Must we take sides?

As I was reading the articles for this week, I was wondering if the field and the theories are always contentious, or if there is a happy medium between the different approaches to teaching (i.e. behaviorism and constructivism). Is it an either/or situation, where you have to be all in on one side or the other? Or is there a place for a combination of theories?

In Richard Mayer’s discussion last night, I was delighted to hear him say that we must look at the specific instructional methods to see which ones work, when they work, who they work for and why they work. There’s no one size fits all. That was refreshing for me after reading these articles and feeling like I had to take a side (which I don’t have). I was reading them thinking that, depending on the situation, one might be better than the other….and that’s exactly what Mayer said.

There’s a time and a place to apply behaviorist theories, a time and a place to apply constructivist theories and we must be able to distinguish between the two, and, to take it a step further, we must re-think what we’ve always done to see if there is a better way. For example, lesson plans for children have always been based mainly on the behaviorist theory (i.e. rewards, punishments). But as we get older and look at adult education and even the workplace, where does behavioral theory fit in?

In the discussion with Mayer, someone actually asked this question and Mayer said that through the lens of cognitive science, the role of feedback is the #1 most powerful instruction tool we have, and that we can’t have learning without feedback. Then we took feedback a step further when someone asked about feedback in the asynchronous schooling model. This got me thinking because two of my kids are in a virtual school, where all but one hour a day is asynchronous, and the teachers leave feedback on their big projects, essay questions from tests, math problems where they show their work, etc. My kids don’t even pay attention to it unless it’s feedback that will be used to improve (i.e. a draft of an essay) and turn back in for another grade.

I then started thinking about feedback that I give in my asynchronous Latino Studies course at IUPUI. I work to be intentional and constructive in my feedback – I want to make it something that is useful for improvement or gets the student thinking further. I give feedback right into the assignment in Canvas, but sometimes there are so many spaces to give feedback (i.e. inside the paper, in the rubric criteria, or on the assignment itself), that I, as the instructor, have to decide the best place to give the feedback, and I’m constantly reminding students that there is feedback in their graded assignments that they need to read and apply to the next similar assignment to show improvement. And…just this week, I got a second video assignment from a student with no improvement at all, on the basic items I gave feedback on. Are my students of a generation that they are just not reading the feedback (that I’ve reminded and prompted them to read) or have they had so much meaningless, purposeless feedback (feedback overload) in their lives that they are numb to it and don’t even read it anymore?

References

Foshay, R (July 2001). Is Behaviorism dead? Should HPT care? ISPI News & Notes, 1-2.

Mayer, R. E. (2004). Should there be a three-strikes rule against pure discovery learning? AmericanPsychologist, 59(1), 14-19.

Skinner, B.F. (1954). The science of learning and the art of teaching. Harvard Educational Review 24:1: 86-97.