Week 3

Goal: to appreciate the theories of Behaviorism, Cognitivism and Socialculturalism.

Objectives: at the end of the lecture, student should be able to: State the essence of each theory in terms of:
Key assumptions on learners.
Key assumptions on learning.
A representation of the process of learning.

Critique the theory's usefulness to different types of problems. Comment on theory's usefulness for the development of 21st century skills.

Assignment: Blog your reflections on the three theories and on their application to the different types problems. Respond to one and read at least three other students' blog.

Learning theories are vital in the field of e-learning as they provide a general explanation for observations madeand can also be altered as time goes by to suit the current state.
The 3 major learning theories that was taught during lectures are behaviourism, cognitivism and socioculturalism.

Behaviourism

Wortham explained how learning for behaviorism involves shaping the learner’s behavior to obtain an outcome that the teacher wants to have happen. At the same time, reinforcements towards that behaviour is vital so that the person does it again (if what he did was correct). And also, punishments (if he or she did something incorrect) so that the person doesn’t do it again

Such behaviour has been prevalent since our younger days in primary school. Teachers often allow students to make mistakes, and when they do, punish them by writing the same phrase a hundred times. At the same time, correct behaviour was always rewarded with stickers or pretty chops at the back of the exercise book..

One thing to probably note is if such a learning method can be applied to modern times. Children nowadays think and behave differently from us (just like how we behave differently from the older generation). Their mindset may deem such a method ineffective in education.


Cognitivism

The second theory cognitivism is based on a person's own internal perception or representation of things. Learning is done when people build new representations as they make sense of the world. The assumption for this theory is that an individual’s memory is the key to process and retain information and prior knowledge and experiences plays a huge role in learning.

However, people often have varying perceptions and they form conflicting ideas for one similar object. I may see situation A as positive, but another person may see it as a negative scenario. As such, the theory of cognitivism cannot be applied to every single person.

Sociocultural

This refers to the collective system as a whole, rather than the individual learner being the focus. It is suggested that learning must be understood as a process that is not solely in the mind of the learner.

In this case, learning is derived from the tools drawn from the environment as well, and language, being an important social tool. We are placed in a situation whereby we perform our best in dealing with the problems.

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