Skinner being a proponent for education makes the connection to Instructional Design more natural than it could be with a more antagonistic founding father. Skinner was of the belief that teachers that fail are not reinforcing enough and rely on one type of teaching (Brau, Fox, Robinson, 2022). In a blog post by Marina Arshavskiy for your eLearning World, there are four ways to implement behaviorism in education: repetition, feedback and recognition, response measurement, and gamification.

• Repetition - Breaking larger units down into smaller ones, this way the learner is able to repeat these smaller foundational aspects in pursuit of the larger educational goal (Marina, 2020).

• Feedback and Recognition - With positive reinforcement being foundational to behaviorism, designing moments in the instruction for feedback or certification upon completion of topics, the student can become more motivated to remain invested (Marina, 2020)

• Response Management - Including assessments that are easily and quickly able to be returned to the student, the learning done by the student is able to be measured (Marina, 2020).

• Gamification - In the eLearning sphere, the additions of progress bars for completion, point systems, and/or leaderboards can help to retain the students attention (Marina, 2020).

Behaviorism can be an important tool for higher education, especially when considering the rise in online learning options. Whether the classroom is physical or virtual, the tenets of behaviorism can be beneficial is assessment of your teaching. If your classroom is not achieving the success you are expecting, you can reflect on the whys. Maybe you are not providing feedback in a timely manner, resulting in the class becoming disinterested or not understanding how they are doing with the material. Maybe the environment is boring and students are becoming distracted by more interesting things, such as their technology. Going back to Skinner, learners should be active in their education. Behaviorism allows us to look at the environment we have created in the classroom and see if learning has occurred or not. If it has not, then we have to assess the environment (Brau, Fox, Robinson, 2022).

Behaviorism does not take into consideration the internal motivation or feelings of the student, or even the teacher. An engaging and optimized classroom may receive results that are worse than expected due to a group of students being uninterested in the topic area, or a boring and inefficient classroom may see success due to heavy internal interest in the topic. Additionally, by using repetition and reinforcement, we might not create true learning. With assessment, the practice of studying all of the material in a short period of time prior to the exam through things like flashcards can be rewarded with high grades, but this does not lead to long term learning. Students can cram for an exam, pass it and forget everything they previously learned before repeating the process.

Behaviorism is still important in the classroom, but pairing it with additional learning theories is important to create a classroom that fosters learning both in the short and long term.