Learning as Shaping Behavior

Embrace the Power of the Insight

How Do You Conceive of Learning?

Learning isn’t simply acquiring knowledge, character, or skill, just as teaching is not simply transmitting knowledge or cultivating character or skill. Those conceptions might be relatively weak analogies for something much more powerful and real. Behavioral approaches to learning suggest instead that learning involves a lasting change in behavior after a desired goal. Focusing on what you want a student to be able to do, rather than on what you want the student to know, can bring a rich harvest of teaching and learning insights.

A History of Behavioral Approaches

Behavioral approaches to learning, an application of behavioral psychology, have in one form or another been around a long time. Aristotle’s associationism, focusing on what he called the laws of similarity, contrast, contiguity, and frequency, could qualify as a behavioral approach. Aristotle had the idea that students should practice their subjects, gradually habituating to performance standards. Students thus built memory in images through repetition, influenced by reward and punishment.

Behaviorism and Psychology

Behavioral approaches to learning eventually became closely associated with psychology. Edward Thorndike’s connectionism, articulated in his late 1800s text Educational Psychology, qualifies as a behavioral approach. Thorndike focused on student readiness, exercise, and effects. John B. Watson’s work, from the 1910s up through his 1930 publication Behaviorism, popularized the approach. Pavlov’s classical-conditioning work of the late 1920s led to B.F. Skinner’s operant-conditioning work described in his 1938 Behavior of Organisms. Skinner held that to teach is to arrange the contingencies of reinforcement so that students learn the desired behavior. More recent developments in the field of behavioral and educational psychology include Clark Hull’s mathematico-deductive theory and William Estes’s stimulus-sampling theory, although their complexity kept them from significantly influenced educational designs.

Observational Approaches

The key to the success of behavioral approaches is that they lean into observation. One doesn’t have to guess at what students are thinking. One instead looks to what students are doing. Behavioral approaches make learning evident. They also promote student activity and engagement. Respect the value of behavioral approaches. And think of how you conceive of learning. Your understanding of what learning entails affects your teaching.