Chapter 7

In class we have been discussing chapter 7 in out educational psychology book. Chapter 7 deals with the social and emotional factors in a classroom, such as reinforcement, learning, and behavior. Although I took general psychology last year, it is interesting to look at these concepts in an educational context.
The beginning of the chapter talks about the behavioral approaches to learning, specifically conditioning. It uses the classic example of Pavlov's dogs to summarize what classical conditioning is. I thought it was interesting to relate this back to ed. psych, children are conditioned to respond in certain ways in the classroom on a daily basis. I began thinking back to my days in elementary school and how I was conditioned in the classroom and didn't know it at the time. One example I thought of was when teachers blow their whistles to line up the kids for recess. The kids are conditioned to look up when a whistle blows and stop what they are doing. To this day, I think many people stop what they are doing and look up when a whistle is blown.
Another issue that was discussed was Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory, which states that social, cognitive factors and behavior play a role in learning. What really caught my attention was his reciprocal determinism model. This model claims that three factors, behavior, person/cognitive and environment, work together to influence learning. I thought this was useful information to have, especially with students that are having problems academically. As teachers, we will need to take in account all of these factors when trying to help a student, not just whether or not the student has a good homelife.