Educational Psychology
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Different way humans learn
conditioning
Conditioning is the learning of a behavioral response. The response doesn’t have to be intentional or unintentional. There are two types of conditioning there is classical conditioning and operant conditioning. The classical conditioning was discovered by Ivan Pavlov. The Classical conditioning leans towards the involuntary behavioral response. Example of such involuntary response is fear or salivation towards a certain food. Pavlov first discovered such behavior in his dog as he noticed the salivation of the dog when he would sound a tuning fork to signal that he was being fed (255 Woolfolk). Operant conditioning was developed by D. F. Skinner. Contrary to Pavlov’s belief Skinner believed that classical learning was a small section of learning. He believed that the biggest part of conditioning was how people operated in their environment (256 Woolfork). An example is when one was in elementary school and would receive stickers for behaving well and therefore would learn that if on was good he would get a sticker. Thus, one would learn a behavior based on the consequences of ones actions. The importance of this learning method is critical to how human s learn as it creates a subconscious behavior that teaches us to behave a certain way. This can most clearly be seen in babies as they do not yet from words or understand them so conditioning is how babies learn for the beginning of their lives.
social learning theory.
Social learning theory breaks away from the traditional behaviorism and forms a new section the beliefs of Enactive and observational learning. The one credited for the development of this theory is Albert Bandura. Bandura states, “I argued against the primacy of conditioning in favor of observational learning, in which people neither emit responses nor receive reinforcements during the process of learning” (278 Woolwork). Bandura talks about how instead of learning by experiencing one can learn by watching others experience it. He is not saying that people should not experience it. He just believes that people should first observe before giving it a try themselves. A more supporting statement, “The observing of others being reinforced or punished for particular behaviors” (412 Woolfork). The most learning is done not through people’s own experiences rather by how they see the end result of another’s experience. Later, as Bandura expanded his theory and included other factors such as expectations and beliefs. The general concept remained the same in the sense that one still observes other people to learn however, now they take considerations that as one observes one starts to anticipate the expectations and beliefs that people have and react accordingly to avoid reprehension. Bandura did not stop growing the theory as he also became aware of the personal factor as well which would depend on the social aspect of the individual’s life.
information processing theory.
The brain can hold up to one million gigabytes of data. Yet, for some reason some people can’t seem to remember what they had for lunch that same day. The question is how one can remember all the information and how the brain processes the information. The brain stores knowledge which is the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject that can be recalled over a certain period of time. The way the mind processes information is simple. The information processing theory is an example of a general process of how we process information. As Woolwork, mentions in her psychology book the knowledge that people are actually exposed to is not all processed (294). The actual process consists of getting input and from there filtering out the information, once some of the information is filtered out then It gets transferred to the short term memory bank, where it goes another filtering process to get either forgotten, or converted into long term memory. The key to learning and getting the information processing theory is to do more repetition. As stated by Aristotle, “that we remember things together when they are similar, when they contrast, and when they are contiguous.” (Woolfork 254). Aristotle, basically states how the information processing theory can be associated with the repetition of it to help retain the knowledge. The basis is the behavior associated with the learning process associated to it.