Human

Learning
By Joury Alkhaldi
 Overview
● BEHAVIORAL PERSPECTIVES

● COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVES

● SOCIAL-CONSTRUCTIVIST PERSPECTIVES

● FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS IN HUMAN

LEARNING
BEHAVIORAL
PERSPECTIVES
 Pavlov's Classical Conditioning
● Ivan Pavlov was The best-known classical behaviorist.
● According to Pavlov’s the learning process consisted of the
formation of associations between stimuli and reflexive
responses without punishment and reward.
● The conditioned/unconditioned stimulus results the conditioned
/unconditioned response.
● Pavlov used the salivation response (an unconditioned response)
to the sight or smell of food in his now famous experiments with
dogs.
 Skinner's Operant Conditioning
● Defines as a process to that attempts to modify behavior through
the use of reinforcement and punishment positive or negative.
● Reinforcement aims at increasing and strengthening behaviors.
● Punishments aims at decreasing and weakening behaviors.
● Operant behavior is behavior in which one operates on the
environment.
● Operants are classes of responses. Crying, walking, speaking
sitting down, and batting a baseball are operants.
 COGNITIVE
PERSPECTIVES
 Learning as Meaningful Storage and Retrieval
Ausubel’s meaningful learning theory:

● Ausubel described human learning as a meaningful process of relating

(associating) new events or items to already existing cognitive structure.
● Meaningful learning is best understood by contrasting it with rote
learning.
● According to Ausubel rote learning is the process of acquiring material as
that have little or no association with existing cognitive structure. On the
other hand, meaningful learning, or subsumption, is a process of relating
and anchoring new material to relevant established entities in cognitive
structure.
● The distinction between rote and meaningful learning is in the retention,
or long term memory.
Systematic Forgetting and Cognitive “Pruning”
● Systematic Forgetting: it happens when something is not connected to core or
meaningful knowledge.
● Cognitive Pruning: it is the process that the brain naturally cleans up
unnecessary knowledge.
● Language Attrition: losing language
○ Strength and conditions of initial learning
○ The kind of use that a second language has been put to
○ Motivational factors
○ cultural identity
● Attrition is not limited to second language acquisition. Native language
forgetting can occur in cases of subtractive bilingualism, when learners rely
more and more on a second language, which eventually replaces their first
language.
 Cognitive linguistics
● Cognitive Linguistics: is an interdisciplinary approach to the study
of language, mind, and sociocultural experience.
● Several themes characterize cognitive linguistic approaches:
○ Language is not an autonomous faculty.
○ Syntax is not simply an arbitrary set of rules but rather is
interwoven with conceptualization and knowledge.
○ Language ability cannot be examined without concurrent
consideration of language use.
SOCIAL-CONSTRUCTIVIST
PERSPECTIVES
 Rogers’s humanistic psychology
● Rogers studied the whole person as a physical and cognitive, but
primarily emotional, being. His formal principles focused on the
development of an individual's self concept and of his or her personal
sense of reality, those internal forces that cause a person to act.
 Freire’s theory
● Freire argued that students should be allowed to negotiate
learning outcomes, to cooperate with teachers and other
learners in a process of discovery, and to relate everything
they do in school to their reality outside the classroom.
● Freire contributed to social constructivism with his view that
learning is based on dialogue; students are both learners
and teachers as their roles change frequently in the process
of learning. Students become co-teachers; teachers become
students and learn through dialogue with their students.
 Vygotsky’s social constructivism theory
● According to Vygotsky’s social constructivism theory,
cognitive abilities are gained through social guidance and
construction. The development and formation of abilities like
memory, learning, problem-solving, and attention take place
through the role of culture as a mediator. His approach to
child development can be considered as a social
constructivism form. He believes that social interactions
produce cognitive functions.
 FUNDAMENTAL
CONCEPTS IN HUMAN
LEARNING
 Types of learning
1. Signal learning. Attending to something in one’s environment (music, animal
sounds, human voices, etc.).
2. Stimulus–response learning. The learner makes a response to a “dis-criminated”
stimulus, a specific attendance to a single element in one’s perceptual
environment.
3. Chaining. Learning a chain of two or more stimulus-response connections.
4. Verbal association. Attaching meaning to verbal/nonverbal chains.
5. Multiple discrimination. Learning to make different responses to many varying
stimuli, which may resemble each other.
6. Concept learning. Learning to make a common response to a class of stimuli even
though the individual members of that class may differ widely from each other.
7. Principle learning. Learning a chain of two or more concepts, a cluster of related
concepts.
8. Problem solving. Previously acquired concepts and principles are com-bined in a
conscious focus on an unresolved or ambiguous set of events.
 Transfer, Interference, and Overgeneralization

● Transfer usually refers to the carryover of previous performance or knowledge to

subsequent learning. Positive transfer occurs when the prior knowledge benefits
the learning task—that is, when a previous item is correctly applied to present
subject matter. Negative transfer occurs when previous performance disrupts or
inhibits the performance of a second task which can be referred to as
interference, in that previously learned material conflicts with subsequent
material—a previous item is incorrectly transferred or incorrectly associated with
an item to be learned.
● Overgeneralization is a negative transfer about the rules of grammar on a whole
language
 Inductive and Deductive Reasoning
● Inductive and deductive reasoning are two polar aspects of the
generalization process.

● Inductive reasoning (IR): one stores a number of specific instances

and induces a general rule that subsumes the specific instances.
(From specific to general).

● Deductive reasoning (DR): a movement from a generalization to

specific instances. (From general to specific).
Thank you