This course, uh,
will introduce you
to some of the main thinkers
in educational psychology.
We've called the course
Learning, Knowledge,
and Human Development.
We will be dealing
with the history
and the paradigms
in, uh, educational psychology.
There are three
that we're gonna focus on.
The first one
will be about behaviorism
and conditioned response.
The second one
about brain developmentalism.
And the third
about social cognitivism.
So first we're gonna de-deal
with behaviorism
and conditioned response.
Here we're going to look
at three psychologists.
Um, men of the 20th century,
uh who were interested
in the way
in which environmental sources impacted our learning
and the role of intelligence
in the limits of learning.
Uh, the first one
is-is-is Ivan Pavlov,
a Russian Noble Prize winner.
And he worked to establish,
uh, the ways in which
you could condition
or stimulate behavior.
Secondly we're gonna look
at John Watson, an American.
Uh, he too was interested
in how to predict
and control behavior.
And in fact, he established
the scholarly field
of behaviorism.
The third one of course
is BF Skinner, also an American,
and he believed that people's
behaviors were dependent
on the consequences
of previous actions.
So thus they can be conditioned to respond in specific ways.
We're also gonna look
at two others, uh,
who were part of this period.
Uh, Alfred Binet, a Frenchmen
who incited the IQ test
originally as a method
for providing remedial help
to those who wanted it.
And, uh, Henry Goddard,
an American, uh,
who expanded the uses
of IQ tests
and also he was interested
in, uh, using it
as a way to detect
feeble minded immigrants
into America.
Uh, and in fact, he was,
uh, quite influential
in the formation
of special education.
All these, uh, uh, thinkers
are highly cited
and had tremendous
implications for education
and Bill will now
elaborate on that.
Well I'm gonna start looking
at some of these people
in a little bit more detail.
Not much detail,
this is really just
a very, rough overview,
or a schematic overview
tryna introduce
some of the key ideas
that have influenced education
over the last, um,
century and a half essentially.
So Ivan Pavlov is in a way,
one of the-the founders
of modern psychology
and famous for what's called Pavlov's dog,
um, or Pavlov's dogs
in his laboratory.
So, um, what-what he did was,
um, he got the dogs
used to the idea
that when a buzzer
was-was sounded that they
were gonna get food.
It's not-it's
to be expected that, um,
that when, um, a dog sees food,
that he might salivate.
But what was interesting was
that the dogs learned
that the buzzer meant
that food was coming
and they salivated
at the sound of the buzzer.
So this is the idea
of a conditioned reflex
that was constructed
by-by Pavlov
and in a way based
on the premise that animals
can learn in the same way
that humans can learn.
John B. Watson, um,
is the person
who introduced
the word behaviorism.
And, um, th-the basic premise
behind Watson's thinking was
we really can't know
much about consciousness
in a self-reflective
kind of way.
What we can really know about
is scientific observation
of what people do,
hence the idea of behaviorism.
So what he was really
trying to do is move thought
about mind, um, and learning,
away from introspection,
philosophical, um,
self-reflection if you like.
Towards a scientific, uh,
observation of actual behavior.
So this is quite
a-a important idea
that he invents that becomes then tremendously influential
in the, uh, in the 20th century.
Moving on, perhaps the most
famous behaviorist of all,
is B.F. Skinner,
um, who is seen here
in this picture
with some of his pigeons.
He worked with rats,
he worked with pigeons,
uh, he invented a thing
called the Skinner box.
And what he did
with the Skinner box was
he, um, uh, you know gave,
um, all sorts of rewards
and reinforcements
to animals, uh, with food,
based on certain behaviors
that they did.
And the-he showed that in fact
it was possible to train, um,
uh, rats and-and pigeons
in these kinds of ways.
He became a kind of a
notorious kind of person.
People think now of Skinner in
quite negative kinds of terms.
And behaviorisms in quite
negative kinds of terms,
but in a sense, it-behind this
was this idea
about the environmental
conditions of learning.
Which are common
to all sentient creatures.
So here is the, um, the-
a little picture
of the Skinner box.
This is actually taken
from one of Skinner's books,
it's one of his actual diagrams
of a Skinn-Skinner box.
And the idea that he developed
was this one
of operant conditioning.
Which is, you know, you're
in this conditions of behavior,
these things get reinforced,
operant condition is the process that-that uh, Skinner describes.
A funny story, in a way,
it's funny tragic,
I don't know what
we can think about it now,
is that he even-for his,
uh, his own baby,
this is his own child,
invented a thing
called the, uh,
the-the-the Heir Conditioner,
spelled H-E-I-R.
Um, which was this box
in which you could put a baby
just with a diaper, um,
there was a-a roll of paper
at the bottom
that you could see,
at the bottom
of the image there,
a roll of paper where
if the-the-the baby soiled,
or made a mess, you just rolled
the paper out the other end,
it's in the same
temperature all the time.
And the family's
pretty protected
from the baby as well
around the noise.
And when Ladies Home Journal
wrote a story about it,
obviously the editor
wasn't terribly amused
and they called it
baby in a box.
So what, um, Skinner
tried to do was transfer
the learning that he had,
um, uh, achieved
in his laboratory
with rats and pigeons,
literally to human beings
in the case of his own child.
But then, um, becomes an
advocate of teaching machines.
So what, um, Skinner does
in the 1950s
is patent a teaching machine.
Now, this is kind of interesting these days because
one of the-the questions,
you know I would like to ask,
I mean here's a picture
of Skinner's patent.
And then here is a picture of,
um, uh, uh, a teaching machine
that-that Skinner uses
to illustrate,
um, learning activities.
Th-it's worth stopping for
a moment to read the caption.
Um, because it does have
the same kinds of processes
around operant conditioning,
uh, that he tried out
with animals.
Which he was then
trying out with humans.
So the critique of this stuff
is that
it's very, very mechanical.
Um, it's individual
stimulus and response.
Um, um, it's a kind
of a-it-it-it's-
it's portrayed as dehumanizing.
But, what's kind of interesting about it nevertheless
is the fact that
what he's interested in doing
and what the behaviorist
in general
are interested in doing,
is tracing the dynamics
of environmental in learning,
these micro conditions of
learning things incrementally
based on things that are
moving in the environment.
So, in a way, um,
it's dismissed
perhaps a little bit
too easily these days.
Um, in terms
of its basic insights.
In the same period, um,
we also have the emergence
of the notion of intelligence,
intelligence testing, uh,
it began with Alfred Binet.
And in a way, this is kind
of the opposite of behaviorism
in a way, it's not about
the conditions of learning
from the environment,
it's about innate capacities
which are variable
across human beings
and which essentially
are not changeable.
So the reason why we have
an intelligence test is,
yes we can learn certain things, but only w-within the parameters
of what our intelligence is,
and intelligence is variable.
The founder of this idea
is Alfred Binet, and then, um,
the person who actually then
creates the idea of an IQ
and the mathematics
of calculating IQ scores
is, um, Goddard,
an American, Goddard.
Now it might seem
just incidentally,
that, um, Mary and I speaking
in this very overview,
schematic kind of way
about these people
just by way of introducing them,
and our new learning
online website,
um, which
supports this course.
What we've done is
we've taken extracts
from the source texts,
it's actually very, very interesting to go back
and read what these people
are actually saying.
It's too easy, a century
or a century and a half later,
to be, um, regarding
them as caricatures.
These are complex, smart people, um, what they're saying
is often flawed,
it's often problematic.
Um, but it's-it's instructive
to go back
to the actual sources,
so they're
there on the website.
Uh, we have texts and images
and even for the more recent people, some videos,
which allows you to get a feel for who these people really were
and what their agenda was
at the time.
Behaviorism remains a very
powerful force even today.
It's taught, uh, a lot
of people still believe in it.
But classical behaviorists,
and this is important,
did not allow for free will
or agency
in human being behavior.
For them, everything depended
on the environment
and the patent responses
that can be conditioned
by positing a negative
i-stimuli.
So, although the insight
into the role of environment
is really valuable,
it has lead in education,
to very narrow
and repetitive drills
and rewards and punishments,
uh, in educational settings,
uh, that don't necessarily, uh,
uh, extend the learner's
in the way they might be.
And also, it does not allow,
or explain,
uh, how language develops.
Uh, so although it's
still there as a choice
that we can make in terms
of, uh, modifying behavior,
uh, it does have some
strong limitations about, uh,
what it does to the lifeworld
of the learners.
