Reflection on The Four Learning Theory Perspectives

Understanding how students learn, and particularly how they learn to read and write, influences the instructional approaches that teachers use. 
Theories about human learning can be grouped into four broad "perspectives". These are

1. Behaviorism - focus on observable behavior
2. Cognitive - learning as purely a mental/ neurological process
3. Humanistic - emotions and affect play a role in learning
4. Social - humans learn best in group activities

Behavioral Perspective

         Behaviorism is the theoretical perspective in which learning and behavior are described and explained in terms of stimulus-response relationships. The key assumptions of behaviorism are:

• Learning is described through stimuli and responses. Behaviorists focus on observable events rather than events that occur inside a person's head, such as thoughts, feelings and beliefs.
• Learning must involve a behavioral change. Theorists believe that learning has not occurred unless there is an observable change in behavior.
• Learning must result when stimulus and response occur close together in time. Learners must associate their response with a stimulus. In order for that to occur, the two must happen in conjunction with each other, or, in other words, be contiguous.

Cognitive Perspective

        Cognitive psychology is the theoretical perspective that focuses on learning based on how people perceive, remember, think, speak and problem-solve. The cognitive perspective differs from the behaviorist perspective in two distinct ways. First, cognitive psychology acknowledges the existence of internal mental states disregarded by behaviorists. Examples of these states are belief, desire, ideas and motivation (non-observable states). Second, cognitive psychologists claim memory structures determine how information is perceived, processed, stored, retrieved and forgotten. Cognitive psychology encompasses perception, categorization, memory, knowledge representation, language and thinking processes.

Constructivist Perspective

        The focus tends to shift from the teacher to the students. The classroom is no longer a place where the teacher pours knowledge into passive students, who wait like empty vessels to be filled. In the constructivist model, the students are urged to be actively involved in their own process of learning.

Social Psychology Perspective

       The focus of social learning theories is interactions between people as the primary mechanism of learning. Learning is based on observation of others in a social setting. Early social learning theories in the 1940's drew heavily from behaviorism, suggesting that imitative responses, when reinforced, let to the observed learning and behavioral changes. 

      When I was at high school, my teachers used cognitive perspective. For example, the teacher wanted to teach how students solve their problems more effectively. The teacher wrote or read questions and then he or she wanted to solve these question with our own thoughts or decisions. This way influenced our positively and so, I encountered many problems about my lesson or different topics with this method.