A) How would you define successful mastery of your lesson
objectives from a behavioral view of learning? From a social cognitive view of
learning?
Since behaviorism puts emphasizes reinforcement and punishment, I believe that mastery would look like the good behavior continuing without the positive reinforcement and/or the bad behavior continuing to cease without the threat of punishment. For example, in a classroom, a teacher could say "If you do well on the spelling quiz, you get a special sticker on your paper." Now the children have external motivation to do well on the spelling quiz. However, you know that the children have mastered this if they continue to put effort to succeed in spelling even without the promise of a positive reinforcement.
From a social cognitive view, if a child saw another child get praised for doing a good job on the spelling quiz, and they want to do the same. What I'm not sure about is if mastery occurs when they continue to try to achieve without the observation or they keep observing and keep trying to achieve. I mean, social cognitive is based on observing behavior. So would mastery entail continuous observations? Any thoughts, ya'll?
Great post! I think mastery with the social cognitive occurs after when the student is trying to achieve what his pier has achieved. Maybe you could assess this skill mastery on students later on a chapter test and decide if the child grasped the concept later on.
ReplyDeleteMary, I hadn't really thought of assessment in terms of reinforcement and punishment. In a perfect world, I would hope that my students would want to take tests and want to achieve, but obviously this is not going to be the case 100% of the time. How can we assess the children's knowledge if the children refuse to take the test? You make an excellent point to reward and the children and giving incentives for doing well on the tests.
ReplyDeleteGreat way of easily explaining the mastery of skills through a behaviorist view! In response to your question, I would say that mastery occurs after observing someone do something and then being able to replicate that performance. I could see how it would be a mastery of a skill when they keep observing and keep trying to achieve. I almost think it could technically be both since you are still observing something be done and trying to apply what was learned. Great job and thought process!
ReplyDeleteI like how you combine the behaviorist view will the positive reinforcers such as the sticker on the paper. This may motivate students to do better because there is a reward. This would be a great addition to the classroom.
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