Learners, Learning and Educational Activity

Judith Ireson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781138384378
• eBook ISBN: 9781134123025
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Klassenführung

Learners, Learning and Educational Activity offers a new and creative approach to the psychology of learning. The central idea in the book is that learning in schools and other educational settings is best understood by paying attention to both individual learners and the educational contexts in which learning takes place.

Providing an accessible introduction to new ideas and recent developments in cognitive and socio-cultural perspectives on learning, the book reviews advances in selected topics that are especially relevant for teachers and other educators. These include:

• learners' conceptions of the nature of learning
• the development of advanced levels of learning and thinking
• the role of motivation and self-regulation in learning
• how learning and thinking relate to social and cultural contexts
• the ways in which these contexts influence interactions between teachers and learners.

By illustrating connections between individual and social aspects of learning in educational settings in and out of school, the book encourages teachers, parents and other educators to think about learners and learning in new ways.

1 Perspectives on learning

When we think about learning, the images that come to mind are usually connected with going to school, attending classes, having a coach, or working through a self-help book or computer program. We often tend to think of learning in terms of acquiring skills and knowledge with help from an instructor. For most people, learning is both an individual and a social process. Individual students see themselves as responsible for learning yet they recognize that other people have an influence on what they learn and the quality of the learning experience.

It may come as a surprise, therefore, that much theory and research on learning is concerned with either individual processes or with the broader social dimensions and that until recently there has been relatively little work relating them. Theories concerned with individual processes tend to describe and explain changes in behaviour, memorizing, thinking, reasoning and problem solving and also a range of cognitive and self-regulatory strategies that make the process of learning more productive. Theories concerned with social processes focus on the nature of a learner’s participation in learning activities and their interactions with others in the settings in which those activities take place. They consider the role of others in supporting an individual’s learning and the social contexts in which this assistance is offered.

Theories of learning offer views of the learner that range from an absorber of information, to a thinker and problem solver, a strategist who regulates learning, and a participant who appropriates information. Traditionally, texts on the psychology of learning tend to work from a single perspective. Learning is considered either from a cognitive, or mental processing, perspective or a socio-cultural perspective. This is understandable as the phenomenon of learning is complex and it makes sense to break off manageable chunks to examine in detail. Yet it leaves us with a rather fragmented view of learning. Now that considerable advances have been achieved from each of these approaches, it is timely to bring them together to give a more complete picture.

The first part of this chapter gives an overview of psychological and socio-cultural theories of learning. The second part documents students’ subjective reports of their experiences of learning in schools, colleges and university and explores differences in both students’ conceptions of learning and teachers’ conceptions of teaching.

Concepts of learning in psychology and education

In everyday usage, learning generally denotes the deliberate acquisition of information or skills. If you ask a group of adults to give examples of something they learned they might suggest learning a foreign language, driving a car, playing a musical instrument, taking a course in history, taking up a new sport or learning to paint. All of these are readily identifiable as forms of deliberate learning, involving skills and knowledge that the individual set out to learn. A more in-depth discussion often reveals awareness of other kinds of learning, such as changes in understanding of a subject, which leads to seeing the world in a different way. Individuals also notice personal changes in themselves as they learn, some of which might be quite fundamental, leading to changes in their identity or seeing themselves in a different way.

Much learning that takes place in life is overlooked in these everyday notions of learning. For example, if someone starts to smoke or develops an irrational fear we do not generally think of these changes as forms of learning. Moreover, some learning is not deliberate, but happens spontaneously as we take part in various activities during our everyday lives. Perhaps because it is so ubiquitous, spontaneous learning is rarely considered in everyday talk about learning.

Within schools, the term learning is often used in a restricted sense, which relates to learning the prescribed curricular content. Teachers and pupils talk about learning specific aspects of curriculum subjects such as mathematics, history or languages. They refer to knowledge and skills that have been learned and reproduced correctly. Learning that does not conform to expectations is not acknowledged, rather it is more likely to be spoken about in terms of failing to learn. In contrast, when speaking about education in general there is a discourse about learning across the lifespan, in the workplace and in a wide range of educational settings, which indicates that learning is interpreted very broadly.

In psychology, notions of learning became wedded to behavioural perspectives early on with learning being defined in terms of changes in behaviour resulting from experience. More complex types of learning, such as changes in conceptual understanding, were considered by Piaget (1964) and Vygotsky (1978) to emerge as part of a developmental process, rather than learning. The reasons for this state of affairs have their roots in the shift from behavioural to cognitive psychology during the middle of the twentieth century. The emergence of cognitive psychology, with its emphasis on mental processes, was a hard fought battle which left learning in the hands of the behaviourists while cognitive psychologists dominated the realms of thinking, reasoning and problem solving. Nowadays some of these divisions have been overcome, and there is a resurgence of interest in the complex types of learning involved in the acquisition of complex mental skills such as reasoning and problem solving.

Some of the fundamental ideas and assumptions underpinning many modern theories of learning date back to the Greeks. Plato proposed that humans are born with knowledge, or innate ideas of other people and objects in the world around. Learning is therefore a matter of uncovering the knowledge we have in our minds and is achieved through rational discourse and logical thinking. Plato’s assumption that knowledge is innate is echoed in many modern theories and beliefs, which emphasize the contribution of innate, genetic factors to learning.

Plato’s student Aristotle strongly disagreed with his teacher on this point and he claimed instead that experience forms the basis of learning. It is through sensory experience of the world that we recognize features occurring together in consistent patterns and we are able to form abstract concepts. This line of argument gave rise to Associationism, and the Behaviourist school of psychology (Richardson 1988). These two central ideas, that knowledge is inborn and that it is acquired through experience, are still alive today in psychology and in education. Nowadays they surface in discussions about learning, intelligence and personality where there is still debate about the relative contribution of innate, genetic inheritance (nature) and experience (nurture) in learning.

Many years later, the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1781) proposed a resolution of this debate. He argued that experience is important for learning, but there must also be innate rules for producing abstract mental representations, as it would be impossible for us to have coherent experience of the world without some innate concepts, categories or rules. These rules allow us to abstract general conceptions from the ever-changing flux of sensory information around us and to mentally construct the world. He proposed the notion of a ‘schema’ or mental representation that reflects the real world as experienced and also reflects certain a priori concepts or rules. These constructivist ideas had a profound influence on Piaget who used the idea of a schema in his studies of the development of children’s understanding of the world. He proposed that children are born with rudimentary schemas which develop in complexity as children interact with the world around them (Piaget 1963). Vygotsky (1978) also proposed that children learn through interactions and his social constructivist theory emphasizes the importance of the child’s interactions with other people. Both Piaget and Vygotsky saw children as active learners, who construct mental representations of the world. Other approaches that follow in the constructivist tradition include phenomenography, which is concerned with individuals’ experiences of teaching and learning (Marton and Booth 1997).

The remainder of this chapter is divided into three main parts. The first part provides an overview of major psychological approaches to the psychology of learning. The second part is concerned with students’ own experiences of learning and what these reveal about their conceptions of learning and the approaches they take to studying. The final part considers teachers’ conceptions of teaching and how these relate to their approaches to teaching and learning.

In the part that follows, major psychological theories of learning will be outlined. Each of these theories has a central metaphor that characterizes a type of learning that is the main focus of research and a set of presuppositions about the nature of learning. Contemporary theorizing and research draws on insights from several of these perspectives. However, it is sometimes helpful to identify the essence of each one and Table 1 displays central metaphors and views of learners.

Behavioural learning

Learning has been a matter of interest to psychologists for over a century. Early research was mainly concerned with animal learning and with basic forms of human learning. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the study of learning was dominated by the associationists who followed Aristotle’s view that all knowledge is acquired through experience. A number of psychologists at that time were concerned to establish psychology as a science and they reasoned that the way to do this was to restrict their investigations to those behaviours that could be observed and documented objectively. It followed that behaviour should be observed using rigorous scientific methods, rather than drawing inferences about unobservable mental states. Behaviourists were unwilling to theorize about mental events that could not be directly observed and instead set out to develop principles of learning based on systematic, verifiable documentation of behaviour. These principles were developed through research with animals and later applied to children’s learning.

Laboratory investigations of learning led to a number of important discoveries. Ivan Pavlov discovered that animals in his laboratory learned by associating a stimulus to a reflex response (Pavlov 1927). Animals have a number of reflex responses, each of which is triggered by a specific stimulus. These reactions are inborn and occur automatically, for example, the pupils in our eyes dilate when we look at a bright light and a hungry animal salivates when exposed to the smell of food. Pavlov was studying the physiology of salivation in dogs, which involved measuring the amount of saliva produced when the dog was presented with a meal. He noticed that the dog began to salivate before the food was produced and conjectured that the dog was responding to the sound of the door, when it was opened by the animal’s keeper delivering food. He went on to design experiments to investigate this phenomenon more carefully, using a bell as a controlled stimulus. These experiments confirmed that if a keeper repeatedly rang a bell before the food was produced, the dog would salivate to the sound of the bell alone. The response of salivation now became associated with the sound of the bell, whereas originally it had been associated with the sight of food. This basic form of learning is referred to as conditional learning (or classical conditioning).

Watson used a similar procedure in a famous study to bring about a fear reaction in a toddler named Albert (Watson and Rayner 1920). Fear is a natural, reflex reaction of young children exposed to sudden loud noises and Watson exposed the child to a loud sound to induce a fear reaction towards soft toys. He produced the noise every time Albert caught sight of a furry rabbit and he found that after repeated pairings the child reacted with fear when he saw the rabbit. This study demonstrated that humans have basic learning mechanisms similar to those of animals. Conditional learning provides a foundation for certain physiological responses to the environment. Some responses that appear irrational, such as phobias, may be learned in this way. Little Albert’s fearful reaction to a soft toy might appear irrational to those who were unaware of Watson’s experiment.

Whereas Pavlov started his work by investigating the associations between events preceding a response, Skinner (1953) was interested in events that followed a response. His early work was also undertaken with animals in a laboratory environment, and he discovered relationships between particular behaviours and the events that followed. He established a principle that behaviour is more likely to occur if its appearance is followed by a desirable consequence and is less likely to be repeated if followed by an unpleasant consequence. He designed what became known as a Skinner box with a mechanism for delivering pellets of food and a lever that a rat could operate by pressing with a foot. A hungry rat placed in the box naturally moved around until eventually it pressed the lever, and was immediately rewarded by delivery of food pellets. It did not take the rat much time to learn to press the lever in order to receive food. Several important principles were established that still hold true today, at least for certain kinds of learning. One of these is that we tend to repeat behaviour that is followed by a pleasant consequence and not to repeat behaviour that is followed by an unpleasant consequence. This means that rewards, or ‘reinforcers’, can be used to encourage desirable behaviour. For example, parents and teachers use tangible rewards or praise to encourage desirable behaviour in young children and dog owners frequently use food to train their dogs to sit, come to heel or fetch objects.

Complex behaviours can be taught with a technique of ‘shaping’ whereby an animal is first rewarded for performing a basic move and once this has been learned the animal is no longer rewarded for the learned move but is given a reward for the next move and so on until the complete performance has been learned. The success of this technique convinced Skinner (1954) that the key to effective teaching was to analyse the task to be learned into components and order these into a logical sequence for learning. The learner then worked through each component in turn, receiving reinforcement for correct responses. Each step had to be mastered before proceeding to the next, and if the learner failed to complete a step successfully, the material would be repeated or additional material presented. Successful completion of each step was seen as the key to learning, as this meant that the learner then received frequent reinforcement. It followed that each step had to be small.

The whole process of becoming competent in any field must be divided into a very large number of very small steps, and reinforcement must be contingent upon the accomplishment of each step. … By making each successive step as small as possible, the frequency of reinforcement can be raised to a maximum, while the possibly aversive consequences of being wrong are reduced to a minimum.

(Skinner 1954: 94)

Behaviourist views of this kind have several important implications for teaching and learning. One of these is that learning is a process of accumulating knowledge in a sequenced and hierarchical fashion. This is based on a view that learning tasks may be analysed to establish the components that must be acquired in order to complete the task. Such an analysis then suggests the most appropriate sequence of learning. Even an apparently simple task of adding two separate sets of objects entails several components. For example, a child who is asked to give the total number of blocks contained in two sets: one containing two blocks and the other containing three blocks must be able to count each set correctly. Counting a set of objects correctly involves knowing how to count orally, being able to count each object in the set once and only once, and knowing that the number in the set is the final number in the count (Resnick et al. 1973). A child who is unable to perform these components of the task will not be able to add small numbers of objects accurately and consistently. Analysis of the components enables instruction to be targeted effectively at components that are weak. Similarly, more complex forms of skilled learning are based on subcomponents that may be analysed and sequenced. These form a hierarchy with complex components at the top and simpler ones at the base. For a complex skill, the hierarchy contains numerous components and learners may work through them in different ways, depending on their preferences and the pattern of components they have already learned (Pask 1976). In general, however, learning a task at the bottom of the hierarchy transfers to, or facilitates, the learning of a more complex task (Gagne 1970; Gagne et al. 1992).

It is now recognized that although behavioural principles of learning are pervasive, there are limits to their range of application. Reinforcement can be beneficial, especially in the early stages of learning and is particularly useful in managing children’s behaviour. A parent or teacher who makes reinforcement contingent on good behaviour encourages the repetition of that behaviour. Nevertheless, reinforcement is not essential and much learning takes place without it. It is now realized that reinforcement has a dual role, it provides a pleasurable outcome and it also provides informative feedback to the learner about the success or otherwise of a response. Feedback helps a learner see where progress is being made and draws attention to improvements that are needed.

Developments of behavioural theory in education also draw attention to the role of antecedents that affect behaviour, rather than focusing exclusively on the influence of consequences. In a classroom, students’ behaviour is affected by the behaviour of teachers and other students in the class. For example seating arrangements can influence the extent to which students remain on task and focused on their work, with more on task behaviour when students are seated in rows than around tables (Hastings and Schwieso 1995). Seating arrangements are antecedents that affect student behaviour.

An important assumption made by behaviourists is that all behaviour is learned. In this sense, behavioural theories of learning convey a very positive view of human learning and suggest that every individual can learn, given the right conditions. They also suggest that behaviour can be unlearned, or at least replaced with new learning. Perhaps the most trenchant criticism of behavioural approaches to learning is that they do not concern themselves with some of the most interesting and important aspects of human thinking. This realization led to the development of other psychological approaches to learning, which will be described in the sections that follow.

Observational and imitative learning

As noted above, learning is more than a process of shaping and moulding responses through reinforcement. Children (and adults) also learn by observing others around them and imitating their actions (Bandura 1977). Imitative learning emerges early in development and is found in animals as well as in humans, for example, young chimpanzees copy successful methods of food gathering used by adults, such as using a stick to extract ants from a hole (Tomasello et al. 1993). During the first year of life, babies imitate facial expressions and vocal patterns of their caregivers and others around them. Older children are inclined to imitate the behaviour of people they admire such as parents, teachers, pop stars or sporting icons. Children are keen observers and learn a great deal about customs, conventions and skilled activities by watching and listening to others in their families and communities (Rogoff 1990).

Adults frequently demonstrate, or model, actions in ways that enable children to imitate. Their demonstrations are based on a belief that the child does not know how to do the action, wants to perform it and can learn by being shown. Observational learning is facilitated when the actions are clearly modelled so that the child is able to follow each of the component parts (Bandura 1977). When parents and teachers deliberately model behaviour for a child to imitate, they may perform an action more slowly or overemphasize articulation of spoken language to draw the child’s attention to important components. This makes the behaviour more amenable to imitation and assists the child in moving on to the next steps, which involve remembering and producing the behaviour independently, when the model is not present.

Observational learning encompasses more than simple imitation and copying of behaviour. When learning through observation and imitation, children also observe the consequences of the behaviour displayed by the model. Following a series of experiments in which children watched an adult behaving aggressively towards a plastic doll, Bandura (1986) concluded that children were more likely to display the modelled behaviour when it was rewarded than when it was punished. A learner’s performance of learned behaviour is affected by the consequences experienced and also by vicarious experience of the consequences for others.

Observational learning appears to be a fundamental type of learning that is found in animals and humans. Together with behavioural learning, it entails the formation of associations and the acquisition of behavioural responses, often witho...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures and tables
• Series editors’ preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Perspectives on learning
• 2 Acquiring skills and expertise
• 3 Taking control of learning
• 4 Cultural perspectives on learning and thinking
• 5 Interaction and learning
• 6 Exploring connections between individual and culture at home and at school
• 7 Connecting spheres of learning
• References