Behaviorism

Though discussed for about 100 years, behaviorism still poses its charisma in the process of human learning, setting up some of the most fundamental instructional settings: focus on the stimulus-response relationship, break down complex tasks to avoid cognitive overload, and positive reinforcement over punishment to shape behavior. Surely there are shortcomings, such as neglecting cognitive processes that oversimplifies the learning process of human beings, as well as a lack of focus on learner’s internal motivation, but it is still thought-provoking and could be applied to many learning scenarios of instructional development.

One of the “a-ha moments” I got from learning the theory of behaviorism is that I have been unintentionally using these strategies – shaping, distraction removal, positive reinforcement - to interact with my interviewees and later my students. I didn’t really realize the importance of positive reinforcement, just “trying to be nice”, to compensate the poor kid living inside of me burdened with many punishments in his childhood, and it worked well.

Learning behaviorism reminds me of my career as a journalist rather than lecturer. In 2019 I was assigned to give a lecture to elementary students on “how to write news”. That was much more challenging than giving a routine report, as I had never taught anything at that moment. When I was drafting my lesson plan, I decided to focus on “those can be observed”- it’s absurd to teach 10-year-old children the theory of “inverted pyramid”. So, my teaching process was more like progressively prompting stimulus-response connection, rather than focusing on cognitive development. Instead of “5W1H”, I gave a prompt like “Today, at school, an event of flower-planting happened...” and that helped. With some stickers as positive reinforcement, the students successfully completed the task of “writing about stories around themselves in the form of news”, reinforced the desired behavior and strengthened the stimulus-response connection – I couldn’t say that they fully understood the cognitive process of “how to finish a news report”, but the activities could be observed were informing that they were capable of writing something almost the same to a news report. (Perhaps many journalists operate at a similar level. #Sarcasm)

So, after learning the behaviorism and related instructional theories, I found that behaviorism is more than Pavlov’s dog and Skinner’s mouse - some of the techniques of instructional theories that are based on behaviorism are explicitly useful, like present the learning content step by step and frequently follow up with quizzes (I love the 10 point quiz after the conclusion of each chapter, it makes me a bit stressful but helps me to memorize the disciplines better).