(a) Describe what psychologists have discovered about perspective in

education.
Introduction:
There are many ways in which human learn skills and behaviors. Two main
behaviorist ways were put forward by Skinner and Pavlov. Applications based on
the humanistic approach were advanced by Rogers. And different Cognitive
applications were mentioned from Piaget, Vygotsy and bruner.
Behaviorist Applications:
The behaviorist perspective focuses on behavior as opposed to internal events
and the main assumption is that all behavior is learned. This can be done
through operant conditioning (skinner) and classical conditioning (Pavlov).
Classical conditioning involves the association of a stimulus to a certain
response. And this is the learned response to the previously neutral stimulus.
Pavlov achieved this through the UCS which triggers an unconditioned response,
a UCR which is a response that occurs naturally as a result of the unconditioned
stimulus, a NS which is the stimulus that does not produce an automatic
response, a CS which is a previously neutral stimulus, but after becoming
associated with the UCS eventually comes to trigger a CR. For example, Pavlov
did this by conditioning dogs to salivate when they heard the sound of a bell and
after this they were given a treat so that every time they heard the sound of the
bell they knew that it would be associated with food.
On the other hand, operant conditioning is a reward and punishment system
that affects whether an action is repeated or changed that allows the formation
of new behaviors. The probability of a response decreases if it isnt followed by a
positive reinforce. The best known example of positive reinforcement is provided
by Skinners research in which a rat in a box containing a lever received food
(reward) when it pressed the lever. The rat learned that food could be obtained
from lever pressing, and so pressed the lever more often.
Programmed learning; Blooms mastery learning (1971) is an approach to
teaching and learning and can be done by a teacher or by an individual student.
It involves small information followed by a memory test. If the learner is correct
they are rewarded for learning each unit with positive feedback. If the learner is
wrong the frame is repeated until they get it right. Kellers personalized system
of instruction (1968) is another type of programmed learning that originated
from Skinners ideas. It has to do with modulised units of instruction where study
guides direct learners through the modules.
Humanistic Applications:
The humanistic approach is holistic and focuses on the individuals unique
characteristics and emphasizes the importance of feelings and emotions Rogers
(1951) wanted to produce an approach that emphasized peoples goodness,
freedom to choose and desire to be better people. Four features are at the heart
of this: Affect, which emphasizes thinking and feeling, not just information
acquisitions. Self-concept, children need to be confident about themselves.
Communication, relates to more attention to positive human interactions and
relationships. Personal values, individuals develop positive values. A remarkable
example of Rogerss humanistic approach is the Summerhill School in the UK that

was founded in 1921. This school put into place many of the humanistic
perspectives mentioned by Rogers. It believes in a democracy system where all
members of the school have an equal vote in how and what they prefer to learn.
It supports the humanistic perspective in the fact that it believes that children
truly learn best when their give freedom and when they can choose what to do
with their time. The school itself encourages creativity on a huge scale so the
students can find more artistic careers. However, this leads to poor performance
in academic skills
Mawson (1970) supported this with student-centred learning, where teachers are
learning helpers rather than dictative instructors. Dunn and Griggs (1998) also
stated that different children have a unique learning style and so traditional
education should change according to this new information, where they should
provide a wide range of options for a diverse group on individuals.
Dennision (1969) advocates open-classrooms. The open classroom is usually an
arrangement that allow large groups of mixed abilities and mixed ages to work
together in a single large room where there may be multiple projects being
undertaken at once. They are student-centred and the students are free to
choose whatever they want to study. In this kind of environment grades and test
are not important to learning. Students can choose to work alone or to work
within a group and have a variety of materials to work from. The main goals of
the open classroom is that children learn to become more independent and less
reliable on teachers so they can start thinking for themselves. This allows for the
student to become the center of attention rather than the teacher. It also allows
the students to move at their own pace and study things that they find
interesting individually.
Another useful technique used is co-operative learning which involves pupils
working in teams to solve a problem. Each child is responsible for a specific role.
When co-operative learning is applied all pupils must put in the same amount of
energy in order to finish the task. Every student should put an equal amount of
effort and attention to complete the task. Five essential elements to this are;
face to face promotive action, individual and group accountability, positive
interdependence, social skills and group processing. A good way in which cooperative learning is achieved in a classroom is through the jigsaw technique.
This is where the students leave their groups to find out about their specific
individual topic and report back and teach the rest of their group about their
topic. This is great for members of the group to share responsibility in cooperating and learning. The goals and rewards that they receive depends on the
contribution they make towards the group as a whole. These kinds of interactions
improve team work skills, interpersonal skills and social skills, which are all
relevant and useful to real life situations. On the other hand, this type of learning
can be effective if the teacher is not skilled enough because it does depend a lot
on the teacher.
There are many ways in which co-operative learning can be achieved. One of
these are learning circles. Its seen very useful because pupils learn how to do
things together. They work together to do various different types of tasks with no
competition arising from different groups. At the end the teacher praises them
for their work and effort. After they present their information the teacher gives
them worksheets and exercises to complete n their group based on what they

learned. The teacher praises the students second time for accomplishing these
exercises. The students dont take any tests as a group but only as individuals.
In the end the team scores are calculated. This method encourages the learners
motivation and allows them to see learning as a sociable activity.
Cognitive Applications:
There are three basic components to Piagets cognitive theory, Schemas which
are the building blocks of knowledge, equilibrium, assimilation and
accommodation which is the adaption process that enables the transition from
one stage to another. Assimilation and accommodation require an active learner
because problem solving cannot be taught it must be discovered. Creating
disequilibrium within the child present them with useful problems. For example,
when a child first learns the word for cat he starts to call all animals that have
four legs a cat. This is referred to as assimilation. This occurs because hell use
his existing Schemas to adapt to new situations in his environment. However,
when an adult tells him that its not a cat, its a dog, he will start to experience
the feeling of disequilibrium and in order to feel right again hell start to modify
the schema for cat in his head. This is known as accommodation. However,
Piaget still believed that children should be taught new information and concepts
when they are ready to process it.
Vygotsky and Bruner had very similar ideas. Vygotsky (1986), believed that
instructions is what marches ahead of development. Emphasizing that children
learn directly from social experiences. Both of them stated that this should be
achieved by someone much more knowledgeable and older than the student.
The instruction should be within the childs zone of proximal development
depending on language development and how they use it. Bruner stated the
instruction should be easily understood and should be related with experiences
that motivate the student. He emphasized the importance of scaffolding which is
the tutor providing input and guidance at a level slightly above the childs. These
instructions should be designed to allow students to draw conclusions and to fill
in the gaps by themselves. In a high school laboratory science class, a teacher
might provide scaffolding by first giving students detailed guides to carrying out
experiments, then giving them brief outlines that they might use to structure
experiments, and finally asking them to set up experiments entirely on their
own.
Although this method has proven to be extremely effective towards children peer
tutoring has shown to have a more positive outcome on the. These are usually
children that are slightly older and more advanced than the learner. This is
because they have the right language skills to understand and the right
knowledge to communicate. This is also a useful method because they also
remember the limitations in their own knowledge and understanding when they
were the students age. A good example of this would be a seven year old girl
trying to teach her little brother how to read and write. The little boy is going to
understand his sister much more than if his mother would teach him. Because
his sister would be much more knowledgeable in his limitations.
Vygotsky, Bruner and Piagets theories were all combined to achieve the CASE
programme. Even though Vygotsky ideas are much more different than Piagets
cognitive theory they were both extremely helpful for the CASE programme.

Even though they emphasized the importance of different factors in promoting

learning they both were aware of the external and internal factors for example,
Vygotskys zone of proximal development meant that he was recognizing the
importance of the internal factors within a child, even though he focused more
on external factors. Some of their ideas were incorporated into the CASE
programme which were lessons given in a classroom in the UK that involved
different phases that the child had to go through when learning a subject. These
phases were: concrete preparation, cognitive conflict, construction,
metacognition and bridging. The process in involved the teachers providing
information during the concrete preparation and bridging phases which was
related to Vygotskys ideas. Then relating to Piagets theory was the cognitive
conflict stage which produced disequilibrium within the child. Next, the stage of
metacognition required students to engage in a process that resembled Piagets
self-discovery theory. The last stage was the constructionist phase which
resembled the peer tutoring approach based on Vygotskys ideas. The CASE
programme provides a great combinations of the ideas of Vygotsky and Piaget to
provide and approach the takes into account the internal and external factors.

Conclusion:
All in all, the Behaviorist, humanistic and cognitive applications to education can
be seen very useful as well as impracticable, considering how much time and
effort has to be put into every student. That being sad it can be agreed upon the
Pavlov, skinner, Rogers, Paget, Vygotsky and Bruner all contributed enormously
to education.
(b) Evaluate what psychologists have discovered about perspective on
learning.
Behaviorist:

Skinners idea of operant conditioning has many useful applications to school,

which are easy to implement and easy for students and teaches to
understand. For example, stickers, certificate, detentions and suspension can
be used to encourage or prevent a behavior. Both operant and classical condition
are a scientific methods of analyzing behavior, emphasizing the use of objective
measurable techniques and effective outcomes. Therefore it can be considered
to be valid and reliable if applied to a large group of children.
However, skinner and Pavlovs principles were discovered using animal
experiments in an artificial setting. The results that are obtained in a lab cannot
be generalized to how students with more complex environments might behave
in school. Therefore it is low in ecological validity. Also, some of these strategies
such as the use of punishment in operant conditioning can creates ethical issues
towards protection of harm for humans and animals.

A major criticism of the behaviorist theory is that it ignores all the other
approaches, such as the cognitive approach. Its crucial to pay attention to our
thought processes and how it can influence our behavior. This leads to the
behaviorist approach only providing a small explanation of human behavior.
Likewise its a very deterministic theory and the student have no choice as to
whether their behavior was changed or not using these methods. This creates a
depressing view on humans and raises ethical questions of consent.
Humanistic:
The humanistic approach give us free will, so we are in control of our own
actions and can take responsibility for the things we do. It treats the students as
individual as it believes that every student is unique. This leads to the collection
of qualitative data which tells us a lot about what student are feeling and what
motivation them in detail. However, Rogers approach can be said to be
unscientific because it does not do any experiments to support its theories and
other approaches, such as behaviorism, have large amounts of supporting data
to back u other theories. Another weakness to this is that treating people as
individuals can be very difficult and time consuming. A lot of staff will be
needed to cater to every students needs.
Co-operative learning techniques, learning circles and open classrooms can be
done in many ways in the classroom and help students to learn how to work
effectively in a group and if done in an organized fashion students tend to learn a
lot. It tends to reduce a lot of stress in the classroom and makes the atmosphere
more relaxed. Students are encouraged to be creative and more co-operate than
in a normal classroom. That being said, its still difficult to tell the difference
between order and chaos. There can be a fine line between a child expressing
themselves and being rebellious. Also, a lack of emphasis on academics tends to
lead to lower grades compared to other schools.

Cognitive:
Piaget stage theory that children learn basic operation and that these operations
than allow them to solve certain problems is valuable. However Piaget
exaggerated the differences between stages and minimized the differences
within stages. He also underestimated the cognitive abilities of young children
but overestimated that of adults. He was more interested in the changes in
cognitive development but not in the processes involved. He admitted that he
wasnt interested in the individual but more in the general development of
intelligence. This also led him to de-emphasize the role of social factor in
cognitive development.

On the other hand, Vygotsky emphasized the importance of the social

environment in cognitive development. His ideas led to the introduction of useful
techniques like scaffolding which provide teachers with a way of intervening in a

childs activity without resorting to traditional methods. Research has shown

that children learn successfully where an adult and can effectively provide
scaffolding. However, Vygotsky carried out little research and exaggerated the
importance of social environments, since childrens cognitive development is
determined more on internal factors. He also did not emphasis on the kids of
social interactions that are most beneficial for learning. Social interactions are
also very complex and scaffolding can only be effective if there is a healthy
relationship between the instructor and learner.