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Behaviorism and Education

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Brief History of Behaviorism

Behaviorism and education examines the behavior of a student rather than the mind of a student. The base of behaviorism lies in the understanding of how students verbally or emotionally react to influences or stimuli of external forces (their environment). Behaviorists believe that learning takes place because of a response that follows on a specific stimulus. By repeating the stimuli-response (S-R) cycle, the subject, whether it is animal or human, is conditioned into repeating a response whenever the stimulus is present. Simply put, the sources of a behavior and learning are external (environmental), not internal (scientific psychological processes). Modern Behaviorist take into account that people are not born as blank slates, what they become, how they learn, and what they learn is based on environmental conditioning of outside forces, i.e. parents, teachers, culture, as well as genetic makeup. However, the result of a direct stimuli response does create a chemical response in our brains, which can change our behavior, intelligence, etc. Therefore, learning and behavior are unquestionably affected by positive and stimulating environments, but does not exclusively rely on this. Behaviors and learning are also programmed by events in our past, ideas adopted from other people in our environment, and how our chemical biology responds to this stimulus. When parents, teachers, doctors, and psychologists first began to study children and chronicle how and when they were meeting certain benchmarks, it was more of a chronological examination of achievements. Certain norms were documented and compared against others. “In the 1940s and 1950s, while Dr. Benjamin Spock was prescribing the measures whereby children might maintain physical health, Dr. Arnold Gesell laid out the calendrical milestones that mark normal child

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