Comparison of

Behaviorism / Cognitivism / Constructivism

Source: Ertmer, P.A. and Newby, T.J. (1993). Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism: Comparing critical features from an Instructional Design perspective. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 6(4), 50-72.

Aspects of learning theory	Behaviorism	Cognitivism	Constructivism
How does learning occur?	• Learning is change in the form or frequency of observable behavior • Learning is demonstrated following the presentation of a specific environmental stimulus. • The primary concern is how the association between the stimulus and response is made, strengthened or maintained. • Responses followed by reinforcement are more likely to occur in the future.	• Learning is discrete changes between states of knowledge rather than probability of response. • Knowledge acquisition is a mental activity that entails internal coding and structuring by the learner. • Concern about what learner know and how they come to acquire it. • Address issues of how information is received, organized, stored and retrieved by the mind.	• Learning is creating meaning from experience. • Mind filter input from the world to produce its own reality. • Learners build personal interpretations of the world based on individual experiences and interactions.
Which factors influence learning?	• Environmental conditions. • The arrangement of stimuli and consequences within the environment. • Which point to begin instruction and which reinforcers are most effective.	• Emphasize on environmental conditions such as explanations, demonstrations, examples, non-examples, practice and feedback. • Focuses on mental activities that lead up to a response. • Acknowledge the process of mental planning, goal-setting and organization strategies.	• Both learner and environmental factors interact to create knowledge. • Context is important. Content knowledge must be embedded in the situation in which it is used. • Critical that learning occur in realistic settings and selected tasks relevant to the student’s experience. • Learning must include activity, concept and culture.
What is the role of memory?	• Not addressed. • Forgetting is due to nonuse of a response over time.	• Learning results when information is stored in memory in organized, meaningful manner. • Use strategies like advance organizers, analogies, hierarchical relationships and matrices. • Forgetting is inability to retrieve information from memory.	• Memory is always under construction as a cumulative history of interactions. • Emphasizes on flexible use of pre-existing knowledge rather than recall of prepackaged schemas. • Learner create novel and situation-specific understandings by assembling prior knowledge from diverse sources appropriate to the problem at hand.
How does transfer occur?	• Transfer is the result of generalization. Situations involving identical or similar features allow behaviors to transfer across common elements.	• Transfer is a function of how information is stored in the memory. When a learner understands how to apply knowledge in different contexts, transfer has occurred. • Not only knowledge itself is stored in the memory, but the usage of that knowledge (conditional knowledge).	• Transfer is facilitated by involvement in authentic tasks anchored in meaningful contexts. • Understanding is indexed by experience and authenticity of experience is critical to the ability to use ideas. • Appropriate and effective use comes from engaging the learner in the actual use of the tools in real world situation.
What types of learning are best explained by this position?	• Prescribe strategies for building and strengthening stimulus-response associations, e.g. cues, practice, reinforcement. • Facilitate learning outcomes like discriminations, generalizations, associations and chaining. • Does not adequately explain acquisition of high level skills or deep processing.	• Complex form of learning like reasoning, problem-solving, information-processing.	• Advanced knowledge acquisition in ill-structured domains.
What basic assumptions or principles are relevant to instructional design?	• represent ID applications • Emphasis on observable and measurable outcomes. [behavioral objectives, task analysis, criterion-referenced assessment]. • Pre-assessment to determine where instruction begins [learner analysis]. • Master simple steps before complex levels of performance [sequencing of instruction, mastery learning]. • Use of reinforcement [rewards, feedback]. • Use of cues, shaping and practice to ensure strong stimulus-response association [sequence of practice, prompts.	• Similar to behaviorism but for different reason. • Use of feedback to guide and support accurate mental connections. • Analyze learner to determine predisposition to learning, and learner’s mental structures so as to design instruction that can be easily assimilated. • Active involvement of learner [learner control, metacognition] • Hierarchical analyses to identify prerequisite relationships [cognitive task analysis]. • Structuring, organizing and sequencing information to facilitate optimal processing [cognitive strategies like outlining, summaries, advance organizers]. • Encourage link to existing knowledge [recall prerequisite skills, use examples, analogies].	• Emphasize on context in which the skills will be learned and applied [anchoring learning in meaningful contexts]. • Learner control and manipulation of information . • Presenting information in variety of ways [cognitive flexibility]. • Supporting problem solving that allow learners to go beyond the information. • Cognitive apprenticeship, collaborative learning, cognitive flexibility, social negotiation.
How should instruction be structured?	• Presentation of target stimulus and provision of opportunities for the learner to practice making proper response. • Use cues to prompt the response. • Use reinforcement to strengthen the association.	• Make knowledge meaningful and help learners organize and relate new information to existing knowledge in memory.	• Model construction of knowledge, promote collaboration, design authentic learning environment.
Role of instructor/ instructional designer.	• Determine which cue can elicit response • Arrange prompts to pair with stimulus. • Arrange environmental conditions so that students can make correct responses and receive reinforcement.	• Acknowledge prior knowledge can affect learning outcomes. • Determine most effective way to organize information to tap on prior information. • Arrange practice and feedback so that new information is assimilated or accommodated.	• Instruct student on how to construct meaning, and how to effectively monitor, evaluate and update their constructions. • Align and design experiences for the learner so that authentic, relevant contexts can be experienced.
Goal of instruction	• To communicate or transfer knowledge to the students in the most efficient, effective manner possible. • Use techniques of simplification and standardization (reductionist). • Assume knowledge can be analyzed, decomposed and simplified into basic building blocks. • Stress on design of environmental conditions.	• As in behaviorism. • Stress on efficient processing strategies.	• To instill self-reliance and self-motivation for learning.