Most learning theorists define learning as the change in a person's knowledge or behavior caused by experience. To behavioral theorists, the relationship between environmental stimuli and observable responses that indicate change is the most important.

I'd like to start off tonight's class with an introductory analysis of the short teaching video from the Woolfolk CD. After we watch this video, let's discuss the following issues as a review of the content we read about in chapter 6.

1) What desired behaviors is this instructor trying to "teach" her young students?

2) What desired behaviors are the students trying to elicit from the teacher?

3) Identify some of the consequences observed in this video. What effect do they have on student behaviors?

Shanita suffers from severe test anxiety, and has done so ever since high school. That trend has continued in college, where most of her courses utilize a sophisticated online testing system at the campus computer lab. Today for her Journalism class, the instructor required them to meet in the same computer lab for a guest speaker and demonstration of some new research software. Even though there were no tests scheduled, she couldn't help but be nervous--short of breath, elevated heart rate, jittery teeth, ok well maybe not jittery teeth, but the point is that her anxiety level was still redlined by the sight and smell of the computer lab. She used to love computers in high school, but now gets upset whenever she has to use one for class, especially in the lab.

1) How can this scenario be explained as an example of classical conditioning? Identify the neutral stimulus, the unconditioned stimulus, the conditioned stimulus, the unconditioned response, and the conditioned response.

2) How do the principles of contiguity and generalization explain the development of Shanita's computer anxiety?

4) Consistent to the principle of extinction, what would you recommend as an appropriate intervention to reduce her anxiety?

Skinner and Thorndike contributed heavily to the behaviorist notion that learning is a change in behavior effected by manipulating antecedents and consequences.

I wonder what they would say about the convention in most elementary educational software programs whereby screen objects emit silly sound effects when moused-over? (See www.funschool.com for an example). What kind of reinforcement schedule is utilized in such programming and how does it supposedly increase the probability of the desired behavior recurring? What is the desired behavior, anyway?

And what about those lengthy animated intros that many educational software titles (My Teacher is an Alien) use to catch the attention of young learners? How would a behaviorist explain an interface design that allows students to bypass the beginning content by clicking a skip intro button? How is such a feature a good example of negative reinforcement?

And if a business trainer conducting a workshop on a new sales procedure utilizes desktop management software to project a student's current computer screen to the entire class, how would it be considered punishment if the student was off-task and playing Solitaire?

Imagine sitting in a large lecture hall listening to a speaker drone about content that is uninteresting to you personally but required for a state curriculum (for example, title insurance arbitration). Suppose further that the instructor's Powerpoint presentation uses slide transitions and bullet-item animations with sound effects.

1) Why would a behaviorist justify the use of such eye-candy as necessary for cueing?

2) What would be the antecedent stimulus and what would be the target behavior?

3) What useful prompts could immediately follow such cues?

Shaping is the highly positivistic notion that any phenomenon can be broken apart into constituent elements arranged in a logical and teachable sequence. Teaching writing as a process, for example, is an obvious implementation of this behavioral principle.

What if the topic of a professional development seminar was on web page design? And what if the school faculty members attending this seminar were not very technologically experienced and highly apprehensive about learning a software application?

1) How could the instructor utilize the shaping principle to design a successful two-hour seminar? Would a task analysis be an appropriate procedure to implement?
2) If the instructor used Powerpoint to present seminar content, would progressively disclosing slide bullets be considered shaping?
2) What characteristic must all objectives conforming to the shaping principle share?
3) How might the instructor apply the Premack Principle in this workshop to elicit intended behaviors?

In one of the many games on the preschool educational software CD, Millie's Math House, the young learner is required to click and drag various graphic objects multiple times to match a demonstrated quantity. When the task is first requested, "Put three bears on your desk, and click on my curtain when you finish," the objects the user must drag and drop are lined up near the bottom of the screen. There are twenty objects available, yet the requesting character, Millie, only asks for single digits. This discrepancy becomes significant when the user fails the task two times consecutively; after the second error, the program removes the extraneous objects, leaving only the correct number (three, in this case), which the user must still drag into position.

1) A behavioral learning specialist would describe this use of adaptive interactive feedback as a way to promote mastery learning. Explain.

In the 1970s, educational technologists were obsessed with the behavioristic notions of programmed instruction, a computer-assisted-instructional (CAI) model that required students to sit at a computer terminal, read text onscreen and then answer objective questions that provided immediate feedback and tracked student performance. Students progressed through the digital units of instruction in a sequential manner. When they scored higher than a predetermined criterion reference, they were encouraged to proceed to the next level, usually higher in difficulty. Some of the more sophisticated systems would catalog a user's performance across multiple domains of test items, offering remediation lessons if the student scored weakly in one or more areas.

Perhaps ironically, although the programmed instruction movement failed to produce the learning gains anticipated (it had even been predicted to one day replace teachers), adapting a program to specific user performance remains a critical algorithm in high-stakes online testing environments, such as the SAT, GRE, MCAT and LSAT.