Chapter 04 - Psychological Foundations of Curriculum PDF

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Psychological Foundations of Curriculum...

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Psychological Foundations of Curriculum LEARNING OUTCOMES After reading this chapter, you should be able to 1. Discuss the appeal of behaviorist theories and why they continue to shape curriculum and instruction 2. Identify and describe Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development 3. Explain how Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory influences the field of

curriculum 4. Justify the development of emotional intelligence in a 21st century curriculum 5. Discuss how an educator can use the information about various types of

thinking 6. Define humanistic learning in schools 7. Identify the three major theoretical schools of learning—behaviorism, cognitive psychology, and phenomenology and humanistic psychology 8. Discuss how psychological foundations enable curriculum workers to perform their educational responsibilities

Psychology is concerned with the question of how people learn, and curriculum specialists ask how psychology can contribute to the design and delivery of curriculum. Put another way, how can curriculum specialists incorporate psychological knowledge to increase the probability that students will learn? Psychology provides a basis for understanding the teaching and learning process. Both processes are essential to curricularists because the curriculum has worth only when students learn and gain knowledge. Other questions of interest to psychologists and curriculum specialists are the following: Why do learners respond as they do to teachers’ efforts? How do cultural experiences affect students’ learning? How should curriculum be organized to enhance learning? What impact does the school culture have on students’ learning? What is the optimal level of student participation in learning the curriculum’s various contents? No curriculum scholar or practitioner would deny the importance of this psychological foundation. All agree that teaching the curriculum and learning it are interrelated, and psychology cements the relationship. This disciplined field of

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inquiry furnishes theories and principles of learning that influence teacher–student behavior within the context of the curriculum. Of course, we are not the first to realize the importance of this foundation. John Dewey knew that psychology was the basis for understanding how the individual learner interacts with objects and persons. The process continues throughout life, and the quality of interaction determines the amount and type of learning. Ralph Tyler considered psychology a “screen” for helping determine what our objectives are and how our learning takes place.1 More recently, Jerome Bruner linked psychology with modes of thinking that underlie the methods used in specific disciplines. These methods can be used to formulate concepts, principles, and generalizations that form the structure of the disciplines.2 In short, psychology is the unifying element of the learning process; it forms the basis for the methods, materials, and activities of learning, and it provides the impetus for many curriculum decisions. Historically, the major theories of learning have been classified into three groups: (1) behaviorist or association theories, the oldest group, which deals with various aspects of stimulus-response (S-R) and reinforcers; (2) cognitive information-processing theories, which view the learner in relation to the total environment and consider the way the learner applies information; and (3) phenomenological and humanistic theories, which consider the whole child,including their social, psychological, and cognitive development. When behaviorist theories are discussed separately, learning tends to focus on conditioning, modifying, or shaping behavior through reinforcement and rewards. When cognitive information-processing theories are stressed, the learning process focuses on the student’s developmental stages and multiple forms of intelligence as well as problem solving, critical thinking, and creativity. The phenomenological aspects of learning deal with the learner’s needs, attitudes, and feelings and entail more alternatives in learning.

BEHAVIORISM The behaviorists, who represent traditional psychology, are rooted in philosophical speculation about the nature of learning—the ideas of Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, and Rousseau. They emphasize conditioning behavior and altering the environment to elicit selected responses from the learner. Behaviorism dominated much of 20th century psychology. Connectionism Edward Thorndike (1874–1949), one of the first Americans to test the learning process experimentally, is considered the founder of behavioral psychology. At Harvard, Thorndike began his work with animals, a course of experimentation other behaviorists also adopted.3 Thorndike focused on testing the relationship between a stimulus and a response (classical conditioning). He defined learning as habit formation, that is, as connecting more and more habits into a complex structure. Knowledge resulted from the accumulation of these stimulus-response associations within this complex structure. Elementary knowledge is composed of groupings of simple components of a skill or knowledge. As one acquired more complicated units of association, one attained a more sophisticated understanding.4 Thorndike defined teaching as arranging the classroom to enhance desirable connections and associations. Thorndike developed three major laws of learning: (1) the Law of Readiness—when a “conduction” unit is ready to conduct, conduction is satisfying and lack of conduction is annoying; (2) the Law of Exercise—a connection is strengthened in proportion to its frequency and its average intensity and duration; and (3) the Law of Effect—responses accompanied by satisfaction strengthen the connection; responses accompanied by discomfort weaken the connection.5 The Law of Readiness suggests that, when the nervous system is ready to conduct, it leads to a satisfying state of affairs; some educators misinterpret this as referring to educational readiness, such as readiness to read. The Law of Exercise provides justification for drill, repetition, and review and is best illustrated today by behavior modification and basic-skills

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instructional approaches. Although teachers used rewards and punishments for centuries prior to Thorndike’s formulation of the Law of Effect, his theory made more explicit and justified what was being done. B. F. Skinner’s operant model of behavior, direct instruction, and many current ideas based on providing satisfying experiences to the learner, as well as reinforcement in the form of feedback, are rooted in this law. Thorndike maintained that (1) behavior was inf luenced by conditions of learning; (2)learners’ attitudes and abilities could improve over time through proper stimuli; (3) instructional experiences could be designed and controlled; and (4) it was important to select stimuli and learning experiences that were integrated, consistent, and mutually reinforcing. For Thorndike, no one subject was more likely than another to improve the mind; rather, learning was a matter of relating new learning to previous learning. He attacked the “psychology” of mental discipline, asserting that there was no hierarchy of subject matter. Thorndike’s Influence: Tyler, Taba, and Bruner Coinciding with Thorndike’s theories, Tyler and Hilda Taba maintained that learning had application and thus could be transferred to other situations. 6 This meant that rote learning and memorization were unnecessary. The student could organize and classify information into existing mental schemata or patterns and use it in different situations. Many of Thorndike’s theories of learning had an impact on the behaviorist and logical approach outlined by Tyler and Taba. However, Tyler and Taba disagreed with Thorndike’s view of connections between specific stimuli and specific responses. They outlined a more generalized view of learning, one that more closely corresponds with a cognitive approach. Whereas Bobbitt and Charters opted for the more precise behavioral approach to learning, along Thorndike’s lines, and viewed objectives in context with highly specific habits to be acquired, Tyler and Taba leaned toward Dewey’s and Judd’s approach: Learning was based on generalizations and the teaching of important principles (terms used by the latter four educators) to explain concrete phenomena.7 Tyler and Taba gave credit to Thorndike in their classic texts. Tyler’s recognition of Thorndike was minimal; nevertheless, he spent considerable space discussing connectionism and organizing learning principles along Thorndike’s transfer theories. Taba devoted an entire chapter to “the transfer of learning” and the influence that Thorndike and others had on her learning theory. Like Thorndike, Taba argued that practice alone does not necessarily strengthen memory or learning transfer, which served to free the curriculum from the rigid roteness and drill of the past. “Since no program, no matter how thorough, can teach everything, the task of all education is to cause a maximum amount of transfer.”8 The idea was to develop content or methods that led to generalizations and that had wide transfer value. Taba advocated problem-solving and inquiry-discovery techniques. The notions of “learning how to learn” and “inquiry discovery,” although popularized by Bruner, are rooted in Thorndike. Thorndike, and later Bruner, assumed that learning that involves meaningful organization of experiences can be transferred more readily than learning acquired by rote.9 The more abstract the principles and generalizations, the greater the possibility of transfer. (This view corresponds with Dewey’s idea of reflective thinking and the steps that he outlined for problem solving.) For Bruner, a true discipline contains structure, which provides the basis for the specific transfer of learning. The abilities to learn and recall are directly related to the learner’s having a structural pattern by which information can be transferred to new situations. Transfer of learning is much more frequent when learning is basic and general. However, whereas Thorndike found that no one subject was more important than another for meaningful learning, Bruner emphasized science and mathematics as the major disciplines for teaching structure. In this connection, Thorndike was more progressive than Bruner; he gave equal weight and equal importance to various subjects—and he broke from traditional thinking about the hierarchy of subject matter. According to classical-conditioning theory, learning consists of eliciting a response by means of previously neutral or inadequate stimuli; some neutral stimulus associated with an unconditioned stimulus at the time of response gradually acquires the ability to elicit the

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response. In Ivan Pavlov’s well-known classical-conditioning experiment, a dog learned to salivate at the sound of a bell. The bell, a biologically neutral, or inadequate, stimulus, was presented simultaneously with food, a biologically nonneutral, or adequate, stimulus. The dog associated the two stimuli so closely that the bell came to be substituted for the food, and the dogreacted tothe bell as he originally had to the food.10 The implications for human learning were important. Some neutral stimulus (bell) associated with an unconditioned stimulus (food) at the time of the response gradually acquired the association to elicit the response (salivation). This theory has led to a wealth of laboratory investigations about learning and has become a focal point in social and political discussions—for example, Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World and the movies The Deer Hunter, Jacob’s Ladder, and Silence of the Lambs. On the American scene, John B. Watson used Pavlov’s research as a foundation for building a new science of psychology based on behaviorism. The new science emphasized that learning was based on the science of behaviorism—what was observable or measurable—not on cognitive processes. The laws of behavior were derived from animal and then human studies and were expected to have the objectivity of scientific laws.11 For Watson, learning was conditioning, and conditioning was adequate to explain all manifestations of higher mutual learning processes. All such activity was nothing more that the reactions from simple, unconditional responses joined to form more sophisticated conditional responses. For Watson and others, the key to learning was to condition the child in the early years of life, based on the method Pavlov had demonstrated for animals. Watson once boasted, “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up and I’ll guarantee to take anyone at random and train him to be any type of specialist I might select—a doctor, lawyer, artist . . . and yes, even into beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, . . . abilities, vocations, and race.”12 That said, Watson bolstered the case for environmental influence in an era when the vast majority of psychologists argued the case for genetics. Behaviorist Reinforcement Theory Many contemporary psychologists believe in the basic stimulus-response principles but reject the rigid mechanistic views of Thorndike and Watson. These contemporary associationists are called “neobehaviorists.” According to one neobehaviorist, Clark Hull, the connection between stimulus and response is determined by its relation to drive and reward.13 A drive is a state of tension arising from a person’s biological or psychological needs. A reward is the satisfaction of the need or reduction of the drive. Conditioning takes place by acting upon the individual while he or she is experiencing these drives and the stimuli that lead to certain drive-reduction responses. The idea is to strengthen the stimulus-response connections that reduce the drive. Redirection of drives leads to reward, or reinforcement. Reward (reinforcement) of these connections in accordance with reducing drive results in an organization of behavior called habit. It is important for the person to reduce his or her primary drives or else face possible death or destruction. The stimulus or stimuli that help reduce these drives form a stimulus-response connection, so that if, on subsequent occasions, any of these stimuli recur in conjunction with the drive, the reaction tends to be evoked. This is called the Law of Reinforcement (somewhat similar to Thorndike’s Law of Effect). Both laws are consistent with common sense. If you want to condition someone, permit that person to associate something pleasant with the behavior you are trying to evoke. The implication for the classroom is to motivate the child when introducing subject matter. On a lighter note, if you want to increase summer attendance at symphonic orchestras among students, serve free ice cream. The students will become conditioned to the enjoyment of music. The drive that functions for the survival of the individual takes precedence over all others, and a threat to normal body functioning reduces the level of activity in other drive areas. Teachers should understand, then, that children who are hungry or have not slept become restless

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or inattentive and are not concerned with secondary drive areas—such as satisfying curiosity or learning. Furthermore, teachers should space classroom exercises to minimize fatigue and maximize performance. Although Hull’s theories have been modified by educators, the idea of establishing appropriate reward and reinforcement activities is, in part, derived from him. Operant Conditioning Perhaps more than any other recent behaviorist, B. Frederick Skinner attempted to apply his theories to the classroom. Basing much of his theory on experiments with mice and pigeons, Skinner distinguished between two kinds of responses: elicited, a response identified with a definite stimulus, and emitted, a response apparently unrelated to an identifiable stimulus. When a response is elicited, the behavior is respondent. When it is emitted, the behavior is operant—no observable or measurable stimuli explain the response’s appearance.14 In operant conditioning, the role of stimuli is less definite; often, the emitted behavior cannot be connected to a specific stimulus. Reinforcers can be classified, also, as primary, secondary, or generalized. A primary reinforcer applies to any stimulus that helps satisfy a basic drive, such as for food, water, or sex. (This reinforcer is also paramount in classical conditioning.) A secondary reinforcer, such as getting approval from friends or teachers, receiving money, or winning school awards, is important for people. Although secondary reinforcers do not satisfy primary drives, they can be converted into primary reinforcers. Because of the choice and range of secondary reinforcers, Skinner refers to them as generalized reinforcers. Classroom teachers have a variety of secondary reinforcers at their disposal, ranging from praise or smiles to admonishment or punishment. Operant behavior discontinues when it is not followed by reinforcement. Skinner classifies reinforcers as positive or negative. A positive reinforcer is simply the presentation of a reinforcing stimulus. A student receives positive reinforcement when a test paper is returned with a grade of A or a note that says, “Keep up the good work.” A negative reinforcement is the removal or withdrawal of a stimulus. When a teacher shouts “Keep quiet!” to the class and the students quiet down, the students’ silence reinforces the teacher’s shouting. Punishment, however, entails the presentation of unpleasant or harmful stimuli or the withdrawal of a (positive) reinforcer, but it is not always a negative reinforcer.15 Although Skinner believes in both positive and negative reinforcement, he rejects punishment because he believes it inhibits learning.16 Acquiring New Operants Skinner’s approach of selective reinforcement, whereby only desired responses are reinforced, has wide appeal to educators because he demonstrated its application to the instructional and learning processes. An essential principle in the reinforcement interpretation of learning is the variability of human behavior, which makes change possible. Individuals can acquire new operants; behavior can be shaped or modified, and complex concepts can be taught. The individual’s capacity for the desired response enables the shaping of behavior or the learning. Behavior and learning can be shaped through a series of successive approximations or a sequence of responses that increasingly approximate the desired one. Thus, through a combination of reinforcing and sequencing desired responses, new behavior is shaped; this is what some people today refer to as behavior modification. Although behavior-modification approaches vary according to the student and the behavior being sought, they are widely used in conjunction with individualized instructional techniques, programmed learning, and classroom-management techniques. Student activities are specified, structured, paced, reinforced, rewarded, and frequently assessed in terms of desired learning outcomes or behaviors. OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING AND MODELING. Albert Bandura has greatly contributed to our understanding of learning through observation and modeling. In a classic study, he showed how aggressive behavior can be learned from seeing human adults act aggressively in real situations or in films and cartoons. The same children also learned nonaggressive behavior by observing humans of subdued temperaments.17

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The repeated demonstration that people can learn and have their behavior shaped by observing another person or even film (obviously, the influence of TV is immense) has tremendous implications for modifying tastes and attitudes, how we learn and perform, and whether we want to develop soldiers or artists. For behaviorists, the findin...