mit3y mouse's List: behavior theories

• A teacher  should serve as more than just a role model of how to do things  or how to respond to situations. They should also be  "cheerleaders" and set challenging goals with  realistic, measurable outcomes that make the students feel proud  and successful. (Klinger, 1999)

• Lots of Fred Jones and new teacher help...
  - mit3y mouse on 2007-11-18

• [Is] the technology deployed today being used to best possible advantage? What conditions need to exist in schools for technology to have an impact?

• mainstream educational psychology
• To reflect   on any act of teaching and learning demands thinking about individual   differences, assessment, development, the nature of the subject matter   being taught, problem solving, and transfer of learning.
• Democritus
• Plato and Aristotle
• the role of the teacher; the relations between teacher and student; the means and methods of teaching; the nature of learning; the order of learning; affect and learning; and learning apart from a teacher.
• visual aids
• understanding, not memory, is the goal of instruction; that we learn best that which we have an opportunity to teach; and that parents have a role to play in the schooling of their children.
• orderly presentation
• what is to be learned must be practiced,
• engage student interest,
• He discussed the schools' role in moral growth, anticipating the work of Dewey, Piaget, Kohlberg, and Gilligan. H
• They promoted the five formal steps for teaching virtually any subject matter: (a) preparation (of the mind of the student), (b) presentation (of the material to be learned), (c) comparison, (d) generalization, and (e) application.
• James's (1890) Principles of Psychology, published in 1890 after 12 years of labor, was the preeminent event in American psychology
• consciousness was continuous-a stream-and not easily divisible. Moreover, and still more startling, he said consciousness chooses-it controls its own attention.
• the plasticity of the nervous system, at least among the young
• It is early acquired habit that guides behavior and provides the glue that holds society together. Thus, James saw education as a crucial element of society, with the school a place for habits to be acquired by design, not willy-nilly
• The year 1892, then, may be used to mark the beginnings of both the APA and the field of educational psychology.
• Talks to Teachers on Psychology (W. James, 1899/1983)
• Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art;
• A science only lays down lines within which the rules of the art must fall, laws which the follower of the art must not transgress; but what particular thing he shall positively do within those lines is left exclusively to his own genius. ..

  • thus, the perfect place for a creative and imaginative individual:)
• He said it was not a teacher's duty to collect scientifically rigorous observations, because to act as a scientist often conflicted with one's performance as a teacher
• The total impression which a perceptive teacher will get of the pupil's condition, as indicated by his general temper and manner. by the listlessness or alertness, by the ease or painfulness with which his school work is done, will be of much more value than those unreal experimental tests, those pedantic elementary measurements of fatigue, memory, association, and attention, etc., which are urged upon us as the only basis of a genuinely scientific paedagogy.
• Clearly, William   James would approve of the portfolio assessment movement of our times   and support the ways in which Howard Gardner and Robert Sternberg have   broadened our conceptions of intelligence.
• fellowships for graduate students.
• With his study of the contents of children's minds, begun in 1883 among Boston kindergarten children, Hall is credited with starting American developmental psychology in general and the child study movement in particular.
• the first empirical educational psychology study that was widely disseminated,
• These terribly imperfect, naturalistic studies that relied on teachers and parents as researchers, formed "the beginnings of a host of new areas focusing on the child, such as experimental child psychology, educational psychology, school psychology, physical education, social work, mental retardation, mental hygiene, and early education"
• His first major article in psychology came out in 1896. It was on the relations between stimuli and responses,
• Experience, as James had noted, is a stream
• putting consciousness, attribution, and constructivist views squarely before the emerging stimulus-response (S-R) psychologists of that time.
• Where was the emphasis on having children respond, on having them be active in some way? What was to be done about will, volition, and motivation? And where was there time allotted during teaching for interpretation, to the making of meaning out of what was presented?
• William T. Harris (1897) was still advocating traditional methods. He stated the four cardinal rules for efficient instruction: "The child must be regular [in attendance] and punctual [in assignments], silent and industrious. .. . It is this which 'builds character' " (pp. 59, 65). Obedience to authority was considered necessary for developing the child's personal sense of responsibility and duty (Monroe, 1952).

  • still what most schools follow...
• Functionalists promoted a psychology interested in the purpose of behavior or the function of mind.
• His laboratory school began as a place to study how children learn,
• the development of thinking skills
• He felt that the individual's intemal processes must be understood. Most important were the urgent needs, impulses, and habits that each child possessed
• Dewey, therefore, believed in a personal and idiosyncratic curriculum for each child. Thus, the project method was advocated by the progressive educators who tried to put Dewey's ideas into practice

  • Dewey--project method
• Can the teacher ever receive 'obligatory prescriptions'? Can he receive from another a statement of the means by which he is to reach his ends, and not become hopelessly servile in his attitude?" (
• James Sully's (1889) Outlines of Psychology,
• palpable
• Instead of promoting the practice school, he tried to open an educational laboratory (Joncich, 1968, p. 163). How different from Dewey at Chicago, who saw the school as the laboratory!
• t is interesting to note and reflect on the fact that Thorndike apparently never field-tested the ideas and materials he promoted in the different subject matter areas. He was so sure of his scientific footing that field-testing his texts and educational materials in the various school subjects seemed absurd.
• Their beliefs were so powerful that empirical data were not seen as relevant (Travers, 1985).
• We now see more concern for (a) the assessment of portfolios--to better reflect the achievement of students in their classroorns; (b) performance tests--a venerable form of assessment brought back into the limelight because we have learned that classical forms of testing can not easily be made to tap complex aspects of human cognition; (c) informal classroom assessment by teachers--because informal assessment, conducted on the run by sensitive teachers trying to make sense out of a large group of very heterogeneous students, is how the vast majority of classroom assessments are carried out, and it is these data that are used in teachers' decisions about instruction or the need for special services for particular students; and (d) program evaluation--which now is seen as a political process, to be conducted by a whole range of social scientists and humanistic scholars, to educate decision makers for making responsible choices in a democratic nation (see Cronbach, 1980, for a synthesis of these views, as well as the writings of other distinguished evaluators such as House, Stake, or Weiss in McLaughlin & Phillips, 1991). These contemporary views of evaluation are far more Deweyan and much less Thorndikian than was true when educational psychologists began to work in program evaluation.

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