Educational Psychology / Unit 5 EDP 0437 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Four Pillars, One Lesson
The idea
The same classroom task looks different through each of the four pillars of learning theory. Behaviorism asks what observable behavior is wanted and what consequences follow it, so it attends to reinforcement, practice and prompts. Social cognitive theory asks what students see modeled and what they believe about their own ability, so it attends to models, attention, retention and self-efficacy. Constructivism asks what students already think and how new experience or dialogue will reshape it, so it attends to misconceptions, disequilibrium and scaffolding. Information processing asks how the material passes through attention and working memory into long-term memory, so it attends to cognitive load, encoding and practice spaced over time. None of the four describes the whole of learning, and each answers a different question about it.
In practice
Worked example: a science class is learning why seasons change. A behavioral teacher sets short practice questions with immediate feedback and praise. A social cognitive teacher first models how to reason from a diagram of the tilted Earth, then has students try it, checking that they attended and can reproduce the reasoning. A constructivist teacher starts from the common belief that seasons come from the Earth's distance from the sun and lets students test it with a lamp and a globe. An information-processing teacher strips the diagram of decoration and spaces review across weeks.
Where people slip
The pillars are lenses, not rival camps a teacher must choose between. Most good lessons draw on several, and the useful question is which lens explains a particular difficulty. A student who cannot reproduce a modeled step needs a different response from one whose misconception survives the lesson, and from one overwhelmed by a crowded worksheet.
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.
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it · Sources for Educational Psychology