Educational Psychology / Unit 1 EDP 0012 review, 2 to 3 minutes
From Behaviorism to Cognition
The idea
The history of educational psychology is also a history of what the field decided learning is. Johann Herbart had urged teachers to build on what students already know, long before the field had a science of its own. Its early science drew on William James's attention to habit and memory and on Edward Thorndike's law of effect, which explained learning as connections strengthened by their consequences and built up gradually. Standardized achievement testing and programmed instruction grew from that view, and Alfred Binet's test turned the field toward individual differences. John Dewey pulled in another direction, toward students learning by doing and by inquiry. From the nineteen sixties the field shifted from a behaviorist to a cognitive perspective. Jerome Bruner brought Jean Piaget's account of children constructing their own knowledge into education, and Benjamin Bloom organized learning goals by the kind of thinking they demand, from recall up to judgment.
In practice
One spelling lesson, read three ways. A teacher drills a list of words and praises every correct spelling. Read through Thorndike, the praise strengthens each connection between word and spelling, and repetition builds it up step by step. Read through Bruner, the students would discover the patterns themselves, sorting words until a rule appears. Read through Bloom, the teacher would first ask what level of thinking the drill reaches, and then add goals that go beyond recall.
Where people slip
Behaviorist methods did not leave the classroom, and units four and eleven teach them as current practice. The cognitive turn did not settle every question either: how much guidance discovery learning needs is still argued over, and unit six presents that debate with its evidence. Bloom's taxonomy, too, was later revised to put creating at the top. The field's reach also ran beyond the classroom, when research on children informed the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in nineteen fifty-four.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
Unlocks
- Nothing yet depends on this.
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