It’s September, and that can only mean one thing: the Roughriders are losing. Oh, all right, TWO things: the Roughriders are losing, and kids are back in school.
School, in theory, is where we learn what we need to know to be a useful member of society. How these things are taught has changed drastically over the years: the one-room classroom of 70 years ago is a far cry from today’s Internet-wired multimedia learning experience. Technology has driven some changes; others reflect changes in theories of how children learn.
It’s a bit disconcerting to discover that there is no single accepted theory of learning. In fact, there are dozens. However, they can generally be divided into three broad categories: behaviorist, cognitive and developmental.
Behaviorists focus only on behavior, while discounting mental activity, and see all learning as a form of conditioning. The classic example is Pavlov’s dogs. Pavlov noticed the dogs salivated when food was provided. By ringing a bell before providing food, he “conditioned”–that is, taught–the dogs to associate the sound of a bell with food. Soon they salivated whenever he rang the bell.
B.F. Skinner showed that by reinforcing the desired response to a stimulus–by providing food when a pigeon pecks the place you want it to peck, for example–you can make the response more likely. Reinforcement can be either positive (a reward) or negative (a punishment). Using reinforcement, Skinner taught pigeons to dance and even bowl.
In school, every time a teacher gives gold stars or good grades for good behavior, or writing lines or bad grades for bad behavior, she’s practicing behaviorism. Behaviorism taught schools the importance of repetition, of breaking complicated material down into a series of small, concrete tasks, and of providing both positive and negative reinforcement consistently and immediately. Most educational computer programs use behaviorist ideas.
However, as noted, behaviorism ignores the mental aspects of learning. That’s where cognitive theories come in.
American researcher Robert Gagné has identified a series of mental processes we go through every time we learn something. First, there’s receptance: our senses receive stimuli from the environment. Next comes selective perception: our brains receive the data from our senses, ignore those that are irrelevant (the lawnmower outside the window during math class, for example) and concentrate on what is important (the teacher’s voice).
This information is placed in short-term memory. If we feel it’s important enough (“This material WILL be on the final exam!”), our brains encode it and organize it, and place it in long-term storage.
When the material is needed again (pop quiz!), we search our long-term memory; retrieve the information, organize a suitable response, and ask our body to carry out any necessary action (write the answer on the quiz paper). The final stage is feedback and reinforcement: we observe the effect of our performance (right answer!) and prepare to repeat the process as appropriate (on the final exam, we’ll answer the same way).
That’s all very well, but does a kindergarten student learn the same way as a high school or university student? Developmental theorist would say no. Educators agree, and so design curricula differently for different age groups.
The various stages of learning through which we pass are identified differently by different theorists, but probably the most influential has been Jean Piaget. He described four stages of intellectual development, which educators have very much taken to heart.
In the sensorimotor stage, zero to four years of age, children explore things that can be seen, felt and touched, and develop motor skills. From two to seven, in the preoperational stage, children begin to think in terms of themselves. They live in the present, and act on intuition, not on logic. From seven to 11–elementary school–children begin to understand numbers, space and classification and begin to think logically, but very concretely. Finally, from ages 11 to 15, children begin to think abstractly, to hypothesize, generalize, reason and form different standpoints, and develop ideals–sometimes much to the annoyance of parents and teachers, when those ideals don’t match their own!
With all of these theories and observations floating around, exactly how children should be taught is a constant matter of debate. Many different approaches flourish around the world, and nobody can say which is best. If you’re a parent, this may concern you, but if you’re a kid, you probably don’t care. For you, all the theory in the world boils down to one cold, hard fact:
Summer is over.
