1.2 Cognitive versus behavioral psychology

Cognitive versus behavioral psychology

“The answers never lie in more rewards or punishments ”

Rationale

The use of behavioral psychology to explain how students learn is generally not accepted today. Schools, however, are often locked into the behavioral psychology tradition of requiring written behavioral objectives for academics and that any behavior concern can be remedied with either more rewards or more punishments . The task is to move your thinking from a behavioral perspective to a cognitive perspective.

With a behavioral perspective one believes that all learning can be broken down into steps. Once you have the steps, students are guided through the progressive steps until they reach the final objective. Problems arise, however, for the students who need extra steps or different steps. As a result, we have some students making A’s but most making B’s, C’s, D’s and F’s. It is really quite a shame that we use and accept this outdated psychology to guide much of what we do in our instruction.

One young teacher decided to not accept behavioral approaches and used what she learned from cognitive psychology in a summer graduate class. She had only one year of teaching and was about to begin in a new school with many students from the inner-city government housing. This area was largely one of poverty and crime. The other teachers warned her about one of the students who would be in her class. She was told that he would be repeating the second grade and was a miserable speller. The student made mostly twenties on spelling tests.

The young teacher decided to put the class in groups. The groups studied together and would guess what their group average grade would be for the upcoming spelling test. The group that had the closest to their guess won some type of reward. Some of the group guesses were barely over passing. The student who made mostly 20’s the previous year was required to study and review the spelling tests with his group. In this group, the other students explained and demonstrated how they learned to spell the new words. In a few months, the student who had failed every spelling test was now passing. By the end of the year, the student had a B average in spelling. The other students taught this student a better way to learn to spell.

Cognitive psychology believes that students process learning in a multitude of ways. Some students have very efficient thinking and learning strategies and processes, while other have very inefficient ones. With cognitive psychology, the teacher would try to discern the thought process used by the student and either use that to help guide the instruction or try to give the student a better, more efficient method for learning.

There are a couple of very important lessons in this for our purpose of using problem-solving . First is that it is impossible to mold and shape every student into our vision of a model student. That belief is a basic tenet of a behavioral perspective .“If I can just get him or her to do this or that, then he or she will be a model student.”Somehow, all their beliefs, experiences, and ways of thinking will all match this model student. At best, this is like pushing a rock up hill and at worst, completely naïve and impossible. Teaching students to problem-solve cannot be a one size fits all and hope that by putting them through a series of lessons, they will learn and use a new behavior. You must discover why and how they came up with their decision to act in that particular way.