8 Learning Theories Essay

Within the elementary classroom, there is a copious amount of rules, guidelines and considerations a teacher must take into account. Learning theories such as social, cognitive, and behavioral learning should be implemented to provide framework and boundaries for the children. When incorporating learning theories in the classroom, it is important to have a clear understanding of how they work and how they will benefit the child and the teacher. These particular theories allows the teacher to run an efficient and effective classroom from day one.

The Behaviourist approach believe that human beings are able to learn all types of behaviours through the environment they grow up in, its believes that we learn these behaviours through using theories, such as, Ivan Pavlov’s Classical Conditioning and Burrhus Frederic Skinner’s Operant Conditioning.

For years, there have been many theorists who have shared their views on how individuals learn. Such research has determined that individuals have different learning styles. It is important for teacher to understand the learning styles of both themselves and their students because it helps them to relay the subject knowledge to the students. The teacher is in a position where they must be able to assess the learning styles of their students. This means that the students and teachers are both in a process of learning.

Teaching theories are as much part of the classroom as the student and the teacher. The effect individual theories have on an environment depends how they are incorporated within the classroom in addition to the influence they have had on the curriculum construction. This essay will briefly look at how motivation theory, cognitive and social cognitive theory along with constructivism have impacted on education and the classroom.

Within this perspective, there are three theories that describe different ways in which learning occurs; classical conditioning theory, operant conditioning theory, and cognitive social learning theory (Hutchinson, 2015).

Behaviorism is one of the most used theories in education. Due to it can fit in both a classroom setting and at home. Educators had sought out the reason why for many years. But due to each child learns a different way so should the educator. Behaviorism was study by many great Psychologists over the years. Just to name some that had done work and publish books on the subject are, John Watson, Ivan Pavlov, Clark Hull, and B.F. Skinner.

can be used to strengthen existing behaviors, as well as learn new ones. Principles of behaviorism can be

Persistence is an essential trait if success is desired in any learning set up. Students must demonstrate the trait of repeating certain tasks for full comprehension and grasp of concepts. The brain is always wired to forget certain concepts that might have been explained earlier. Persistence makes sure the student never hangs up their boots when they encounter a hard task. Besides grasping forgotten concepts, persistence is also efficient when dealing with practical sessions. The ability of the student to perform one task repetitively is desirable and it increases the chances of the student to permanently and fully grasp the concept (Habley, 2013).

The learning perspective what is it? This is the study of how exactly a person is effected through what they learn on a daily basis. Through family, their surroundings and behavior. The people who believe this line of thinking are called behaviorists. Many people look at the learning perspective in a suspiciouse manner not believeing or trusting any of the experiments. But there are many contributions and many limitations of the learning perspective.

“Behaviorism is predominantly concerned with evident and measurable aspects of human behavior. In defining behaviour, behaviourist-learning theories emphasise changes in behavior that result from stimulus-response links made by the learner. Behaviour is directed by stimuli. An individual selects one response instead

The Behavioural approach (also called the learning theory) focuses on the belief that our environment, e.g. people, experiences and learning, influences the development and behaviour of an individual whilst thinking the internal functions, such as thoughts and cognition, are impossible to observe, so they are not apart of the scientific approach to psychology. This theory is also based on the concept of ‘explaining behaviour through observation. Behaviourists assume individuals are born as a blank state (tabula rasa), meaning they do not think biology and cognitive functions influence our behaviour, only our environment does. A large idea that the theory hold is that behaviour can be broken down into stimulus-response units. Stimuli are anything environmental that triggers an individuals’ senses, for example, a student being asked to complete an assignment (stimulus) would respond by completing the assignment. Stimulus-response theories form the basis of classical or operant conditioning, which suggests animals and humans can learn through the relation of a response to any certain stimuli.

According to Eggen and Kauchak (2012) behaviorism is a theory that explains learning in terms of observable behaviors and how they’re influenced by stimuli from the environment. It defines learning as a relatively enduring change in observable behavior that occurs as a result of experience (Schunk,

Behaviorism is the point of view where learning and behavior are described and explained in terms

In the theory of behaviourism the learner is passive and reacts to external stimuli with a response which then creates a new behaviour. Behaviour is then shaped and conditioned by reinforcement. According to behaviourists the learner always starts off with a

Behaviorism focuses on a new behavioral pattern being repeated until it becomes automatic. 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. 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