Instructional Strategies Correlation with Behaviorist Learning Theory

Blog Post: Instructional Strategies Correlation with Behaviorist Theory
Both instructional strategies discussed in this week’s learning resources seem to line up accordingly to the behaviorist learning theory. As Dr. Orey stated, in his brief presentation, that operant conditioning, or the use of reinforcements and punishments, is the most powerful way of reaching academic goals when delivering instruction through the behaviorist learning theory, it directly relates to this week’s instructional strategies of reinforcing effort and homework/practice. One of our goals as educators is to prepare our students for a successful transition into the real world. I have always been taught that hard work, which directly relates to effort, is the key to success. Educators must influence and model great effort for students to realize its importance. When intended effort is exhibited by our students it needs prompt reinforcement to show its importance in both the classroom and real life situations. Teachers need to explicitly teach students the importance of effort and have students keep track of their own effort (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, Malenoski 2007). Collecting data is easily conducted in this day and age where teachers can integrate technology into the classroom, by using spreadsheets software and data collection tools to aide students in the direct feedback of their given effort.
Even the use of homework or additional practice of a specific skill taught in the classroom directly aligns with the behaviorist learning theory. Whether you would like to call it punishment or not is up to you. Just don’t ask our students; but the repetition of this certain task or skill allows our students learn and make correlations on their own by independently finding ways to successfully complete the given task. The use of homework, although wonderful for students to get extra work in a certain area can also cause some students to become frustrated with a task when it is complicated in their own eyes. This is why it is imperative that educators leave time during class for students to increase their conceptual understanding of the skills and practices (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, Malenoski 2007). With the instantaneous ability to communicate and retrieve data through technology educators are able to expand their boundaries with creativeness to motivate students to complete the additional practice or homework. The repetitious reinforcements and punishments that students receive through completion or non-completion of doing homework actually correlates with the previous instructional strategy of reinforcing effort. The tracking of data on both instructional strategies can prove to be a worthy eye opener for many students to show the direct relationship of their effort to the current academic grade.