CLASSROOM IMPLICATIONS OF BEHAVIORIST, COGNITIVE AND CONSTRUCTIVE THEORY

Here are three commonly known learning theories main categories or philosophical frameworks under which learning theories fall: behaviorism, cognitive and constructive. Behaviorism focuses only on the objectively observable aspects of learning. Cognitive theories look beyond behavior to explain brain-based learning. And constructivism views learning as a process in which the learner actively constructs or builds new ideas or concepts.

CLASSROOM IMPLICATIONS OF BEHAVIORIST, COGNITIVE AND CONSTRUCTIVE THEORY

BEHAVIOURISM

The behaviorist school sees the mind as a “black box,” in the sense that a response to a stimulus can be observed quantitatively, totally ignoring the effect of thought processes occurring in the mind. Early computer learning systems were designed based on a behaviorist approach to learning. The behaviorist school thought of postulates that learning is a change in observable behavior caused by external stimuli in the environment. Skinner argued that since it is not possible to prove the inner processes with any available scientific procedures, researchers should concentrate instead on ‘cause-and-effect relationships’ that could be established by observation.

Behaviorists claim that it is the observable behavior that indicates whether or not the learner has learned something, and not what is going on in the learner’s head. However behaviorists suggest Implications for Online Learning with respect to the behaviourist school:

1. Learners should be told the explicit outcomes of the learning so that they can set expectations and can judge for themselves whether or not they have achieved the outcome of the online lesson.

2. Course designers have to define sequences of instructions using conditional or unconditional branching to other instructional units and pre-determining choices within the course.

3. Learners must be tested to determine whether or not they have achieved the learning outcome.

4. The behaviouristic approach for learning suggests to demonstrate the required operation, procedure or skill, and to break it down into its parts with appropriate explanation before learners are expected to copy the desired behaviour. Learners are supposed to build proficiency from frequent review or revision with check tests at strategic points or repeat practice with feedback.

COGNITIVISM

The cognitivist paradigm essentially argues that the “black box” of the mind should be opened and understood. The learner is viewed as an information processor (like a computer). Cognitive psychology claims that learning involves the use of memory, motivation, and thinking, and that reflection plays an important part in learning. They see learning as an internal process and contend that the amount learned depends on the processing capacity of the learner, the amount of effort expended during the learning process, the depth of the processing and the learner’s existing knowledge structure. They also look at learning from an information processing point of view, where the learner uses different types of memory during learning

The cognitive school recognizes the importance of individual differences, and of including a diversity of learning strategies in online instruction to accommodate those differences. Learning style refers to how a learner perceives, interacts with, and responds to the learning environment; it is a measure of individual differences.

Some aspects have to be followed by the Instructional designers for realizing the online courses:

1. Online learning materials should include activities for the different learning and cognitive styles.

2. The teaching strategy should enhance the learning process by facilitating all sensors, focusing the learner’s attention by highlighting important and critical information, reasoning each instruction, and matching the cognitive level of the learner.

3. The instructional designer should tie up to new information with existing information from long-term memory using advanced organizers to activate exiting cognitive.

4. The learning content should be chunked to prevent cognitive overload. Exceeding a number of five to nine items to learn, linear, hierarchical, or spider-shaped information maps should be provided.

CONSTRUCTIVISM

Constructivism learning theory is defined as active construction of new knowledge based on a learner’s prior experience. Research agrees that constructivism learning theory, which focuses on knowledge construction based on learner’s previous experience, is a good fit for e-learning because it ensures learning among learners .

A major emphasis of constructivists is situated learning, which sees learning as contextual. Learning activities that allow learners to contextualize the information should be used in online instruction [4]. In most pedagogies based on constructivism, the teacher’s role is not only to observe and assess but to also engage with the students while they are completing activities, wondering aloud and posing questions to the students for promotion of reasoning. Constructivists see learners as being active rather than passive so he will be the center of the learning, with the instructor playing an advising and facilitating role. That will encourage the learner to arrive at his or her version of the truth, influence by his or her background, culture or embedded worldview.

Learning should be an active process by means of keeping learners active doing high-level activities such as asking learners to apply information in practical situations, facilitating personal interpretation of learning content, discussing topics within a group, assessment and so forth. (Figure 2) shows the relation between constructivism and e learning design.

Experiences and social interactions play a role in the learning process. The following statements show some of the deriving implications for creating instructions for online learning:

1. To enforce learners constructing their own knowledge, instructors have to provide good interactive online instructions.

2. Learners should be given control of the learning process. Besides, there should be a form of guided discovery where learners can make their decision on learning goals, but can also use some guidance from the instructor

3. Instructors should focus on interactive learning activities as collaborative and cooperative learning should be encouraged to facilitate constructivist learning.

4. Learning should be made meaningful and illustrative for learners by including examples and use cases for theoretical information.

CONCLUSION

This paper describes the three commonly known learning theories the behaviorism, cognitivist, and constructivist and how their implication on e-learning courses; By summarizing the three commonly used learning theories in table 1, the researchers can benefit from our result that it can help them to make a good decision about the choice of a suitable learning theory when they develop their e-learning courses. Our future work should be extended to include comparison between more learning theories so that the e-learning courses developer will have more information to make an easy decision.

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