digitalknowledgeworker.net

1. Some basic background

Learning is an issue that mostly psychology as a science has been observing and researching. As such, the acquired results are by definition not universal applicable, they must be interpreted as findings of empirical testing. Be it behaviourist psychology, that completely ignores the cognitive functions of the mind or the cognitive psychology that specifically tries to open that black box, the formulation of concepts of learning and knowledge has not come to a rest.

Let us first start by defining "learning". We shall use the following definition of Zimbardo (1992):

"Learning is a process that leads to relatively stable changes in the behaviour or potential behaviour and that builds upon experiences. It cannot be observed, it must be inferred from the observable behaviour."

From that definition we can draw two basic consequences:

1. Learning can be identified by amelioration of performances
2. The performance does not reflect all learning

The latter consequence stresses, that there are believed to be conscious and subconscious learning processes that both form not explicit but rather potential ameliorations in behavior. We shall call this kind of learning latent learning.

2. Behaviorist and cognitive theory

What can be said about this approach to the conception of a persons learning, is that it focuses on the exterior conditions in learning situations. Behaviourism explicitly leaves the cognitive processes out of the picture. As such, the focus is on the triggering of reactions through impulses, especially on punishment and gratification of ones behaviour. Behaviourist theory is strongly founded on Pawlovs Experiments with so-called conditioning. The following links discuss his findings in more detail: