B.F.Skinner - Psychology, Learning and Motivation
B.F.(Burrhus Frederic) Skinner (1904-90)
American psychologist (pictured right).
Famous for his ideas about learning and motivation.
Why is he called a “behaviourist”?
Because he studied people's behaviour like the psychologists:
- John Watson (pictured right below).
His most famous book
is…
Walden Two (1948)
This describes a communal, unmaterialistic and ecological utopia in which people are rewarded for moral and
useful actions.
His tips for learning and motivation
1. Rewards motivate people
Skinner’s “operant conditioning” says that people are best motivated to do something
through:
- positive reinforcement - rewards for good behaviour like recognition, praise and
fulfilment from interesting work.
- negative reinforcement - removal of something unpleasant e.g. noise.
He experimented with rats in “Skinner boxes”, where they received
food (positive reinforcement) for pressing a bar.
“The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount”, Skinner
said.
Punishment (the removal of rewards for doing something bad) isn't
a good motivator.
Skinner believed that punishment was unsuitable for controlling
children.
2. Don’t do everything at once
Learning must be gradual.
So:
- divide a subject into small steps
- present information in small pieces.
- the difficulty of tasks should be gradually increased (starting with the
easiest).
3. Questions and feedback
Answer questions and then get immediate feedback from the teacher
about how:
This helps to overcome people’s fear of failure which is a major obstacle to
learning.
To avoid the discouragement of too many wrong answers, the difficulty of questions must be related to
people's:
4. Direction and pace
Learners should be:
- given clear directions (as many times as possible)
- allowed to learn at their own pace (so that brighter students are not held
back).
5. Learning by doing
People learn by doing things for themselves.
6. Turn your genes into greatness
Your performance is determined by your:
- inherited ability (nature).
- the environment in which you learn (nurture) - external influences like family, education
and income .
Your destiny is controlled by others as well as yourself, so “autonomous
man” doesn't exist.
Key quote on education and
learning
Education is what survives when what has been learnt is forgotten.
Key quote on
reading
We shouldn’t teach great books, we should teach a love of reading.
Key quote on science and
technology
The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.
Key quote on
success
A failure is not always a mistake; it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real
mistake is to stop trying.
Key quote on
motivation
The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
A person's behaviour is controlled by his genetic and environmental histories.
|