequences do not necessarily motivate performance.
  
• The "law of exercise" held that the more an S-R (stimulus response) bond is practiced the stronger it will become. As with the law of effect, the law of exercise also had to be updated when Thorndike found that practice without feedback does not necessarily enhance performance.
  
• The "law of readiness" : because of the structure of the nervous system, certain conduction units, in a given situation, are more predisposed to conduct than others.

Thorndike's laws were based on the stimulus-response hypothesis. He believed that a neural bond would be established between the stimulus and response when the response was positive. Learning takes place when the bonds are formed into patterns of behavior (Saettler, 1990).

Watson (1878 - 1958)

John B. Watson was the first American psychologist to use Pavlov's ideas. Like Thorndike, he was originally involved in animal research, but later became involved in the study of human behavior.

Watson believed that humans are born with a few reflexes and the emotional reactions of love and rage. All other behavior is established through stimulus-response associations through conditioning.

Watson's Experiment

Watson demonstrated classical conditioning in an experiment involving a young child (Albert) and a white rat. Originally, Albert was unafraid of the rat; but Watson created a sudden loud noise whenever Albert touched the rat. Because Albert was frightened by the loud noise, he soon became conditioned to fear and avoid the rat. The fear was generalized to other small animals. Watson then "extinguished" the fear by presenting the rat without the loud noise. Some accounts of the study suggest that the conditioned fear was more powerful and permanent than it really was. (Harris, 1979; Samelson, 1980, in Brophy, 1990)

Certainly Watson's research methods would be questioned today; however, his work did demonstrate the role of conditioning in the development of emotional responses to certain stimuli. This may explain certain fears, phobias and prejudices that people develop.

Skinner (1904 - 1990)

Like Pavlov, Watson and Thorndike, Skinner believed in the stimulus-response pattern of conditioned behavior. His theory dealt with changes in observable behavior, ignoring the possibility of any processes occurring in the mind. Skinner's 1948 book, Walden Two , is about a utopian society based on operant conditioning. He also wrote,Science and Human Behavior, (1953) in which he pointed out how the principles of operant conditioning function in social institutions such as government, law, religion, economics and education (Dembo, 1994).

Skinner's work differs from that of his predecessors (classical conditioning), in that he studied operant behavior (voluntary behaviors used in operating on the environment).

Skinner's Operant Conditioning Mechanisms

• Positive Reinforcement or reward: Responses that are rewarded are likely to be repeated. (Good grades reinforce careful study.)
• Negative Reinforcement: Responses that allow escape from painful or undesirable situations are likely to be repeated. (Being excused from writing a final because of good term work.)
• Extinction or Non-Reinforcement : Responses that are not reinforced are not likely to be repeated. (Ignoring student misbehavior should extinguish that behavior.)
• Punishment: Responses that bring painful or undesirable consequences will be suppressed, but may reappear if reinforcement contingencies change. (Penalizing late students by withdrawing privileges should stop their lateness.)

  (Good & Brophy, 1990)

Skinner and Behavioral Shaping

If placed in a cage an animal may take a very long time to figure out that pressing a lever will produce food. To accomplish such behavior successive approximations of the behavior are rewarded until the animal learns the association between the lever and the food reward. To begin shaping, the animal may be rewarded for simply turning in the direction of the lever, then for moving toward the lever, for brushing against the lever, and finally for pawing the lever.

Behavioral chaining occurs when a succession of steps need to be learned. The animal would master each step in sequence until the entire sequence is learned.

Reinforcement Schedules

Once the desired behavioral response is accomplished, reinforcement does not have to be 100%; in fact it can be maintained more successfully through what Skinner referred to as partial reinforcement schedules. Partial reinforcement schedules include interval schedules and ratio schedules.

• Fixed Interval Schedules: the target response is reinforced after a fixed amount of time has passed since the last reinforcement.
  
• Variable Interval Schedules: similar to fixed interval schedules, but the amount of time that must pass between reinforcement varies.
  
• Fixed Ratio Schedules: a fixed number of correct responses must occur before reinforcement may
  recur.
  
• Variable Ratio Schedules: the number of correct repetitions of the correct response for reinforcement varies.

Variable interval and especially, variable ratio schedules produce steadier and more persistent rates of response because the learners cannot predict when the reinforcement will come although they know that they will eventually succeed.

Behaviorism and Instructional Design

** This section on behaviorism is largely a synopsis of information from Paul Saettler's book, The History of American Educational Technology, (1990).

In Paul Saettler's book The History of American Educational Technology, he states that behaviorism did not have an impact on educational technology until the 1960s, which was the time that behaviorism actually began to decrease in popularity in American psychology. Saettler identified six areas that demonstrate the impact of behaviorism on Educational Technology in America: the behavioral objectives movement; the teaching machine phase; the programmed instruction movement; individualized instructional approaches, computer-assisted learning and the systems approach to instruction.

Behavioral Objectives Movement:

A behavioral objective states learning objectives in "specified, quantifiable, terminal behaviors" (Saettler, pp. 288, 1990). Behavioral objectives can be summed up using the mnemonic device ABCD (Schwier, 1998).

Example: After having completed the unit the student will be able to answer correctly 90% of the questions on the posttest.

• A - Audience - the student
• B - Behavior - answer correctly
• C - Condition - after having completed the unit, on a post test
• D - Degree - 90% correct

To develop behavioral objectives a learning task must be broken down through analysis into specific measurable tasks. The learning success may be measured by tests developed to measure each objective.

The advent of behavioral objectives can be traced back to the Elder Sophists of ancient Greece, Cicero, Herbart and Spencer, but Franklin Bobbitt developed the modern concept of behavioral objectives in the early 1900s (Saettler, 1990).

Taxonomic Analysis of Learning Behaviors

• Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning - In 1956 Bloom and his colleagues began development of a taxonomy in the cognitive, attitudinal (affective) and psychomotor domains. Many people are familiar with Bloom's Cognitive taxonomy:
  
  • knowledge
  • comprehension
  • application
  • analysis
  • synthesis
  • evaluation

   

• Gagne's Taxonomy of Learning - Robert Gagne developed his taxonomy of learning in 1972. Gagne's taxonomy was comprised of five categories:
  
  • verbal information
  • intellectual skill
  • cognitive strategy
  • attitude
  • motor skill

Mastery Learning

Mastery learning was originally developed by Morrison in the 1930s. His formula for mastery was "Pretest, teach, test the result, adapt procedure, teach and test again to the point of actual learning." (Morrison, 1931, in Saettler, 1990). Mastery learning assumes that all students can master the materials presented in the lesson. Bloom further developed Morrison's plan, but mastery learning is more effective for the lower levels of learning on Bloom's taxonomy, and not appropriate for higher level learning (Saettler, 1990).

Military and Industrial Approach

For military and industrial training, "behavioral objectives were written descriptions of specific, terminal behaviors that were manifested in terms of observable, measurable behavior." (Saettler, 1990) Robert Mager wrote Preparing Instructional Objectives, in 1962 which prompted interest and use of behavioral objectives among educators. Gagne and Briggs who also had backgrounds in military and industrial psychology developed a set of instructions for writing objectives that is based on Mager's work.

• Gagne's and Brigg's Model
  
  • Action
  • Object
  • Situation
  • Tools and Constraints
  • Capability to be Learned

By the late 1960's most teachers were writing and using behavioral objectives. There were, of course, people who questioned the breaking down of subject material into small parts, believing that it would lead away from an understanding of the "whole" (Saettler, 1990).

Accountability Movement

 A movement known as scientific management of industry arose in the early 1900s in response to political and economic factors of that time. Franklin Bobbitt proposed utilization of this system in education stressing that the standards and direction of education should stem from the consumer - society. Bobbitt's ideas exemplified the idea of accountability, competency-based education and performance-based education, which because of similar economic and political factors, experienced a revival in America during the late 1960s and 1970s (Saettler, 1990).

Teaching Machines and Programmed Instruction Movement 

Although the elder Sophists, Comenius, Herbart and Montessori used the concept of programmed instruction in their repertoire, B.F. Skinner is the most current and probably best known advocate of teaching machines and programmed learning. Contributors to this movement include the following:

• Pressey - introduced a multiple-choice machine at the 1925 American Psychological Association meeting.
  
• Peterson - a former student of Pressey's who developed "chemosheets" in which the learner checked their answers with a chemical-dipped swab.
  
• W.W.II - devises called "phase checks", constructed in the 1940s and 1950s, taught and tested such skills and dissassembly-assembly of equipment.
  
• Crowder - designed a branched style of programming for the US Air force in the 1950s to train troubleshooters to find malfunctions in electronic equipment.
  
• Skinner - based on operant conditioning Skinner's teaching machine required the learner to complete or answer a question and then receive feedback on the correctness of the response. Skinner demonstrated his machine in 1954.
  
  (Saettler, 1990)

Early Use of Programmed Instruction

After experimental use of programmed instruction in the 1920s and 1930s, B. F. Skinner and J.G. Holland first used programmed instruction in behavioral psychology courses at Harvard in the late 1950s. Use of programmed instruction appeared in elementary and secondary schools around the same time. Much of the programmed instruction in American schools was used with individuals or small groups of students and was more often used in junior high schools than senior or elementary schools (Saettler, 1990).

Early use of programmed instruction tended to concentrate on the development of hardware rather than course content. Concerned developers moved away from hardware development to programs based on analysis of learning and instruction based on learning theory. Despite these changes, programmed learning died out in the later part of the 1960s because it did not appear to live up to its original claims (Saettler, 1990).

Individualized Approaches to Instruction

Similar to programmed learning and teaching machines individualized instruction began in the early 1900s, and was revived in the 1960s. The Keller Plan, Individually Prescribed Instruction, Program for Learning in Accordance with Needs, and Individually Guided Education are all examples of individualized instruction in the U.S. (Saettler, 1990).

Keller Plan (1963)

• Developed by F.S. Keller, a colleague of Skinner, the Keller plan was used for university college classes.
  
• Main features of Keller Plan
  • individually paced.
  • mastery learning.
  • lectures and demonstrations motivational rather than critical information.
  • use of proctors which permitted testing, immediate scoring, tutoring, personal-social aspect of educational process.
    
    (Saettler, 1990)

Individually Prescribed Instruction (IPI) (1964)

• Developed by Learning Research and Development Center of the University of Pitsburgh.
  
• Lasted into the 1970s when it lost funding and its use dwindled
  
• Main features of IPI:
  • prepared units.
  • behavioral objectives.
  • planned instructional sequences.
  • used for reading, math and science.
  • included pretest and posttest for each unit.
  • materials continually evaluated and upgraded to meet behavioral objectives.

  (Saettler, 1990)

Program for Learning in Accordance with Needs (PLAN) (1967)

• Headed by Jon C. Flanagan, PLAN was developed under sponsorship of American Institutes for Research (AIR), Westinghouse Learning Corporation and fourteen U.S. School districts.
• Abandoned in late 1970s because of upgrading costs
• Main features of PLAN
  • schools selected items from about 6,000 behavioral objectives.
  • each instructional module took about two weeks instruction and were made up of approximately. five objectives.
  • mastery learning.
  • remedial learning plus retesting.

  (Saettler, 1990)

Computer-Assisted Instruction (CAI)

Computer-assisted instruction was first used in education and training during the 1950s. Early work was done by IBM and such people as Gordon Pask, and O.M. Moore, but CAI grew rapidly in the 1960s when federal funding for research and development in education and industrial laboratories was implemented. The U.S. government wanted to determine the possible effectiveness of computer-assisted instruction, so they developed two competing companies, (Control Data Corporation and Mitre Corporation) who came up with the PLATO and TICCIT projects. Despite money and research, by the mid seventies it was apparent that CAI was not going to be the success that people had believed. Some of the reasons are:

• CAI had been oversold and could not deliver.
• lack of support from certain sectors.
• technical problems in implementation.
• lack of quality software.
• high cost.

Computer-assisted instruction was very much drill-and-practice - controlled by the program developer rather than the learner. Little branching of instruction was implemented although TICCIT did allow the learner to determine the sequence of instruction or to skip certain topics.

(Saettler, 1990)

Systems Approach to Instruction

The systems approach developed out of the 1950s and 1960s focus on language laboratories, teaching machines, programmed instruction, multimedia presentations and the use of the computer in instruction. Most systems approaches are similar to computer flow charts with steps that the designer moves through during the development of instruction. Rooted in the military and business world, the systems approach involved setting goals and objectives, analyzing resources, devising a plan of action and continuous evaluation/modification of the program. (Saettler, 1990)