Behaviourism: The Tinned Soup of Learning Theories

Rachel
Oct 30, 2018
3 min read

When I was a student, I used to buy a lot of tinned soup. Tinned soup and jars of pasta sauce. Quick, warm, fairly tasty – salty and palatable at least – it did the trick and filled me up. Looking back, I’m ashamed to say, I didn’t know how to make soup. Or sauce. So I bought it in tins, and I got on with the rest of my student life of studying, attending lectures and partying.

My life has changed a lot over the many years since then and, amongst those changes, I’ve become a much better cook. From tasting my future husband’s grandfather’s leek and potato soup (Way better than canned), through reading baby and toddler weaning cook books and buying a blender, getting a freezer and discovering the cost cutting delights of bulk cooking, discovering the plethora of free recipe sites online, to trying to eat local and seasonal produce and experimenting with the available vegetables – It’s fair to say I have been on a journey of learning what goes into soup.

ree — It takes practise to perfectly season your sauces to taste and individual tastes and needs can be very different.

I now know my own tastes. I know when to add just a bit more pepper, when a dash of fresh chilli would go down well, whether to add bacon (always a delicious idea) or some fresh parsley. If I say so myself, I can make a really good bowl of soup. I understand which flavours go together and why, and I can barely bear to eat a store bought sauce or soup these days.

Which brings me to behaviourism, the oldest of the learning theories: Often criticized but still often used.

We still sit kids in classrooms with pages full of exercises to work through and positive reinforcements – think marking in green with an encouraging comment, a sticker on the chart, a certificate in assembly. Meanwhile, educational apps using behaviourism abound – it’s a core element of the Gameification of learning: repetitive drills with level up rewards, badges and scoreboards to keep us pulling the learning lever. And it works. These kinds of exercises are quick and simple to write, to program and to grade. They give us test scores that can be easily analysed, monitored and compared. We can prove that learning is happening.

But they are the tinned soup of learning.

They might offer the easiest way to ensure that learners fill up on something but they fall short of the quality learning experience we can create for our learners when we use and understand the ingredients of learning.

Behaviourism is based on the premise that our internal processes are unknowable or irrelevant. Changes in external behaviours that can be quantified are valued. The mental states and internal connections and drivers that lead to that behaviour are irrelevant. Much like the tinned soup: I don’t need to read the ingredients list, much less know how those ingredients were put together to serve it up and know I will feel full.

ree — Behaviourism: The mind as a black box... or tinned can?

But, unlike my years of learning how to prepare and season my soup, in terms of learning design, that work has been done for us. Decades of study by psychologists into the invisible processes of human memory and cognition have done the hard work for us and laid the ingredients out. We have studies that show the role of discovery and personal construction of understanding, how learning conditions and internal motivations influence learning, the role of social interaction and problem solving in developing higher level thinking, how our past experiences affect the links we construct between existing knowledge and new…

These are the invisible ingredients of the learner’s experience. They allow us to design learning that is both more efficient and deeper than binary “Skill and Drill” exercises. We can create learning experiences that hand pick the theories and tailor the tools to suit the learner and the content. Creating a perfectly seasoned recipe for maximum engagement with and internalisation of the content.

"[Behaviourist learning tools]might offer the easiest way to ensure that learners fill up on something but they fall short of the quality learning experience we can create for our learners when we use and understand the ingredients of learning."

So yes, behaviourism works. It will get your test scores up. With enough repetition, enough time and reinforcement most (but not all) learners will get there. The tinned soup will go down just fine. But to craft learning experiences that bring out the best in learners, that allow them to go beyond test performance and achieve real world success, requires knowledge of the best ingredients and how they are added to the pot. The more we use what we understand about how learning takes place, the better the quality of the learning.

It’s time to move away from the quick and easy out of the can approach and learn to cook some really good soup.