Page 48 - Educational Technology A Primer for the 21st Century

36 2 Learning in the Context of Technologies
environment to achieve the desired results, and the main method of controlling
learning behavior is to strengthen the correct response. Behaviorism pioneer,
Watson (1930) said,

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them
up in and I will guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of
specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man
and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of
his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the
contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years (Watson, 1930, p. 82).

The impact on teaching
Burrhus F. Skinner (1953) proposed operant conditioning. Operant conditioning is
a type of learning in which the strength of a behavior is modified by the behavior’s
consequences, such as reward or punishment. In operant conditioning, stimuli are
present when a behavior is rewarded or punished to control that behavior. For
example, a child may learn to open a box to get the candy inside, or learn to avoid
touching a hot stove; the box and the stove are discriminative stimuli.
According to operant conditioning, the probability of the behavior occurring in
this scenario is enhanced by the reinforcement. Learning is understood as the
step-by-step or successive approximation of the intended partial behaviors by the
use of reward and punishment.
Programmed instruction is based on Skinner’s operant conditioning. It is a
method of presenting new subject matters for students in a graded sequence of
controlled steps.

• According to programmed instruction, the textbooks are divided into small
frames and small steps, and each frame has its own goals. Learners could
achieve their goals through certain learning procedures.
• Students work through the programmed material by themselves at their own
speed. After each step, we can test their comprehension by answering an
examination question or filling in a diagram. They are then immediately shown
the correct answer or given additional information (The Columbia Encyclope-
dia, 2001).
• Instruction is self-paced, and learners are required to be active by completing
exercises and tests and proceeding based on feedback from the instruction.

The learning essence of behaviorism is the change of the external behavior
caused by the environment. Impacts on teaching are that the desired results could be
achieved through controlling the learning environments, while the main measures
of control learning include present stimulus, provide practice, feedback and rein-
forcement, such as strengthening the correct response.