When talking about learning theories, the first thing that comes to my mind is almost always behaviourism. The reason why behaviourism is deep in my deep is because of the environment of my early life and an unforgettable moment that I had when I was just a 5 years old boy. As we learned in EDCI 337, we understand that behaviorism believes that learning results are decided by feedback from others, for instance, punishments(Crozier, 2021). Using my experience as an example, when I was 5, I once learned how to swear curse words when watching a soccer game with my father, the way I learned it is by observing my father’s behavior, my father cursed every time when his favourite team was behind. As a 5-year-old child, I decided to do what my father was doing, which is cursing along with him, it didn’t matter to me which team was winning, I just cursed throughout the game. As a result, my mother stopped me with a method I couldn’t recall, my guess on that method is that it wasn’t pretty. It is a very strong memory to me as I could still remember the lesson I learned from it. Therefore, I believe that behaviorism is an effective method for us when it is about learning. However, we often ignore the possible negative outcome of this learning method, for example, people who learned from this method might not able to understand their purpose of learning, their motivations are often to be the winning prize of their learning or, to avoid the losing punishment. To me, this is not a very healthy learning method as we could be blinded by the outcome of learning, and forget why we want to learn.
Reference:
N. Crozier, EDCI 337: Interactive and Multimedia Learning (2021).
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