Learning theories wiki reflection

Strengths

• Encourages students to actively share their understanding of concepts to be learnt – learning by teaching others.
• Students summarise key concepts
• Context is provided by ensuring students relate back to how learning theories affect the role of a teacher

Weaknesses

• Goup work can often be limited by “the weakest link”.
• May not suit individual learners
• Difficult to perform by distance/correspondance

Opportunities

• Will students then read other summaries of topics thus distributing work load?
• By stimulating discussion, will students be encouraged to research concepts further?

Threats

• Loss of interest in subject by individual learners?
• Unrest amongst group members?

My initial understanding of Behaviourism was that it is a rather primitive view on psychology, where the learner is seen as a black box, responding to stimuli in a predictable manner.

Whilst this positivist approach attempts to explain human behaviour in the most basic of means, it seems to be spot on if we look at the widespread use, and effectiveness of reward and punishment in the class room.

As my curiosity lead me to read further on the topic I came across a few articles of interest:

http://www.mendeley.com/research/undermining-childrens-intrinsic-interest-with-extrinsic-reward-a-test-of-the-overjustification-hypothesis/#page-1

This article argues that excessive reward has the potential to undermine the learners own intrinsic interest.

Conveniently this further investigation acted as a segue into other attempts to improve upon the theory of behaviourism, which form our current understanding of learning today.