10/8: Recognizing mastery of objectives as a Behaviorist and Social Cognitivist

Behaviorists believe the environment conditions one’s behavior (Ormrod 286). Learning, then, occurs when one changes a behavior due to environmental stimuli. To measure my students’ learning as a behaviorist, I would have to create an activity that would allow be to observe their behavior. For example, I could do a class-wide contingency check over material I had previously covered. I may ask students true or false or short answer questions over the material and then give them time to write down their responses. I would look at certain behaviors to gauge if they had learned the material. If students look at others’ responses, talk to their peers about the question, or hesitate to reveal their answer, I may infer that learning had not occurred and that they had not mastered the material. For those who did well, I could offer rewards to reinforce their behavior and motivate other students to try to master the material.

Social cognitivists believe people learn by observing others but that learning may not always directly or immediately lead to a behavior change (Ormrod 324). Moreover, instead of a one-way interaction between the environment and behavior, social cognitivists recognize reciprocal causation, that is, a mutual exchange between the environment, behavior, and the learner (Ormrod 352). I could gauge learning one way by observing a learner’s behavior after an assessment. A poor performance could lead to a decrease in self-efficacy, which would alter the student’s behavior. Being cognizant of my own role in shaping the environment would be important as well. Spending more time with a student or differentiating instruction would be recognition on my part that learning had not occurred. Because modeling plays an integral role in social cognitive theory, I could see if students could model desirable behavior or aspects of the lesson to determine if learning had occurred. But a change in behavior when learning might not always occur according to this theory. I might measure learning another way by charting students’ progress. If they continuously show improvement, I would know they were mastering the material. This approach may be more appropriate if, as Ormrod suggests, it is more important to focus on improvement rather than mastery (337).