STUDENT BEHAVIOUR AND EDUCATION

Student Behaviiour and Education

Student Behaviiour and Education

Statement

"One might say that the main trouble with education in the lower grades today is that the child is obvioulsy not competent and knows it and that the teacher is unable to do anything about it and knows that too" (Skinner, 1968:27).

Introduction

Behaviourism is a philosophy and conceptual framework for the study of behavior. It advocates the use of a natural science approach to establish general laws and principles that explain the causes of behavior—its acquisition, maintenance, and change—without reference to mental events or internal psychological processes. These principles emphasise relationships between behavior and the physical and social environment, particularly the contingencies of reinforcement that control the occurrence, strength, and choice of behaviours (Sternberg, 2007, 11).

Behaviourism developed primarily in the United States, originally in opposition to the philosophy of “introspection” as a technique for investigating mental processes (thoughts, feelings, and perceptions). Behaviourists disagreed with both the subject matter of introspection (subjective experience and internal states) and the questionable reliability and validity of the technique itself (critically examining one's own mental processes by “looking inward”). John B. Watson coined the term “behaviourism” in 1913 and developed its earliest form: classical or “S-R” behaviourism, which sought to explain behavioural events in terms of a publicly observable antecedent stimulus (S) that elicited a publicly observable response (R). As this statement suggests, Watson believed that psychology should concern itself solely with publicly observable behaviour, without reference to private, mental events, a philosophical position now called “methodological behaviourism.” (Sternberg, 2006, 89)

Discussion

Contingencies of reinforcement comprise three variables that are defined in terms of each other and that form a single, interrelated system linking behaviour and environment: an operant, defined as a behaviour that operates on the environment to produce some consequence or effect that, in turn, modifies the subsequent occurrence of the operant; a stimulus consequence, defined as an environmental consequence or outcome of a behaviour that modifies its subsequent occurrence; and a discriminative stimulus, defined as an environmental stimulus that marks an occasion on which, in the past, the occurrence of an operant has produced a particular reinforcer. For example, students learn that when in a classroom (a discriminative stimulus), raising one's hand (an operant) is the way to be called upon by the instructor. How the instructor responds to the student's comment or question (the stimulus consequence) will tend to modify its occurrence, either increasing or decreasing the probability of the student's future hand-raising behaviour (Sternberg, 2004, 33).

All operants and stimuli are members of classes of similar phenomena, defined by the environmental relations in which they participate. Classes of operant behaviour are created by differential reinforcement with respect to classes of discriminative stimuli. For example, closing a door with one's foot, hand, or elbow are all ways of responding to a cold draft created by an open door, and all will be reinforced by a reduction in cold. Stimulus consequences are classified by their effects on behaviours: Those that increase or strengthen the behaviours on which they ...