#behavioral approach

Currently, this blog is continuing its account of the liberated federalism model of governance and politics.[1]  With this posting, the blog looks further into suggested instructional methods in civics that teachers can utilize as most amenable to this featured construct.  The previous posting identified the use of case studies and community service projects – in both strategies, one does not eliminate other methods, but simply states that the featured methods allow teachers to get at what liberated federalism deems to be important.

          That posting also identified the psychological school of thought that supports the efforts that liberated federalism pursues.  That would be constructivism as developed from the works of Jean Piaget and Lev S. Vygotsky and runs counter to those pedagogical views emanating from behavioral psychology.  This posting will share more of Piaget and Vygotsky’s ideas.

          The Piaget based model, as explained by Geoffrey Scheurman,[2] calls effective human learning as “cognitive constructivism.”  It is dependent on a developmental view.  Scheurman writes

[Piaget] believed that people develop universal forms or structures of knowledge (i.e., prelogical, concrete, or formal) that enable them to experience reality.  This view holds that while an autonomous “real” world may exist outside the learner, he or she has limited access to it.  The emphasis in learning is on how people assimilate new information into existing mental schemes, and how they restructure schemes entirely when information is too discrepant to be assimilated.[3]

Within the cognitive constructivism model, the teacher acts as a facilitator and challenges students’ views of reality by introducing disequilibrium with incongruent factual or theoretical material.

          The teacher further guides students through problem solving activities and reviews and monitors students’ reflective and interpretive thinking after they, the students, discover their researched findings.  Experience consists of actual physical and social encounters in which they deal with unexpected claims – either factual or opinionated claims – and reflect on them, according to Scheurman.

          As for Vygotsky’s strand of constructivism, Scheurman calls it “social constructivism.”  Scheurman explains:

Accepting Piaget’s view of how individuals build private understandings of reality through problem solving with others, Vygotsky further explained how social or cultural contexts contribute to a public understanding of objects and events.  In this view, reality is no longer objective, while knowledge is literally co-constructed by, and distributed among, individuals as they “interact with one another and with cultural artifacts, such as pictures, discourse, and gestures.”[4]

Within the social constructivism view, teachers take on a collaborative role.  That is, they participate with the students in “constructing” reality.

          By doing so, certain functions are met.  These functions are to bring to light students’ misconceptions, to hold open-ended discoveries and inquiries, and to lead teachers and students to real social resources and procedures.  A class of students, including the teacher, “creates” a reality by manufacturing a culturally based understanding, conducting open-ended inquiries, and reflecting on the mutually constructed meaning.

          Constructivism promises to be a viable methodology for teaching a communally based curriculum.  As Scheurman points out, it does not preclude other types of instruction as functional components in preparing students for meaningful constructivist lessons or reflective extensions to lessons that have had students construct conclusions to a set of inquiries.

          Already mentioned in the last posting, there are more behaviorally based lessons which can be employed to establish needed information.  Also, inquiry type lessons that can test claims or conclusions presented to students and are based on the behavioral science model, can be conducted.  In other words, a healthy mix of modes of learning and teaching can add various contributions toward viable civics instruction.

          Perhaps here, as this account completes the description of the commonplace, the subject matter, it is useful to provide a short review of what has been presented.  The account first reviewed the assumptions of the liberated federalism construct regarding individual decision-making.  The account then proposed a model of the liberated federalism model which is presented as the preferred foundation for the study of government and civics at the secondary level.

          Then, using Eugene Meehan’s criteria, the model was reviewed for its viability.  Last, this and the former posting looked at methodology as a contextual factor in implementing the liberated federalism model.  In that, the presentation was in line with focusing on the more interpretive approach of constructivism, i.e., it encourages more heuristic approaches – in which students derive their own conclusions.  In that, they avoid the claim that it promotes indoctrination.  Next, the blog will address the commonplace, the student.

[1] For readers who wish to review those corresponding postings and have not read them, they are guided to this blog’s posting, “From Natural Rights to Liberated Federalism” (June 2, 2023), at the URL, https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/, where this series begins.

[2] Geoffrey Scheurman, “From Behaviorists to Constructivist Teaching,” Social Education, 62, 1 (1998), 6-9.

[3] Ibid., 8.

An advocate of parochial federalism continues his/her presentation[1] …

The last posting left the reader with a general view of what essentialist instruction is and how it has advanced through constructionist thinking in the late twentieth century.  Pioneering that development was Robert Gagne.  He identified a set of conditions and levels of learning in which students, still within the tradition of essentialism, were directed to add to their knowledge of essential knowledge – that is information needed in becoming functioning adults.  

That instructional approach – the most conducive to the natural rights perspective – would utilize techniques that have students reflect on the information presented to them by the implementation of various classroom techniques summarily called constructivism.  They, the techniques or strategic instructional practices, have added sophistication to essentialist instruction that previously relied on straightforward presentation – mostly lecturing – of information.  

Through constructivist techniques, students are called upon to manipulate information in various ways that demand them to reflect on that information.  But is there proof that constructive methods work? With some added theorizing, one can make the claim that there is evidence that they in fact do work.  That is, for example, if one ascribes the term, prototypes, to what constructive instruction strives students to form – and the judgment here is that it does – then there is ample evidence that it is effective.  

Starting in the 1980s, E. D. Hirsch cited studies that show the advantages of using these mental prototypes - as part of an essentialist approach:

 We are able to make our present experiences take on meaning by assimilating them to protypes formed from our past experiences. Psychologists have … given them various names such as frames, theories, concepts, models, and scripts. Researchers … have chosen the word schema for them, and it is the term I use to refer to the phenomena.  Schema and its plural schemata correctly suggest somewhat abstract mental entities rather than concrete images.[2]

 This indicates that the goal of these essentialists is to have students make more holistic or integrated cognitive formulations of what otherwise would be too unassociated or asymmetrical bits of information.  So, readers might further ask:  is attempting to do this too complex for secondary students?  Has subsequent research supported the use of schemata formation or construction?

         Here is but one example of more contemporary research that further supports this essentialist approach; that is a study by Hogfeng Zhang, et al. It  

 … found that significant improvement—in terms of students’ learning experience scores and academic grades—was seen in the experimental group [in which constructive instruction was implemented] compared with the control group. This study has further verified that implementing a constructive alignment template can significantly improve students’ learning effectiveness in scientific courses, hence providing theoretical and practical references for teaching and learning in scientific courses.[3]

 Or indicated in the following finding by Audrey Gray,

 … I visited Pat Gray's classroom. His secondary language arts programme exemplified the attributes of constructivist teaching: learner-centered instruction in a democratic environment; active learners who build and create meaning and knowledge; learners who hypothesize, question, investigate, imagine and invent; learners who reflect and make associations with prior knowledge to reach new understandings.[4]

 While this sort of constructive learning enhances the role of students, it is still teacher-centered in that those professional educators orchestrate the presentation of information to fulfill the conditions and levels that Gagne identifies.[5]  

Again, in terms of civics, the political systems model provides the needed guiding schema.  The model, if taught to students, not only organizes the information in appropriate fashion for the goals expressed in this and previous postings but also serves as the conceptual organizer for political and governmental information that individual students will confront in the classroom and in their adult lives.

         And with this account demonstrating the tie to a constructivist approach, it will now begin to address the various commonplaces of curricular development – those being students or learners, subject matter, teachers, and milieu – that this natural rights/behavioral associated perspective has.  The blog will further turn to how they relate to the application of this approach to civics.  

But as a word of context, readers should keep in mind that these positive qualities of constructive or essentialist teaching are only possibilities or potentials since what was described in this, and the last two postings do not pertain to what actually happens in most American civics education classrooms.

In the upcoming postings, readers will not find an extensive inquiry into each of these issues (each can be the topic of extensive study), but a general view which sufficiently helps justify the adoption of the natural rights construct as a theoretical foundation for a civics curriculum in America’s secondary schools.

[1] This presentation continues with this posting.  The reader is informed that the claims made in this posting do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or knowledge of this blogger.  Instead, the posting is a representation of what an advocate of the natural rights view might present.  This is done to present a dialectic position of that construct.  This series of postings begins with “Judging Natural Rights View, I,” August 2, 2022.

[2] E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy:  What Every American Needs to Know (New York, NY:  Vintage, 1987), 51.

[3] Hongfeng Zhang, Shanodan Su, Yumeng Zeng, and Johnny F. I. Lam, “An Experimental Study on the Effectiveness of Students’ Learning in Scientific Courses through Constructive Alignment – A Case Study from an MIS Course,” Education Sciences, May 11, 2022, accessed September 14, 2022, file:///C:/Users/gravi/Downloads/education-12-00338-v2.pdf.  Emphasis added.

[4] Audrey Gray, “Constructive Teaching and Learning,” SSTA Research Centre Report #97-07 (n.p.), accessed September 15, 2022, https://saskschoolboards.ca/wp-content/uploads/97-07.htm.  This is taken from Ms. Gray’s master thesis and is offered as a demonstration.

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I was brought into an exchange between cognitivedefusion and scienceofeds re: defining a process as 'behavioural' as opposed to 'psychological'.  See below for a sample of the discussion.  Original post is here and the article in question is here.

cognitivedefusion how is something a behavioral but not psychological issue?

I don’t know if I totally follow their logic. Maybe behaviouristatplay has some insight? I’m looking at the actual article and I’m getting lost when reading the results section focused on factor A:

"Participants defining Factor A endorsed the view that the path to bulimia might begin with individuals experimenting with binging and purging behaviors (12: +2), perhaps falsely believing that it will help them achieve their desired body shape, with the notion that this behavior works as a method to eat what you want and stay thin rejected."

That…sounds like there’s a psychological component? 

Thanks for bring me in the loop.  Not that I am any authority over what may be considered 'behavioural' versus not but I think the field of psychology has struggled in separating behavioural processes as something completely different from a traditional psychological process. The over-simplification of a behavioural approach/viewpoint as being just 'response leads to consequence' lends it to standing alone separate from the other more complex schools of thought. In trying to create a dichotomy between the two, the field of psychology continuously fails to recognize that we are often talking about similar effects, just with different terminology or sequencing of events.

The term 'psychological' conjurs up associations with the brain, the mind, emotions and cognition; often placing the cause for or dysfunction within one of these elements.  The term 'behavioural' conjurs up associations with reward, punishment and environment, placing the cause or dysfunction as a function of the environment and the consequences experienced.   What gets lost in the 'behavioural approach' label are the operational definitions for behaviour, reward and punishment.  As a radical behaviourist, I see thoughts and emotions as behaviours; the consequences of which can be the antecedent for the overt behaviours associated with a disorder.  The "reward" can come in the amelioration of physiological symptoms conditioned with social/environmental factors or associated with these thoughts/emotions. This is the effect of negative reinforcement (an often misunderstood maintaining variable in many dysfunctional behaviours).

Perhaps as this article was suggesting, people seeing something as a 'behavioural' process are concerning themselves with the actions of self or others; actions which can be attributed to the environment and their consequences.  It suggests to people that patterns of behaviours (including where one's thoughts and emotions fit in) can be found and re-arranged.  People aligning their disorder with a 'psychological' process may concern themselves with how their mind is doing and that the mind needs "fixing" or changing.  If I could just change my thoughts or address underlying emotions I would not engage in dysfunctional behaviour [X]. Unfortunately, this is often done at the expense of acknowledging the effects the social and physical environment play on behaviour.  You can convince yourself to "be happy with what you see" (an over-simplification, I know).  That doesn't change that there are well established patterns of behaviour that come from social and physical cues and these need exploring as well.

I've spoken before about my feelings for Skinner and I really don't want to get into it again, and even after our discussions about him in class, my opinion has not changed: I do not agree with Skinner's overly simplistic view of human nature, and I think that seeing it that way is really just a little bit insulting and de... well, dehumanizing.

The idea that you can raise a child up to be anyone (and that he says he can raise x number of kids into x number of professions, including a homeless man) just seems a little sketchy for me. I mean, one, it's been proven by the biological approach that children aren't born clean slates, and that tabula rasa is an outdated idea, but here comes this approach, making it seem for all the world that the solution to a person's problem is to just re-condition everything. Of course not.