Have you ever heard of the debate between "nature" and "nurture"? The question comes down to this: how much of our behavior is due to who we are (nature) versus how we were raised (nurture)? From the point of view of Behaviorism, there is a clear answer. Nurture is the key.

Behaviorism is a well-established theory from psychology, and its founding thinkers are B.F. Skinner and J.B. Watson. Their early to mid twentieth century ideas stood in contrast to much of what came before. Sigmund Freud, for example, focused on introspection and the individual mind, as did many other psychologists of the era. Treating the mind as a fully individual thing seemed to undermine the idea that psychology and related fields like education could be considered science, because an individual mind is not repeatable or generalizable, and science needs to be both. Skinner and Watson focused instead on theories that could be repeated and generalized, and Behaviorism is the result.

Behaviorism has shaped education deeply since the mid twentieth century. Most learners in a modern college classroom were taught with behaviorist techniques at least some of the time in K-12, whether their teachers named the philosophy or not. Behaviorism in education holds that:

• Learning is a behavior, and people learn through interaction with their environment.
• Information is transferred from the teacher to the learner.
• Learners are passive recipients of information, and teachers are active transmitters.
• Teaching should be repetitive, with regular reminders about what is expected.
• Students learn which behaviors are correct through positive and negative reinforcement, with positive reinforcement being more common.
• Students' inner thoughts and motivations are not part of behaviorist technique.

Behaviorism is still at work in the modern classroom, especially for certain kinds of learning such as memorization in the early grades. Classroom techniques that come from a behaviorist point of view include:

• Drills. Learners repeat multiplication tables or a catechism out loud, alone or as a group.
• Regular skill practice with teacher support. Students practice something repeatedly while the instructor observes and guides. This is a common way to teach a musical instrument.
• Question and answer. The instructor asks increasingly difficult objective questions that have a correct response, such as "What atom has three protons?" or "Who is the president of France?"
• Reinforcement. Nearly all behaviorist teaching includes reinforcement, such as gold stars or saying "great work."

For a closer look at how reinforcement works, see Positive and negative reinforcement below.

Skinner's Operant Conditioning model looks at the causes and effects of individual actions. For Skinner, the key to understanding behavior is reinforcement. When people do something and receive reinforcement for it, they are likely to repeat the action. When they receive no reinforcement, or a punishment, they are less likely to repeat it.

Four scenarios

These four short scenarios make the idea concrete.

1. A learner studies hard for a test and does so well that the teacher praises the learner in front of the class.
2. A learner studies hard, gets a high score, and the teacher says, "you did so well, you don't have to take the final exam."
3. A learner studies hard and gets the test back with a high score but no other remark, just the score.
4. A learner studies hard, but when they show their family they get made fun of for having to study in order to do well.

Four types of response

• Positive reinforcement (Scenario 1). The learner receives something desirable in response to an action. Studying earns praise in front of the class.
• Negative reinforcement (Scenario 2). The learner has something unpleasant removed in response to an action. Studying means the final exam is taken away.
• Neutral response (Scenario 3). The learner receives nothing desirable and has nothing unpleasant removed. There is no outward sign the effort mattered.
• Punishment (Scenario 4). Something bad happens to the learner in response to an action. Studying earns ridicule.

A short video explains positive and negative reinforcement and punishment in the context of athletic training. Instructors who want to go deeper can watch a fifty minute talk on conditioning from Dr. John Gabrieli of MIT.

One real benefit of defining learning as a change in behavior, the way Behaviorists do, is that behaviors are easier to measure than cognitive changes. Behaviorism itself grew out of earlier ideas that focused heavily on what happens inside the learner's mind. Early behaviorists like Watson did not even believe learners had an internal life separate from their expressed behaviors. Skinner did believe the mind exists, but he argued it is a black box and inherently unknowable, so it is better to focus on behavior.

Behaviorism has its challenges too. Few people would agree that their own lives are merely a collection of responses to stimuli. So there is a tension here. On one side is the rich, personally validating idea that knowledge is constructed. On the other is the argument that internal realities are at best secondary to actions. Both are useful, and we can use both at once, but each has its supporters and its critics.

Meanwhile, practical educators need data to measure whether their techniques and programs work, and behaviors are the easiest thing to measure. As a result, practical education leans heavily on measurable goals tied to behavioral change. These goals, often called outcomes, use measurable verbs. A measurable course outcome might read, "students in this course will be able to list five learning theories and explain their historical significance to the field of education." You can measure whether students list the theories and evaluate whether they explain the significance accurately. An entire course or program assessment can be built around outcomes like these. This is not the only learning that happens in a course, but it is learning that can be measured and reported.

Educators need measurable verbs for every kind of learning, from basic memorization to invention and creation. To meet that need, most turn to Bloom's Taxonomy, a pyramid-shaped model that organizes learning from the most basic task, remembering, to the most demanding, creating. Benjamin Bloom and his collaborators developed it in 1956, and it became especially influential from the late twentieth century onward. The levels, from foundation to peak, are:

• Remember
• Understand
• Apply
• Analyze
• Evaluate
• Create

Oxford Languages defines cognition as "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses." There are several pieces to that definition:

• Mental action or process: cognition happens inside an individual's brain.
• Acquiring knowledge: cognition sometimes involves encoding new information.
• Acquiring understanding: cognition involves making meaning.
• Thought: cognition can happen without additional input.
• Experience: cognition can use our experiences to encode new information.
• Senses: cognition relies on sensory input through the eyes, ears, mouth, skin, and nose.

In short, cognition is how our brains interact with the world. The brain takes in information from many sources and makes sense and meaning of it by organizing it.

Metacognition is a related term. Oxford Languages defines it as "awareness and understanding of one's own thought processes." When we stop and think about the processes our brains use to make sense of the world, we are performing a metacognitive act. Cognition makes sense of the world. Metacognition makes sense of cognition itself. Good teaching engages both.

Cognitive Learning Theory is a set of theories that grow out of metacognition. It asks us to think about thinking, and about how thinking is influenced by internal factors, such as how focused or distracted we are, and external factors, such as whether our community values what we are learning or whether we receive praise for it. The theory comes from psychology and has roots reaching back to the beginning of Western philosophy, including Plato, Descartes, William James, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget.

Two ideas help get started:

• Social Cognitive Theory argues that learning is inherently social and happens in a social context. A learner's interactions with peers, instructors, and others affect learning directly. An instructor who creates a positive social experience, with regular chances for students to see that learning is valued and that others are engaged, tends to be effective.
• Behavioral Cognitive Theory argues that a person's thoughts shape their actions, feelings, and ultimately their ability to learn and their enjoyment of it. Students who believe they "don't like to read" will find reading harder, and students who believe they are "good at art" will try harder and enjoy it more.

These ideas work well together. Social Cognitive Theory looks at both internal and external influences, while Behavioral Cognitive Theory explores internal forces alone. Learning activities that fit Cognitive Learning Theory include:

• Journaling, which draws on internal interests and motivations and provides a safe space to take risks without the threat of external judgment.
• Peer teaching, which gives learning a social context and shows that knowing is valued in the group.
• Modeling your own thinking, working through a problem in front of learners to normalize the fact that understanding takes time and is a process.

Cognitive load is a good example of the hard science of neuroscience and the social science of education coming together to form a practical learning theory. In 1968, Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin published "Human Memory: A Proposed System and its Control Processes," which offered a model of human information processing. Twenty years later, in 1988, John Sweller built on that model to propose Cognitive Load Theory.

Cognitive Load Theory argues that human working memory has a limited capacity, so learning experiences should be designed to remove unnecessary information and keep every activity tied directly to learning.

The theory is influential today, and you can see it in the educational technology we use at Wichita State. Blackboard's course format is designed to remove as much extraneous information as possible. It offers limited color and font options, and the layout available to instructors is deliberately constrained so that most courses look similar from one to the next. These choices reduce unnecessary strain on students' cognitive load.

The central idea in Constructivism is that knowledge is constructed inside the mind of the learner. That is a compelling and even beautiful idea, and it also means learner-constructed knowledge is subject to systematic, predictable errors in the way human brains work. In short, human brains are subject to cognitive bias. This article from VeryWell Mind covers ten different types.

Cognitive biases are not the same as logical fallacies. A logical fallacy is an error in argument, and learners can be trained to avoid it. A cognitive bias is rooted in the way the brain actually works. We can be taught that biases exist, and we can work against them, but they cannot be conquered the way logical fallacies can.

One way to think of memory is the everyday process of storing and recalling information. There are many techniques for storing information so it can be recalled at will, and one of them is the mnemonic device. Mnemonic devices give us a mental shortcut for storing information in a lasting, readily recalled way. Some learners invent them on their own, and others benefit from being shown how. A few useful and ancient examples:

• Acronyms and acrostics. An acronym is a word or word-like set of letters built from the first letter of each word in a phrase, such as ASAP for "as soon as possible." An acrostic makes a phrase instead of a single word. Many learners remember "Kings play chess on fine grain sand" for kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species.
• Rhymes and music. These have aided memory far longer than the written word. If you sing the alphabet in your head to recall the order of the letters, you have used music for memory your whole life. And when did Columbus sail the ocean blue? Fourteen hundred and ninety-two.
• The Method of Loci. Also called a memory palace, this ancient technique goes back at least to the Ancient Greeks. Picture a place you know well, often your own home, and, starting from a fixed point such as the front door, associate a mental image of each thing you want to remember with an item in the house. Competitive memory athletes use it to recall the order of a shuffled deck of cards.

If you have heard someone describe teachers as either "a sage on the stage" or "a guide on the side," you have already met Constructivism. Its heavy focus on the learner leads to the view that good instruction supports learning but cannot impart it.

Although Constructivism took shape in the 1980s, it is grounded in the work of Jean Piaget and other early twentieth century thinkers. Piaget argued that people use both their experiences and their ideas to construct meaning, and that observation sits at the core of a constructivist worldview. Lev Vygotsky made similar observations but placed them in a social context, advancing a theory of social constructivism in which learners use interactions with others to build the cognitive tools that support their learning. Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development has been especially influential. It is the area between what a learner can do fully on their own and the point where they need help from an outside source. Think of it as a reach or stretch assignment, where a learner struggles to succeed and learns through that struggle.

The Zone of Proximal Development and Jerome Bruner's related idea of instructional scaffolding are both central to Instructional Design. Scaffolding means offering supports at the start and gradually removing them as the learner grows, giving just enough help that learners feel confident taking risks. Constructivism's basic arguments include:

• All knowledge is constructed, and the process is individual to each learner. New information is folded into a learner's prior experience and worldview.
• Learners learn how to learn by going through the process of learning. Learning cannot be understood apart from that process.
• Learning is inherently active. Passively receiving information does not lead to learning.
• Learning is inherently social, so constructivist educators favor discussion, group work, and peer modeling.
• Even though learning is social, knowledge itself is personal.
• To be meaningful, learning must be contextualized in a way that makes sense for the learner.
• Failure is central. Learners must experience failure to find the edge of their Zone of Proximal Development and reflect on how to improve.
• Learning happens in the mind. Repetition may build muscle memory, but making meaning requires engaging the mind as well as the body.
• Because learning depends so much on the individual, learners must be intrinsically motivated.

Humanism, like most of our learning theories, comes to education from another discipline. Its roots are in Ancient Greece, and it came to flower in the Italian Renaissance as a reaction to an earlier focus on the divine and metaphysical. Rather than looking toward religion, Humanists focused on the inherent good they saw in humanity. That belief in people's essential goodness shaped educational theory and has been influential from the nineteenth century onward. As a learning theory, Humanism tends to hold these beliefs:

• Learner-centered education. Whether focused on children or adults, Humanists believe education exists to develop the individual learner, which shows up as a great deal of learner choice in what and how to learn, even for very young learners.
• Learner engagement. Humanists believe learning requires learners to be engaged. This is sometimes misread as a demand that educators be entertainers, but engagement means fostering curiosity and interest. Excellent educators help students come to love learning.
• Self-evaluation. Because learners are at the center, Humanists emphasize student-led evaluation. Students still need structured ways to think about their growth and have to learn how to self-evaluate well.
• Respecting the whole brain. Humanism holds that learning requires both emotional growth and the acquisition of knowledge and skills. This idea predates modern neuroscience but fits well with what we now understand about how the brain stores and retrieves information.
• How to learn, not what to learn. Because each learner is in charge of their own learning, Humanists focus less on delivering a fixed curriculum and more on helping learners develop skills they can apply outside the classroom.

Abraham Maslow's pyramid-shaped Hierarchy of Needs is an influential way of organizing human needs from the most basic to the most advanced. Maslow argued that the most basic needs must be met before a person can move up to more advanced ones. He did not argue that each need must be one hundred percent met before moving up. A learner can be a little hungry and still learn, but chronic hunger is a problem.

From the bottom up, the needs are physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. They fall into two categories. Most of the pyramid consists of "deficiency needs," which grow worse over time. As the need grows stronger, so does the motivation to meet it. Someone can be a little hungry and wait for dinner, but a starving person will eat anything and find it delicious. Self-actualization is different. It is a "growth need," not defined by the lack of something. Our need for self-actualization is intrinsic, and it can be seen as a cluster of related growth needs that are individual to each person.

Over a lifetime, and even within a single day, learners move up and down the pyramid. A young student may come to class hungry, eat a school breakfast, and do well until a conflict with a peer threatens their sense of safety or esteem. By the end of the day an attentive teacher may have eased the social pressure, but the child then goes to bed hungry at home. Adults face disruptions too, from the mundane, like dieting, to the serious, like being the victim of a crime or going through a divorce.

Transformative Learning Theory, sometimes called Transformational Learning Theory, has its roots in the 1970s, though through its connection to Humanism it draws on a much older strand of Western educational thought. At its heart, the theory seeks to understand and promote human development through learning. Transformation is more than knowing more over time. When a learner is transformed by education, they undergo a shift in perspective, and afterward they cannot go back to seeing the world the way they once did.

Consider Plato's allegory of the cave. To a Transformative Learning practitioner, an educator's ultimate purpose is to help learners recognize and grow from moments of perspective transformation. From this view, the educator is not even a guide, as in Constructivism, but more of a host who welcomes learners into increasingly sophisticated ways of understanding the world.

Like many learning theories, this one is tied to one person. Jack Mezirow, often called the father of Adult Learning, developed the theory from his work with adult women who returned to formal education at community college in the 1970s. His research led to ten phases of Transformative Learning:

1. A disorienting dilemma. An experience that can shake up a learner's understanding of how the world works.
2. Self-examination with feelings of guilt or shame. The learner reacts emotionally, often negatively.
3. A critical assessment of assumptions. The learner reconsiders what they believed before the dilemma.
4. Recognition that the discontent is shared. The learner realizes others have negotiated a similar change.
5. Exploration of new roles, relationships, and actions. The learner starts to learn the new rules.
6. Planning a course of action. The learner imagines a different future.
7. Acquiring knowledge and skills for the plan. The learner seeks what they need to succeed.
8. Trying out new roles. The learner begins to see themselves differently.
9. Building competence and self-confidence. The learner masters the new skills.
10. Reintegration into one's life. The learner fully incorporates the journey into their life story.

Transformation does not require the disorienting dilemma to be negative, but it is often experienced that way, because transformations are hard and we rarely undertake them unless we must. The theory is easiest to picture around a life-changing event such as divorce, the death of a spouse, the birth of a first child, or becoming an empty nester. In those cases the dilemma has already occurred, and the educator's job is to help the learner feel welcome in their new life while they build new skills and a new sense of self. Here the Humanist perspective and Transformative Learning work well together.

Major life events illustrate the theory, but they are not the only way to understand it. Many people trained as adult educators hold that all education has the potential to transform learners. From this view education is "dangerous," because it constantly offers opportunities for personal disruption, though it is ultimately the learner's responsibility to be open="" to change. This is not far-fetched. Throughout history, some groups have argued against educating others. Anti-literacy laws were used to control enslaved people, especially in the nineteenth century, and their effects still reach the modern classroom. Even today, educating girls is frowned upon in some places and outright illegal in others.

In the end, Transformative Learning is more than one thing, and each version points to the same outcome: a learner's fundamental change and movement toward their own self-actualization. Three ways to understand it are as an ancient idea that helped found a Western view of education, as a research-based account of adult development in response to a disorienting event, and as a philosophy of transformation through education that shapes how some educators see their role.

Connectivism has its roots in the early twenty-first century, when George Siemens (2004) and then Stephen Downes (2005) published articles about the role technology plays in modern learning. Because it is still developing, and because Siemens and Downes each focus their thinking differently, a full summary is not yet possible. In general, though, Connectivism argues that:

• Learning goes beyond individual knowledge construction. Any one learner is only part of a much larger story.
• Learning takes place across a network. People and other resources such as webpages, books, and databases are "nodes," and as nodes connect through learning, "links" are made.
• Knowledge comes from the combination of links made over time. The process of making connections matters more than the sheer number of them, especially as some become outdated.
• Decision-making is itself a learning process, including the ability to sort through links to find the best ones for a need.
• Connections keep adding to learning over time when they are maintained, nurtured, and kept relevant.
• The more difference there is among the nodes, the more learning can happen. Knowledge depends on a rich spectrum of viewpoint and experience.
• Accurate, timely knowledge is the goal of learning.

Because the theory is still developing, it is less tied to classroom pedagogy than most. It does have a place in the modern classroom, though. Consider a class that uses a social platform to draw global experts into the conversation, or rich simulations where students learn from the decisions they make, especially when they work through those simulations together. Connectivism is a "watch this space" theory. It is likely to keep developing over the coming decades, and the world's response to the COVID crisis will give researchers a rich source of data.