Cognitive Versus
Behavioral Psychology
Behavioral Psychology
University of Delaware
|
Behavioral Psychology |
This article consists of excerpts from Chapter Four of the McGraw-Hill textbook Multimedia Literacy, which comes with a CD-ROM full of tools and resources for creating Web pages and multimedia applications. The ISBN is 0-07-913107-7. The material on this Web page is Copyright © 1997 by McGraw-Hill; used by permission. For more information, call McGraw-Hill at (800) 338-3987 or send e-mail to the book's publisher, Rhonda Sands.
Much of what happens in the traditional classroom was influenced
heavily by the behaviorist movement, which dominated American
psychology from about 1920 to 1970. Chief among the behaviorists
was Skinner (1938, 1953), who saw that human behavior is powerfully
shaped by its consequences. Moreover, Skinner felt that psychology
was essentially about behavior and that behavior was largely determined
by its outcomes. While Skinnerian methods have been effective
in learning how to train animals and helping human beings modify
their behavior, the behaviorists fell short of what is most important
in education for most educators. To educate, you must do more
than modify behavior. To educate, you must help the student learn
how to develop strategies for learning. Such is the goal of the
cognitive movement in education as defined by Bruning (1995, p.
1):
Cognitive psychology is
a theoretical perspective that focuses on the realms of human
perception, thought, and memory. It portrays learners as active
processors of information--a metaphor borrowed from the computer
world--and assigns critical roles to the knowledge and perspective
students bring to their learning. What learners do to enrich information,
in the view of cognitive psychology, determines the level of understanding
they ultimately achieve.
It is appropriate that Bruning borrows from the computer world
in his definition of cognitive psychology. As you will see in
the educational applications surveyed in this chapter, multimedia
computers provide a powerful environment for helping achieve the
goals of the cognitive movement in education. As articulated by
Piaget (1969), students learn better when they can invent knowledge
through inquiry and experimentation instead of acquiring facts
presented by a teacher in class. It is difficult for a teacher
to provide this kind of environment for each student in a traditional
classroom. Since there is only one teacher for many students,
it is physically impossible for the teacher to support each student's
individual needs. Multimedia computers help by providing students
with a world of interconnected knowledge to explore. The screen-capture
and downloading tools you will learn in the tutorial section of
this book enable students to collect what they discover and construct
a framework for organizing and understanding. Thus, the student
becomes an active processor of the information, and knowledge
is the by-product.
Since the learner is portrayed as an active processor who explores,
discovers, reflects, and constructs knowledge, the trend to teach
from this perspective is known as the constructivist movement
in education. As Bruning (1995, p. 216) explains, "The aim
of teaching, from a constructivist perspective, is not so much
to transmit information, but rather to encourage knowledge
formation and development of metacognitive processes for judging,
organizing, and acquiring new information." Several theorists
have embellished this theme. Rumelhart (1981), following Piaget,
introduced the notion of schemata, which are mental frameworks
for comprehension that function as scaffolding for organizing
experience. At first, the teacher provides instructional scaffolding
that helps the student construct knowledge. Gradually, the teacher
provides less scaffolding until the student is able to construct
knowledge independently. For example, in the History of Flight
tutorial in Part Six of this book, a lot of scaffolding is provided
at first as an aid to learning how to develop a multimedia application;
gradually, the scaffolding is removed until the student is able
to create new multimedia works independently. Skinner and the
behaviorists used related techniques known as prompting
and fading. A hierarchy of sequential prompts firms up
and reinforces a student's skill, and fading removes the prompts
gradually until the student can perform a task independently.
Vygotsky (1978) emphasized the role of social interactions in
knowledge construction. Social constructivism turns attention
to children's interactions with parents, peers, and teachers in
homes, neighborhoods, and schools. Vygotsky introduced the concept
of the zone of proximal development, which is the difference
between the difficulty level of a problem a student can cope with
independently and the level that can be accomplished with help
from others. In the zone of proximal development, a student and
an expert work together on problems that the student alone could
not work on successfully.
A challenge for software designers is to create programs that
can function as the expert in the zone where learning and development
take place. Software that succeeds can help transform the traditional
teacher-centered classroom into a more learner-centered environment.
Table 4-1 compares the teacher-dominated and cognitive perspectives.
As you review the software surveyed in this chapter, keep this
comparison in mind, and reflect on the role multimedia computers
can and should play in the contemporary classroom.
| Teacher Centered | Learner Centered |
| Teachers Present Knowledge | Students Discover and Construct Knowledge |
| Students Learn Meaning | Students Create Meaning |
| Learner as Memorizer | Learner as Processor |
| Learn Facts | Develop Learning Strategies |
| Rote Memory | Active Memory |
| Teacher Structures Learning | Social Interaction Provides Instructional Scaffolding |
| Repetitive | Constructive |
| Knowledge Is Acquired | Knowledge Is Created |
| Teacher Provides Resources | Students Find Resources |
| Individual Study | Cooperative Learning and Peer Interaction |
| Sequential Instruction | Adaptive Learning |
| Teacher Manages Student Learning | Students Learn to Manage Their Own Learning |
| Students Learn Others' Thinking | Students Develop and Reflect on Their Own Thinking |
| Isolationist | Contextualist |
| Extrinsic Motivation | Intrinsic Motivation |
| Reactive Teachers | Proactive Teachers |
| Knowledge Transmission | Knowledge Formation |
| Teacher Dominates | Teacher Observes, Coaches, and Facilitates |
| Mechanistic | Organismic |
| Behavioralist | Constructivist |
Science teachers are using the Internet to provide students with
collaborative learning experiences, access to scientific databases,
and virtual visits to science laboratories. Reporting on the New
Jersey Networking Infastructure in Education project, Friedman,
Baron, and Addison (1996) cite several compelling examples of
science study via the Internet. Students gather samples from local
pond water, measure chemical characteristics, examine organisms,
and share observations with peers over the Internet. An ocean
weather database that tracks ships at sea enables students to
calculate the speed and direction of ocean going vessels and predict
arrival times. Students visit the Plasma Physics Laboratory at
Princeton University to access data from fusion experiments as
quickly as Princeton scientists. Table 4-2 lists the World Wide
Web sites you can visit to learn more about these projects. For
the latest information about the New Jersey Networking Infastructure
in Education, go to http://k12science.stevens-tech.edu.
The Curry School of Education has a frog dissection tutorial that
shows how the World Wide Web can host highly interactive educational
activities over the Internet. In one part of the tutorial, for
example, the student clicks places on a picture of a frog to mark
the beginning and ending of an incision. If the student is wrong,
feedback is provided. When the student gets the answer right,
the incision is made, and another picture shows the results. You
can do the frog dissection tutorial at http://curry.edschool.virginia.edu/~insttech/frog.
Virtual FlyLab (VFL) is an interactive Web site for genetics instruction.
Developed by Dr. Robert Desharnais at California State University
at Los Angeles, VFL enables students to conduct genetic experiments
by "breeding" fruit flies over the Web and observing
the patterns of inheritance in the offspring. Students can also
formulate hypotheses and conduct statistical tests. Virtual FlyLab
is on the Web at http://vflylab.calstatela.edu/edesktop/VirtApps/VflyLab/IntroVflyLab.html.
You can find out more about how multimedia computers are being used in biology teaching at the National Association of Biology Teachers Web site at http://www.gene.com/ae/RC/NABT. As illustrated below, there is a teacher's lounge where you can discuss the latest trends with other biology teachers. The teacher/scientist network lets you team with scientists on important projects such as the Human Genome Project. The search engine lets you perform keyword searches of all the documents in the NABT site.
Active technologies on the World Wide Web can help solve a fundamental
problem in teaching chemistry: visualizing the structure of chemical
models. In a textbook, students are limited to a static photo
that shows only one position. On the Web, using active technologies
such as Sun's Java, Macromedia's Shockwave, and Microsoft's ActiveX,
students can rotate chemical models by clicking and dragging with
a mouse. For example, figure 4-13 shows different stages in the
rotation of a model of a benzene molecule on a Java Web page.
To try this and other chemical models on the Web, point your Java-enabled
Web browser at http://www.udel.edu/fth/java/MoleculeViewer.
Figure 4-13. Java rotations of a model of a benzene molecule. Rotating the chemical model leads the user to discover that the centers of the six carbon atoms and six hydrogen atoms in benzene are coplanar.
The Internet is the richest source of information on the planet. Just about anything you could ever want to know is available online. Search engines make it possible for scholars and students to find and download this information. Because researchers in most fields are using the Web to communicate about research in progress, students can find out not only what has been done in the past, but also study the latest findings of the top researchers in the field. Students can even search the ongoing conversations that current researchers are holding via newsgroups.
Some skill is required in using Internet search engines, however. Unless the student knows how to use the Advanced Search Syntax effectively, frustration will set in as tens of thousands of irrelevant documents get found in response to a naively constructed search. All faculty should become role models in the use of the Internet search engines and show students how to make the most effective use of the Web in their discipline. Text, graphics, audio, and video are being used in virtually all subjects to provide an online multimedia resource for teaching, learning, and scholarship. The faculty should help students learn how to download this information and manipulate it for use in classroom presentations and the writing of multimedia term papers.
The new Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia permit students to include reasonable amounts of copyrighted works-including text, pictures, music, and video-in multimedia term papers. Every student at the University of Delaware now has a Web site, where multimedia term papers can be mounted on the Internet. The two major word processors that students use to write term papers-WordPerfect and Microsoft Word-both have Web page creation utilities that can translate term papers into Web pages automatically. WordPerfect's translator is called WP Internet Publisher, and Microsoft's is called the Internet Assistant.
Once again, all faculty should become role models for using the Web to create a virtual world of interconnected scholarship. When the day-to-day tools used to write scholarly papers take on the ability to create Web pages automatically, there is no excuse for scholars to delay joining the online community and mounting their research papers on the Web.
At many colleges and universities, every student has a Web site. The faculty should encourage students to submit their term papers on the Web, where the faculty can read and grade them in a multimedia format. In addition to preparing students for participating in the scholarly infrastructure of the 21st century, Web-based submission of multimedia term papers has advantages for faculty as well. It's easy to copy text from a student term paper, paste it into an e-mail message, and send it to a student along with critical comments for improving the section in question. By requiring students to link bibliographic references to source documents online, faculty can more easily check references in term papers. If a term paper gets submitted with misspellings and grammatical errors, the faculty member can send the student a quick e-mail message requiring that the student run a spell-checker and a grammar analyzer (the grammar analyzer built into Microsoft Word 97 is fantastic) and resubmit the paper.
If faculty members can learn to shift their pedagogical paradigm from teacher-dominated to learner-centered, students will become more actively involved in the teaching and learning process. At the end of a course, instead of having been trained in the digestion of existing knowledge, students will have become able to continue finding, judging, critiquing, synthesizing, and constructing new knowledge. In sum, students will have become truly educated, not just trained.
Bruning, Roger H., Schraw, G. J., and R. R. Ronning. Cognitive Psychology and Instruction. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1995.
Friedman, E.A., Baron, J.D., and C. J. Addison. Universal access to science study via Internet. T.H.E. Journal (June 1996), 83-86.
Piaget, J. The Mechanisms of Perception. New York: Basic Books, 1969.
Rumelhart, D. E. Schemata: The building blocks of cognition. In J. T. Guthrie (Ed.), Comprehension and Teaching: Research Reviews (pp. 3-26). Newark, DE: International Reading Association, 1981.
Skinner, B. F. The Behavior of Organisms. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1938.
Skinner, B. F. Science and Human Behavior. New York: Macmillan, 1953.
Vygotsky, L. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.
This Web page was created by Fred T. Hofstetter,
Professor and Director of Instructional Technology at the University of Delaware.
Send comments to fth@udel.edu.