Learning and Teaching

1. The Technical Core:
Learning and Teaching

2. Talcott Parsons: Three levels of structure in organizations
•Technical
•Managerial
•Institutional
Technical Core: system of organizational activity where the
“product” of the organization is produced.
In schools, the teaching-learning process, as the technical
core, shapes many administrative decisions.
Levels of Organizational Structure

3. Learning Defined
• Learning: experience produces a stable change in someone’s knowledge or
behavior.
– Change must occur because of experience, whether or not the learning
is intentional or unintentional
• No one best explanation of learning, but three general theories:
– Behavioral theories: stress observable changes in behaviors, skills, and
habits
– Cognitive theories: stress internal mental activities such as thinking,
remembering, creating, and problem solving
– Constructivist theories: stress how individuals make meaning of events
and activities. Learning = construction of knowledge

4. Behavioral Perspective on Learning
• Behaviorists not concerned primarily with mental or internal processes, but
rather with changes in behavior brought about by experience.
• B.F. Skinner and his followers emphasize antecedents and consequences as
mechanisms for changing behavior.
• Environmental influences (antecedents and consequences) shape all
behavior, in the “A-B-C” pattern:
– Antecedent-behavior-consequence: antecedent precedes behavior,
which is followed by a consequence
– Consequences of behavior become antecedents for next ABC sequence
– Change behavior by changing antecedents, consequences, or both

5. Consequences
• Early behavioral work focused on consequences more than antecedents.
• Kind of consequence and timing of consequence will strengthen or
weaken individual’s propensity for a certain behavior.
• Two kinds of consequences: Reinforcement and Punishment
– Reinforcement strengthens or increases frequency of behavior.
– Punishment weakens or suppresses behavior.
– Be careful not to confuse punishment with negative reinforcement:
no matter how you reinforce, if you’re reinforcing you’re
strengthening behavior.

6. Reinforcement
• Reinforcer: consequence that strengthens behavior that it follows.
• One individual’s reinforcer might not be a reinforcer for someone else:
responses are highly individualized
• Some psychologists say reinforcers satisfy needs; others argue they
reduce tensions or stimulate particular parts of the brain.
• Strength of reinforcement depends upon individual’s perception of the
event, and the meaning it holds.
• Two main types of reinforcement: positive and negative

7. Positive and Negative Reinforcement
• Positive reinforcement: occurs when a behavior produces a new
stimulus or motivating force
– When a consequence strengthens a behavior by adding a stimulus,
the behavior has been positively reinforced
• Negative reinforcement: occurs when a behavior removes or
eliminates a stimulus
– If behavior results in elimination of a negative stimulus, it’s more
likely to be repeated: the behavior has been negatively reinforced
• Both types of reinforcement strengthen behavior: positive through
adding stimuli; negative by subtracting stimuli

8. Punishment
• If reinforcement strengthens behavior, punishment suppresses it:
behavior followed by punishment is less likely to be repeated
– As with reinforcers, punishments are somewhat individualized: what
punishes one individual might not be perceived as punishment by another
• Two main types of punishment:
1. Direct Punishment (Type I)
Direct punishment: appearance of stimulus following behavior
suppresses or weakens behavior.
2. Removal Punishment (Type II)
Removal punishment: stimulus is removed following behavior in order to
weaken or suppress it.
• Both types suppress behavior--Direct punishment by adding
something to stop it, and removal punishment by withholding
something

9. Antecedents
• Antecedents precede behavior
– Help individuals distinguish between behaviors that lead to positive
consequences and behaviors that lead to negative consequences:
individual learns to “read the antecedent.”
• Not always the case that people are conscious of reading the antecedent,
but cues and prompts can be deliberately used to influence behavior.
• Cueing: providing an antecedent just prior to a particular behavior.
– Furnishes information about which behaviors will be punished and
which reinforced.
– Allows teachers, parents to reinforce behavior without resorting to
punishment.

10. Prompting
• Prompting: providing an additional cue after the first cue
• Two principles for using cues and prompts effectively:
– Make sure environmental stimulus you want as a cue occurs right
before your prompt
– Fade the prompt as soon as possible
• Example: checklist when students work in pairs on peer tutoring
– Gradually remove the support of the checklist, which serves as a
prompt, when students internalize procedures
– Monitor progress, reinforce good work, correct mistakes

11. Teaching Applications
• Guiding principles for teaching contexts:
– Clear, systematic praise for genuine accomplishments
– Link success to effort and ability—in order to build confidence
– Make sure reinforcers are things students value
– Give plenty of reinforcement when introducing new material
– Set clear and specific goals so you know what to reinforce
– Offer a variety of reinforcers and allow students to choose
– Structure situation around negative reinforcement rather than punishment
– Use cues to help establish new behavior
• Specific approaches that utilize behavioral principles: the Good Behavior
Game, Positive Behavior Support (PBS) based on a Functional Behavioral
Assessment (FBA), learning objectives, and direct instruction
• Most useful when learning new behaviors or explicit information, and
when learning is sequential or factual

12. Positive Behavior Support based on a
Functional Behavioral Assessment
• FBA What are students getting out of the negative
behavior?
1. Receive attention from others—teachers, parent, or peers.
2. Escape from some unpleasant situation—an academic or social
demand.
3. Get a desired item or activity.
4. Meet sensory needs, such as stimulation from rocking or flapping
arms for some children with autism.
• PBS What positive behaviors could lead to the same results
and what will support the student in learning the new positive
behaviors?

13. Learning Objectives
• Instructional objective: clear and unambiguous description of teacher’s
educational aims for students
• Robert Mager: objectives should describe what students will be doing to
demonstrate their achievement, how teacher will know when students have
succeeded
• Three parts to good objectives:
1. Intended student behavior: what must student do?
2. Conditions under which behavior occurs: how will behavior be recognized
or tested?
3. Criteria for acceptable performance: how well has student done?
• Objectives useful under certain specific conditions:
– More successful in promoting learning with loosely structured activities
– Useful when significance of information is unclear from learning materials and
activities themselves, i.e., objectives help focus students’ attention on learning
goals

14. Direct Instruction
• A.K.A., “explicit teaching” or “active teaching”
• Best applied to teaching of basic skills: science facts, mathematical
computations, vocabulary and grammar rules
• Taught step-by-step, assessed with standardized tests
• Barak Rosenshine: Six Teaching Functions of effective direct
instruction
1. Review and check previous day’s work
2. Present new material
3. Provide guided practice
4. Give feedback and correctives based on student answers
5. Provide independent practice
6. Review weekly and monthly
• Other direct instruction approaches—Hunter; Good, Grouws, and
Ebmeier—draw on similar elements of effective instruction

15. Cognitive Perspectives on Learning
• Cognitive theorists focus on thinking, learning, conceptualization, and
problem solving
• Learning is an active mental process: we plan our responses, use systems to
help us remember, and organize materials
• Puts the individual back in the learning process: what we bring to the
learning situation has a huge influence on how and what we learn

16. Categorizing Knowledge
• Knowledge as both means and end: existing knowledge guides new
learning—the “scaffold that supports the construction of all future learning”
• General knowledge vs. Domain-specific knowledge:
– General: applies to a variety of situations
– Domain-specific: relates to particular task or subject
• Also categorize knowledge by how it’s manifested
– Declarative knowledge: can be declared, usually in words
– Procedural knowledge: “knowing how” to do something—knowledge
that is demonstrated
– Self-regulatory: “knowing when and why” to apply declarative and
procedural knowledge

17. Information-Processing Model
• Early views had the analogy between mind and computer: information
stored in three storage systems
– Sensory memory: holding system that maintains stimuli so that
perceptual analysis can occur
– Working memory: (short-term memory) holds 5-9 bits of info at a time
for up to 20 seconds
– Long-term memory: stores huge amounts of info for long periods of
time; may be coded verbally or visually or both
• Memory = reconstruction: leads to accurate, partly accurate, or inaccurate
recall; accurate retrieval depends partly on how info was learned.
• A more recent view of memory and cognition is called cognitive science,
which emphasizes the role of working memory, attention, sensory memory,
and interactions of the elements of the system.

18. Sensory Memory
• Sensory memory = the initial system that briefly holds stimuli we perceive
through our senses; other names for sensory memory are sensory buffer,
iconic buffer (for images), and echoic memory for sounds.
• We attend to some stimuli and not to others—this attention is first step in
learning.
• A challenge to teachers is to structure classroom environment to get and
keep student attention at outset of lesson and keep them focused
throughout the class.

19. Working Memory
• Working memory defined: where new information is held briefly and
combined with knowledge from long-term memory.
• Resembles screen of computer—content is activated information, in-the-
moment consciousness.
• Capacity = 5-9 separate new items at once or the amount of info we can
rehearse in about 1.5 seconds
• Recent theories: two working memory systems—one for language-based
information, one for nonverbal, spatial, visual information
• Duration of info in working memory is short: 5-20 seconds.
• Easily overwhelmed if cognitive load (especially extraneous load) is too
great.

20. Retaining Info in Working Memory
• Use it or lose it: if info in working memory is not activated, it fades
• Most people engage in specific strategies to keep it
• Rehearsal: 2 types
– Maintenance rehearsal — repeating information in your mind
– Elaborative rehearsal — associating the info with something you
already know (info in long-term memory)
• Not only improves working memory, but also helps channel info from
short- to long-term memory
• Chunking: group or “chunk” individual bits of information into meaningful
units (size doesn’t matter, # of bits does)

21. Long-Term Memory
• Long-term memory holds information that we move from working
memory for indefinite storage
• Virtually unlimited, but not always easy to access specific information
if much is stored over a long time
• 3 main kinds of long-term memory:
1. Episodic: associated with particular times and places—personal
memories of events of your own life
2. Procedural: how to do things—may take a while, but once learned, such
knowledge is remembered for a long time
3. Semantic: memory for meaning: general concepts, principles, and their
associations
• 2 important ways of storing semantic memory
Images: visual representations—”mind’s eye”
Schemas: abstract structures, patterns, systems, scripts

22. Storage and Retrieval
• How info is processed initially has impact on recall.
• More likely to remember new material if you integrate it with information
already stored in long-term memory.
• 3 ways to facilitate this kind of integration:
1. Elaboration: add meaning to new info by connecting it to existing
knowledge (apply schemas, for instance, or make analogies).
• Easier to recall because elaboration acts like rehearsal—keeps memory
activated longer in working memory, which deepens its imprint in long-
term memory.
– 2. Organization: structuring information helps you remember both general
ideas and specific examples; structure helps map your way back to info when
you need it.
– 3. Context: we learn physical and emotional aspects of context along with the
information we process within that context; replicating context helps recall the
information.
• Bottom line: the more completely information is processed when we first
learn it, the better our chances of remembering it.

23. Metacognition
• Metacognition: individuals awareness of his/her own cognitive processes
and how they work.
• Can intentionally use metacognitive understanding to regulate learning
– Planning: deciding how much time to give to a task, what strategies to
use, how to begin, etc.
– Monitoring: awareness of how much, how well I’m learning
– Evaluation: judgments about outcomes of thinking and learning—
effectiveness of strategies, time allocation, etc.
• Metacognitive skills begin to develop at ages 5 to 7, and generally improve
throughout school.
• Superior metacognitive skills can compensate for lower levels of ability,
and can be taught.

24. Teaching Applications
• Some guiding principles for teaching:
– Use previous knowledge, connections to focus attention and aid
encoding
– Help students organize material in meaningful chunks
– Provide review, repetition, and contextualization
– Exercise metacognitive skills
• Common techniques consistent with cognitive approaches:
– Underlining or highlighting
– Note-taking
– Visual aids
– Mnemonics

25. Constructivist Perspectives on
Learning
• Ancestors: Dewey, Piaget, Vygotsky, Gestalt psychology
• Key assumption: people create and construct knowledge rather than
internalize it from the external environment
• Several different approaches to constructivism:
– Psychological/Individual Piaget
– Radical Postmodern
– Social Vygotsky

26. Psychological Constructivism
• Emphasizes the individual’s reconstruction of external reality
• Build accurate representations of the outside world, often using processes
consistent with cognitive perspectives (schemas, for example)
• Knowledge is acquired by transforming, organizing, and reorganizing
previous knowledge
• Piaget typical of psychological constructivists
• Construction is a rational process generating increasingly complex
reasoning—as in Piaget’s sequence of developmental stages

27. Radical Constructivism
• The extreme of psychological constructivism: no basis for evaluating or
interpreting any belief is any better or worse than any other
• Knowledge constructed largely by interpersonal interactions and
constraints of culture and ideology
• NOT a mirror of external world, because of these interactions and
limitations
• Consistent with post-modernism, post-modernist critiques of American
education

28. Social Constructivism
• Draws on Vygotsky’s notion that learning is inherently social, embedded in
cultural setting
• Social interaction, cultural tools, and activity shape individual development
and learning
• All higher-order mental processes, such as reasoning and problem solving,
are mediated by psychological tools, such as language, signs, and symbols.
• Knowledge, ideas, attitudes, and values develop through “appropriating”
the ways of acting and thinking provided by the culture

29. How is Knowledge Constructed?
1. The realities and truths of the external world direct
knowledge construction Information Processing
2. Internal processes such as organization,
assimilation, and accommodation direct knowledge
construction Piaget
3. Both external and internal factors direct knowledge
construction Vygotsky

30. Situated Learning
• Draws on the Vygotskys notion that learning is inherently
social, embedded in cultural setting
• Described as “enculturation,” or a norming process: individuals
adopt the norms, behaviors, skills, beliefs, language, and
attitudes of a community
• Learning prepares for participation in that community,
whatever it may be
• Emphasizes that much of learning is situation-specific;
therefore, students learn skills and knowledge in meaningful
contexts with clear connections to “real-life” applications

31. Teaching Applications
• Some guiding principles for teaching:
– Employ multiple strategies, diverse contexts for learning
– Embed problems in “authentic tasks” that require students to apply what
they are learning
– Create environment of thinking, problem-solving, dialogue, openness, and
tolerance
– Keep students’ ideas and responses at the center of instruction
• Common techniques consistent with constructivism:
– Inquiry learning: teacher presents puzzling problem or question and
students organize hypotheses, data collection and analysis
– Cognitive apprenticeships: students observe experts, receive coaching,
practice to gain proficiency, reflect on progress, and explore new
approaches to cognitive tasks
– Cooperative learning: working with others enhances learning by
requiring students to elaborate, interpret, explain, argue, and coordinate
information and procedures with others (jigsaw and scripted cooperation
are two examples of such techniques

32. Practical Imperatives
• Ensure that positive actions are recognized and rewarded: Reinforcement strengthens behavior.
• Accompany all punishment with rewards for correct behavior: Emphasize the positive.
• Understand the function of negative behavior: Help students reach their goals through positive
actions instead.
• Match instruction to learning goals: Direct teaching is useful when students have limited
knowledge,
• Help students focus attention on the big ideas: Learning is difficult when you don’t know what is
important.
• Avoid overwhelming working memory: Extraneous cognitive load limits learning.
• Build knowledge in long-term memory by making many connections: Deeply processed and
elaborated information is easier to remember.
• Teach memory and learning strategies directly: Without guidance some students will never
master powerful strategies.
• Create situations in which students actively construct meaning: To invent is to understand.
• Position students at the center of learning: Build on the their knowledge and interests.
• Provide authentic problems as a launching pad for learning: Useful knowledge grows from
solving real-life challenges.
• Build collaborative skills among students and faculty: Cooperation leads to respect and critical
thinking.