In addition to the effect of the consequences of behaviour, social learning theory developed by Albert Bandura (1924- ), emphasised the fact that children learn through watching and imitating the behaviour of people around them. “Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do ... from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviours are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action” (Bandura, 1977, p. 22). Guatemalan girls learn to weave through observation alone. They watch the teacher first and when they feel ready to operate the textile machine, they take over and normally proceed skilfully with their first try. (Crain, 2000, p. 194).
Bandura considers four factors a child must do when they learn through imitation. They must: attend (to the behaviour), retain (encoding and rehearsal), be physically able (to reproduce the behaviour) and be motivated (through reinforcement and punishment). He also identified three stages in a child's learning, namely exposure, acquisition, and acceptance. Bandura conducted research with 4-year-old children's tendency to imitate aggression when merely observing it (1965). This led other researchers to consider the effects of television aggression on children. As a consequence, Bandura (1973) considered what makes children more likely to learn through imitatation. He found that when the model is similar to them in age and sex, or if the model has desirable characteristics or is seen as attractive, they are more likely to copy the behaviour. An example can be seen in the media kit 1, video band 1: “children learning”, where children learn to play musical instruments through observing and imitating more competent others. The social learning theory unfortunately did not take into account the cognitive development of the child's learning. The next theory, constructivism, did.
Constructivism or Jean Piaget's (1896-1980) stage theory sees a child's learning as a process of building mental representations (an internalised, personal understanding of an aspect of the external world) of the environment. This is based on their actions on the environment and also the consequences of such actions. He called his study of the origins and the development of knowledge, genetic epistemology. He believed that children construct their own development, even though he identified universal basic building blocks and processes of development.
The first stage of intellectual development introduced by Piaget is known as the sensori-motor stage, where the child is still very much egocentric: they don't see other people or objects as separate from themselves. Infants focus on a single aspect of a situation (centration), and the object only exists when the infant can see it (Piaget, 1955). As a result of the child's actions on the environment, schemas form. They are representations of a sequence of actions which form as a result of intrinsic motivation (desire to apply schemas to new situations). This makes the child less egocentric. Schemas have a reflex quality to them in the beginning (for instance sucking) and the infant will fit parts of the environment into these schemas (assimilation). Through constant assimilation, the schemas are modified to suit the environment better and this is called accommodation. Behaviour is adapted in a step by step way as the infant combine schemas in order to do new things. They then store the schemas internally where they represent actions (“operations”).
By the age of two, the child develops the ability to combine representations into sets of actions which signifies the start of the second stage: the pre-operational stage. He also identified that children lack the concept of conservation (that a quantity is still the same even if it is presented in a different way) at this stage. As they progress through the third stage (concrete operations stage) the child also start to act more appropriately on the environment as they generate “rules” based on their own experiences. Eventually by the final stage from about 12 years onwards (formal operations stage), they learn to reason also in a purely abstract and hypothetical way. It should be noted that subsequent research by Donaldson (1978) and others, show that children can operate at a higher level than that predicted by Piagetian theory. One important element that Donaldson brought into play was the social element which enabled the children to make sense of the tasks and perform better.
The fourth grand theory, social constructivism was founded by Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) and emphasised the role and influence of the social and cultural world surrounding the child. Vygotsky proposed that human history is created through the construction and use of cultural tools, for example a hammer or language. When this tool is adapted by each generation, it is referred to as “appropriation”. Children therefor learn through social interaction whereby they appropriate their thinking. Social constructivism sees the child's acquisition of thought and language, dependant on underlying “intelligence”. Up to the age of two years, language is only used to communicate with others socially. Between the ages of three and four, children often talk to themselves as their prior social language becomes internalised (Vygotsky, 1978). At this point the language is internalised as thought, where the social environment of the child reflects in their reasoning (Vygotsky, 1986).
Vygotsky believed that children learn more through social contact with other, more able, people and that this is more important for cognitive development. The difference in what the child can learn with the help of a more competent person, than without, is called the zone of proximal development (ZPD) (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86). This theory therefor sees the teacher as essential in passing on the cultural tools which the child needs and assisting them to increase their cognitive ability such as metacognition (the ability to “think about thinking”). These insights have been applied with children with special needs such as in deaf-blind education, to teach them how to communicate with others.
In contrasting and comparing the four grand theories, behaviourism places a strong emphasis on the environment as the main influence when it comes to learning and this places the important factors affecting learning, outside of the child. The child is thus seen as being passively influenced through reinforcement (such as reward and punishment) by the environment and this led Watson to make the following statement:
“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll 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”. (Watson, 1924, p. 104) An example of this passive type of learning would be (as above) the 11-month-old infant Albert B., who were conditioned to feel fear every time he saw a rat or a furry animal (Watson, 1924).
Social learning theory contrasts with behaviourism as it showed that children could learn through simply observing the behaviour of someone else and without the reinforcement factors that behaviourists value. This is evident from Bandura's research (1965) with four year olds, where they watched a man being aggressive towards an inflatable doll called Bobo doll. All the groups in this study learned the same aggressive behaviour and it was also found that they generate their own rules from what they see. This meant that children have a much more active role to play in constructing their own learning. “The sort of learning that Bandura highlighted goes further than simple mimicry. It implies that children extract general principles from what they observe” (Oates et al., 2005, p. 62). Social learning theory however still places a great emphasis on the role of external factors in shaping the learning and behaviour of the child, for instance the experiences and behaviour of the people around them. Therefore one could argue that there is a passive element to learning as well.
Unlike behaviourism, Piaget's theory sees the child as taking an active role in their learning in an individual and constructive way. Children can be seen as active organisers of experience and more important than the influences of parents and teachers. They are no longer just passively receiving stimuli from the environment (as in behaviourism), or passively following a biological programme. Rather, this process of learning can be seen as a continuous, two way interaction between the child and the environment. “The proposition that children are active learners is not a new one, but Piaget spelled out in greater detail than anyone had ever done before just how children's natural curiosity impels them to explore and experiment and so discover for themselves the way the world works. The idea of children sitting at desks, passively listening to a teacher transmitting knowledge, was anathema to Piaget...” (Schaffer, 2004, p. 183). Children therefore actively create their own stance within the world and they create these beliefs and new learning from an initial set of innate behaviours.
Social constructivism takes the same stance as Piaget, where the child is seen as active in constructing their own learning. “Vygotsky's theory of cognitive development, like Piaget's, is a constructivist one: children, that is, actively interpret the world around them instead of passively relying on bits of knowledge being fed to them by others” (Schaffer, 2004, p. 218). Social constructivism can be seen as a contextualist theory because it links children's learning with their socio-cultural environment. This is also evident in the difference in children's performance in the standard Piagetian conservation task and a modified version by Light and colleagues (1979). In the modified “chipped beaker” version, a social element were introduced and the children performed better because it made sense. Children therefore actively try to identify meaning in apparently meaningless tasks of learning and they construct their own learning within the zone of proximal development (ZPD), by appropriating their thinking.
Classic behaviourism is most clear in its view that the child is passive and is influenced by the environment. Behaviourism therefore does not support the idea that the child is active in constructing their own learning. Bandura's social learning theory and social constructivism by Vygotsky supports the fact that children are predominantly active in their learning. However, both these theories also recognise a passive element in a child's learning from the effects of social and cultural influences. Piaget's stage theory considered mostly the cognitive development of the child and only recognised the active role of the child in constructing their own ideas about the world. Therefor, some of the theories support the fact that children are active in constructing their own learning and some do not.
References
Bandura, A. (1965) “Influence of models” reinforcement contingencies on the acquisition of imitative responses”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 1, pp. 589-95.
Bandura, A. (1973) Aggression: a social learning analysis, Upper Saddle Place, NJ, Prentice Hall.
Bandura, A. (1977) Social Learning Theory, New York, General Learning Press.
Crain, W. C. (2002) Theories of Development: concepts and applications, Upper Saddle Place, NJ, Prentice Hall.
Donaldson, M., (1978) Children's Minds, London, Fontana.
Keenan, M., Kerr, K. P. and Dillenberger, K. (eds) (2000) Parent's Education as Autism Therapists, London, Jessica Kingsley.
Light, P. H., Buckingham, N. and Robbins, H. (1979) “The conservation task as an interactional setting”, British Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 49, pp. 304-10.
Oates et al. (2005) “Theories of development”, in Oates, J., Wood, C. and Grayson, A. (eds) Psychological Development and Early Childhood, Oxford, Blackwell/The Open University.
Piaget, J. (1936/1955) The Child's Construction of Reality, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Schaffer, H. R. (2004) Introducing Child Psychology, Oxford, Blackwell.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1934/1986) Thought and Language, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
Vygotsky, L. (1978) Mind in Society: the development of higher psychological processes, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
Watson, J. B. (1913) “Psychology as the behaviorist views it”, Psychological Review, vol. 20, pp. 158-77.
Watson, J. B. (1924) Behaviorism, New York, Norton.
