Philo 60/ EDDReported By: Giraldyne D. Semaña BEED- 3

B.F. Skinner

Autobiography:

His real name is Burrhus Frederick Skinner.He was born in March 20, 1904 at Susquehanna, Pennsylvania.He died August 18, 1990 (aged 86) and buried at Cambridge, Massachusetts.His Nationality is American.His wife’s name is Yvonne Blue.He had daughters named Julie (m. Vargas) and Deborah (m. Buzan).His field of expertise is Psychology.He taught three institutions University of Minnesota, Indiana University, and Harvard University.He finished his studies in Hamilton College and Harvard University.

Theory of Learning: Operant Behaviorism

Skinner is the leading figure in Behavioral Psychology; he noted two types of conditioning: Operant and Respondent. Operant learning results from an organism are operating on its environment. Whatever it does that proves instrumental in obtaining its objective is reinforced by obtaining of the objective.

Skinner believed that education should maximize knowledge. This is done through operant conditioning, though building up a student’s repertoire of responses. He insists that when students can answer questions in a given area, and speaks and write fluently about the area, then, by definition, they understand the area.

Skinner also suggests that teachers should use techniques that produce meaningful behavioral changes. Though teachers may sometimes use primary reinforcers such as candy, condition reinforcers such as good grades, promotion and prizes. He favored the use of teaching materials, programmed instruction, and behavior therapy, for it can provide immediate reinforcement and help bridge the gap between the students’ behavior and the more instant conditioned reinforcers such as promotion or grades. Skinner is against the use of punishment in the classroom, not because it will not control behavior but it may produce a host of negative emotional reactions.

According to Skinner, teachers cannot always wait for behavior to manifest itself; therefore they must sometimes shape the behavior of the individual. By means of innovations such as videotape replay, for example, students see themselves in action and discover their deficiencies. Such devices prove beneficial in reinforcing learning in large classes, in which the teacher is unable to cope with all the individual problems that arise.

The Axiology of B.F. Skinner

The Axiology of B.F. Skinner is focused on Ethics. Ethics – is the practical science that deals with the morality of human action or conduct. This emphasizes the acquisition of behavior in education rather than its maintenance.

Inventions

Air crib

In an effort to help his wife cope with the day-to-day tasks of child rearing, Skinner – a consummate inventor – thought he might be able to improve upon the standard crib. He invented the 'air-crib' to meet this challenge. An 'air-crib' (also known as a 'baby tender' or humorously as an 'heir conditioner') is an easily cleaned, temperature and humidity-controlled box Skinner designed to assist in the raising of babies.

It was one of his most controversial inventions, and was popularly mischaracterized as cruel and experimental. It was designed to make the early childcare simpler (by greatly reducing laundry, diaper rash, cradle cap, etc.), while encouraging the baby to be more confident, mobile, comfortable, healthy and therefore less prone to cry. (Babies sleep and will sometimes play in air cribs but it's misleading to say they are 'raised' in them. Apart from newborns, most of a baby's waking hours will be spent out of the box.) Reportedly it had some success in these goals. Air-cribs were later commercially manufactured by several companies. Air-cribs of some fashion are still used to this day, and publications continue to dispel myths about, and tout the progressive advantages of Skinner's invention.

Skinner’s Box

A laboratory device for animal experimentation, designed to study responses to external stimuli.

Teaching machine

The teaching machine, a mechanical invention to automate the task of programmed instruction

The teaching machine was a mechanical device whose purpose was to administer a curriculum of programmed instruction. It housed a list of questions, and a mechanism through which the learner could respond to each question. Upon delivering a correct answer, the learner would be rewarded.

Influence on Education

Skinner influenced education as well as psychology. He was quoted as saying "Teachers must learn how to teach ... they need only to be taught more effective ways of teaching." Skinner asserted that positive reinforcement is more effective at changing and establishing behavior than punishment, with obvious implications for the then widespread practice of rote learning and punitive discipline in education. Skinner also suggests that the main thing people learn from being punished is how to avoid punishment.

Skinner says that there are five main obstacles to learning:

1. People have a fear of failure.2. The task is not broken down into small enough steps.3. There is a lack of directions.4. There is also a lack of clarity in the directions.5. Positive reinforcement is lacking.

Skinner suggests that any age-appropriate skill can be taught using five principles to remedy the above problems:

1. Give the learner immediate feedback.2. Break down the task into small steps.3. Repeat the directions as many times as possible.4. Work from the simplest to the most complex tasks.5. Give positive reinforcement.

Books

Skinner is popularly known mainly for his books Walden Two and Beyond Freedom and Dignity. The former describes a visit to a fictional experimental community [33] in 1940s United States, where the productivity and happiness of the citizens is far in advance of that in the outside world because of their practice of scientific social planning and use of operant conditioning in the raising of children.

Walden Two, like Thoreau's Walden, champions a lifestyle that does not support war or foster competition and social strife. It encourages a lifestyle of minimal consumption, rich social relationships, personal happiness, satisfying work and leisure.[34]

In Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner suggests that a technology of behavior could help to make a better society. We would, however, have to accept that an autonomous agent is not the driving force of our actions. Skinner offers alternatives to punishment and challenges his readers to use science and modern technology to construct a better society.

Skinner’s Educational Theory

1. Theory of Value:

When we learn to make an origami pigeon or memorize a poem, we acquire behavior .... The stimuli which take control are generated by the behavior itself That may seem like an inferior kind of knowledge, but verbal behavior is brought under the control of other kinds of stimuli in the same way. We teach a very young child to speak a word by priming it. We say "Dada" or "Mama" and reinforce any reasonable approximation. We bring verbal response under the control of an object by showing the object, speaking the word, and reinforcing a fair approximation. We hold up a spoon, say "spoon", and reinforce any reasonable response. Later we wait for a response to be made to the spoon alone. We teach what a word means by speaking the word and holding up an object. Later, we reinforce pointing to the object when we have spoken the word. Children do not need such explicit instruction, of course. They learn to talk, but much more slowly, under the contingencies of reinforcement maintained by a verbal environment.

2. Theory of Knowledge:

Cognitive psychologists have turned to brain science and computer science to confirm their theories. Brain Science, they say, will eventually tell us what cognitive processes really are. They will answer, once and for all, the old questions about monism, dualism, and interactionism. By building machines that do what people do, computer science will demonstrate how the mind works.

We can trace a small part of human behavior and a much larger part of the behavior of other species, to natural selection and the evaluation of the species, but the greater part of human behavior must be traced to contingencies of reinforcement, especially to the very complex social contingencies we call cultures.

3. Theory of Human Nature:

Actions consists of the structures and processes by which human beings form meaningful intentions and, more or less successfully, implement them to concrete situations. The word "meaningful" implies the symbolic or cultural level of representation and reference. Intentions and implementation taken together imply a disposition of the action system -- individual or collective -to modify its relation to its situation or environment in an intended direction.

4. Theory of Learning:

Learning is not doing; it is changing what we do. We may see that behavior has changed, but we do not see the changing. We see reinforcing consequences but not how they cause a change. Since the observable effects of reinforcement are usually not immediate, we often overlook the connection. Behavior is then often said to grow or develop. Develop originally meant to unfold, as one unfolds a letter. We assume that what we see was there from the start.

Copies or representations play an important part in cognitive theories of learning and memory where they raise problems that do not arise in behavioral analysis. When we must describe something that is no longer present, the traditional view is that we recall the copy we have stored. In behavioral analysis contingencies of reinforcement change the way we respond to stimuli. It is a changed person, not a memory that has been "stored".

5. Theory of Transmission:

Teaching is more than telling. When the doorman said "taxi" we "learned" that a taxi was waiting, but we were not taught. Then we were first told, "That's a taxi," we learned what a taxi looked like but again we were not taught. Teaching occurs when a response is primed, in the sense of being evoked for the first time, and then reinforced. For example, a teacher models a verbal response and reinforces our repetition of it. If we cannot repeat all of it, we may need to be prompted, but eventually the behavior occurs without help.

The same two steps can be seen when we teach ourselves. We read a passage in a book (thus priming the behavior), turn away and say as much of it as we can, and turn back to the book for prompts if needed. Success in saying the passage without help is the reinforcing consequence.

6. Theory of Society:

A culture commends and rewards those of its members who do useful or interesting things, in part by calling them and the things they do good or right. In the process, behavior is positively reinforced, and bodily conditions are generated that may be observed and valued by the person whose self it is. It is a self that is especially vulnerable to scientific analysis.

7. Theory of Opportunity

I simply must not publicly express my low opinion of them, (educational psychologists,

administrators, reformers and many others) for they are already sufficiently disposed to reject any help from a science of behavior.

(Skinner considered them) "badly educated... shaped by cheap successes... [with] a grim faith in the status quo ... they think metaphorically, illogically, or not at all. They assimilate a new idea to serve part of the established set and forget it. They are smug, unambitious.

8. Theory of Consensus

My questioner might have asked Darwin, "if natural selection is so powerful, why have people believed so long in the creation of the species according to Genesis?" The myths that explain the origin of the universe and the existence of living things, especially man, have been extremely powerful and are not yet displaced by a scientific view. Mind is myth, with all the power of myths.

Sources:

Books:

Tulio, Lovely. Foundations of Education Book One. Mandaluyong City, Philippines. Cacho Hermanos Inc., 2000

Skinner, B.F.. Science and Behavior. New York, USA. The Macmillan Co. 1953

Internet:

http://www.newfoundations.com/GALLERY/Skinner.html

http://www.answers.com/topic/b-f-skinner