What can you tell me about Behaviourism approach and Cognitive approach to education?
Conditioning (the process which behaviourism explains/is interested in) is a very simple but unbelievably powerful way in which to modify behaviour. There are two fundamental branches to the theory; Classical conditioning (CC) and Operant conditioning (oc). CC was first described by Pavlov in the early twentieth century and his work is perhaps the best example to explain CC. Pavlov found, unsurprisingly, that when a dog sees its food bowl it begins to salivate (as would you or I). No conditioning has been done to achieve this result, so the food bowl is called the Unconditioned stimulus, and the salivation the Unconditioned response. What was suprising to Pavlov however was that the dogs were salivating before they had actually seen the food! It was found in fact that the dogs were salivating when a bell was being rung ordering Pavlov’s assistants to give the dogs their food. The dogs were, therefore, associating the ringing sound with food! The ringing sound is called the conditioned
