Chapter 10 Learning Log

What?

This week in education psychology I learned about social cognitivism. The definition of learning for this theory is that learning is an internal process that may or may not lead to a behavioral change. It is a combination of cognitive psychology and behaviorism in that change in behavior may take place and it recognizes that something is going on inside the brain. I thought that the Bobo doll experiment was very interesting to watch and see that children who watched an aggressive model were more aggressive to the Bobo doll. In the text it says that children are influenced by what they watch including videos, games, and movies. I have always thought that children are influenced by what they see; however, I am kind of confused about this because I think that it has been reported in the news that they don’t think there is a connection between what we see and what we do. This seems to not be true. In class, we talked about reciprocal causation and how environment, behavior and personal beliefs, perceptions, values, and emotions can all influence each other. There is an interrelationship between all of these things. We were divided into groups and went to the computer lab. Our group worked on a presentation concerning vicarious learning. Vicarious learning is when a person observes someone else doing something and they learn from the experience themselves. Three types of this include response facilitation effect, response inhibition effect, and response disinhibition effect. In the first, the learner increases an activity after seeing someone else being reinforced for it. The second is when a learner sees a person being punished for an activity and the learner decreases the activity. The final of the three is when previously punished activities are not punished in others and so the learner increases the frequency of the previously punished activity.

So What?

From this chapter, I have learned that modeling of appropriate behavior will have a great impact on my students. As I model the behaviors I expect my student to adopt, they will be able to use me as a model and make goals for their own behavior. As I help my student incorporate self-regulating in their behavior, they will eventually be able to make decisions about their behavior on their own. The things I do in class will have a big impact on all the students through vicarious learning. The students will feel vicarious reinforcement and punishment as they see me interact with other students in the classroom so I had better make sure that I am consistent in my behavior. Students need to have high self-efficacy in order for them to be successful in their lives. There are things that teachers can do to promote a high self-efficacy in their students.

Now What?

I will need to make sure that I am always a good model for my students. Students need to feel that I am competent as a teacher and as a person. They also need to feel that what I model is relevant to their personal situation. For this, I will need to make sure to make connections with what I teach to their lives. In the text, it indicated that I need to provide a wide variety of successful models so that my students feel that they too can be successful. To do this, I will look for resources in the school and in the community so that all of my students know that success is possible for them. I will need to be consistent in my reinforcements and punishments because I have learned that students can experience consequences for behavior either directly or vicariously. In order to promote high self-efficacy in my students, I can provide experiences in which they will be able to be successful in many different areas. I can help them be successful by providing necessary scaffolding. I can provide explicit ways that students are successful and I can communicate my belief in their ability to be successful.