B. F. Skinner's Theory Of Operant Conditioning

Another psychologist, named John B Watson, was inspired by Pavlov’s work and conducted an experiment on a young boy named Albert to see if classical conditioning could work on human subjects. Albert was noted to be a healthy baby who reacted negatively to almost nothing and rarely cried. Watson presented Albert with a white rat and followed with a loud banging noise. After repeating this several times, Albert was conditioned into being afraid of the rat on its own, and had a similar reaction to other furry, white animals, and even Santa Claus! Watson therefore concluded that despite the fact that human brains were far more complex than a dog’s, the same ideas could be

Later, Skinner conducted experiments with rats in a cage. When the rats pressed the lever in the cage, they would get food. Since the rats were conditioned to press the lever to get food, they would press the lever more frequently. Skinner became known as the father of operant conditioning. Operant conditioning was described by Barnett (2015) as a learning process where a specific behaviour is increased or decreased through positive or negative

INTRODUCTION Ivan Pavlov (1849 – 1936), a Russian physiologist, wrote extensively about classical conditioning after an accidental finding while conducting research on the digestive system of dogs. In the course of his research, Pavlov noticed that the dogs began to salivate merely at his approach and not just at the sight of any food. Pavlov then began to conduct a series of conditioning experiments. Prior to conditioning the unconditioned stimulus, that is the meat, would produce the unconditioned response of salivation. Pavlov paired the neutral stimulus, a bell, with the unconditioned stimulus which was the food.

weakened). Skinner (1948) studied operant conditioning by conducting experiments using animals which he placed in a 'Skinner Box ' which was similar to Thorndike’s puzzle box. B.F. Skinner (1938) coined the term operant conditioning; it means roughly changing of behavior by the use of reinforcement which is given after the desired response. Skinner identified three types of responses or operant that can follow behavior. a) Neutral operants: responses from the environment that neither increase nor decrease the probability of a behavior being repeated.

In the Educational Leadership article entitle “The Boss of My Brain”, authors Donna Wilson and Marcus Conyers examines the explicit instruction in metacognition. Researchers stated that “explicit instruction in metacognition puts students in charge of their learning.” It was also stated that “meta-cognition supports learning by enabling us to actively think about which cognitive strategies can help achieve learning, how we should apply those strategies, how we can review our progress, and whether we need to adjust our thinking.” I believe this a unique teaching tool for teachers to implement with their students. With the use of metacognition, students whether they are struggling learners or gifted can learn how to use a variety of cognitive strategies to help improve their learning.

Do dogs produce salivate? Do dogs produce salivate when given food? In the 1890’s, Russian psychologist, Ivan Pavlov put the question to the test and looked into the amount of salivation produced by dogs in response to being given food and “demonstrating the way in classical conditioning (also referred to as Pavlovian conditioning) could be used to cultivate a particular association between the occurrence of one event in the anticipation of another.” (Pavlov’s Dogs and Classical Conditioning, 2018) From the experiment, Pavlov proved the existence of an unconditional response from a “dog by presenting a dog with a bowl of food and measuring exactly how much saliva it produces”( Mcleod,2015) as shown in image 1. Pavlov, however, did discover that no matter what the object was or even what the dogs learned to associate with its food (e.g. lab assistant) would trigger the same response from the dog which led him to believe that he did indeed make a scientific discovery.

At first the mouse had wondered around in search for food and accidentally pressed down on the liver whistle. It explored the food and the mouse had learned to obtain food whenever it gets hungry because of the conditioning. According to the skinner test the food is called a reinforce and the process of giving food is called reinforcement. A reinforce is anything likely to increase a behavior. There are two types of reinforcement, positive and negative reinforcement.

Also within this style, discipline is more positive without the harsh aftermath. A child is less likely to experience anger issues if they’re able to associate punishments when they’ve done something bad. It’s rather different than authoritarian parenting where if they accidently did it and admitted to it, they still received the same level of punishment regardless. As a result, parents strive for their kids to be better and “although authoritative parents also make demands, they accord their children a high degree of autonomy and responsibility, and encourage them to set their own goals and work schedule” (Leung et al. 3).

Pavlov developed the theory of Classical Conditioning. This is where certain stimuli can invoke particular behavior. He conducted his experiments on dogs, testing whether or not he could condition them to salivate at the sound of a bell. At first, along with the bell, he would hold up food, causing the dogs to salivate. After repeating this action numerous times, Pavlov would ring the bell without the food and found that the dogs would still salivate.

When it is taken into account in the field of language teaching, it shows how languages are learned. Behaviorist psychology had a significant effect on the teaching and learning principles of audio-lingual method. In Audiolingualism, the underlying theory of learning is behaviorist. Stimulus, response, and reinforcement are the main components of Behaviorism. When we adjust it to language learning; the stimulus is the information about foreign language, the response is student’s reaction on the presented material, and the reinforcement is natural “self-satisfaction of target language use (Richards & Rodgers, 1987).