Philo 60/ EDD

Reported By: Giraldyne D. Semaña

BEED- 3

B.F. Skinner

Autobiography:

His real name is Burrhus Frederick Skinner.

He was born in March 20, 1904 at Susquehanna, Pennsylvania.
He died August 18, 1990 (aged 86) and buried at Cambridge, Massachusetts.
His Nationality is American.
His wife’s name is Yvonne Blue.
He had daughters named Julie (m. Vargas) and Deborah (m. Buzan).
His field of expertise is Psychology.
He taught three institutions University of Minnesota, Indiana University, and Harvard
University.
He finished his studies in Hamilton College and Harvard University.

Theory of Learning: Operant Behaviorism

Skinner is the leading figure in Behavioral Psychology; he noted two types of

conditioning: Operant and Respondent. Operant learning results from an organism are
operating on its environment. Whatever it does that proves instrumental in obtaining its
objective is reinforced by obtaining of the objective.

Skinner believed that education should maximize knowledge. This is done through
operant conditioning, though building up a student’s repertoire of responses. He insists
that when students can answer questions in a given area, and speaks and write fluently
about the area, then, by definition, they understand the area.

Skinner also suggests that teachers should use techniques that produce meaningful
behavioral changes. Though teachers may sometimes use primary reinforcers such as
candy, condition reinforcers such as good grades, promotion and prizes. He favored the
use of teaching materials, programmed instruction, and behavior therapy, for it can
provide immediate reinforcement and help bridge the gap between the students’
behavior and the more instant conditioned reinforcers such as promotion or grades.
Skinner is against the use of punishment in the classroom, not because it will not control
behavior but it may produce a host of negative emotional reactions.

According to Skinner, teachers cannot always wait for behavior to manifest itself;
therefore they must sometimes shape the behavior of the individual. By means of
innovations such as videotape replay, for example, students see themselves in action
and discover their deficiencies. Such devices prove beneficial in reinforcing learning in
large classes, in which the teacher is unable to cope with all the individual problems that
arise.
 The Axiology of B.F. Skinner

The Axiology of B.F. Skinner is focused on Ethics. Ethics – is the practical science that
deals with the morality of human action or conduct. This emphasizes the acquisition of
behavior in education rather than its maintenance.

Inventions

Air crib

In an effort to help his wife cope with the day-to-day tasks of child rearing, Skinner – a
consummate inventor – thought he might be able to improve upon the standard crib. He
invented the 'air-crib' to meet this challenge. An 'air-crib' (also known as a 'baby tender'
or humorously as an 'heir conditioner') is an easily cleaned, temperature and humidity-
controlled box Skinner designed to assist in the raising of babies.

It was one of his most controversial inventions, and was popularly mischaracterized as
cruel and experimental. It was designed to make the early childcare simpler (by greatly
reducing laundry, diaper rash, cradle cap, etc.), while encouraging the baby to be more
confident, mobile, comfortable, healthy and therefore less prone to cry. (Babies sleep
and will sometimes play in air cribs but it's misleading to say they are 'raised' in them.
Apart from newborns, most of a baby's waking hours will be spent out of the box.)
Reportedly it had some success in these goals. Air-cribs were later commercially
manufactured by several companies. Air-cribs of some fashion are still used to this day,
and publications continue to dispel myths about, and tout the progressive advantages of
Skinner's invention.

Skinner’s Box

A laboratory device for animal experimentation, designed to study responses to external

stimuli.

Teaching machine

The teaching machine, a mechanical invention to automate the task of programmed

instruction

The teaching machine was a mechanical device whose purpose was to administer a
curriculum of programmed instruction. It housed a list of questions, and a mechanism
through which the learner could respond to each question. Upon delivering a correct
answer, the learner would be rewarded.
 Influence on Education

Skinner influenced education as well as psychology. He was quoted as saying

"Teachers must learn how to teach ... they need only to be taught more effective ways
of teaching." Skinner asserted that positive reinforcement is more effective at changing
and establishing behavior than punishment, with obvious implications for the then
widespread practice of rote learning and punitive discipline in education. Skinner also
suggests that the main thing people learn from being punished is how to avoid
punishment.

Skinner says that there are five main obstacles to learning:

1. People have a fear of failure.

2. The task is not broken down into small enough steps.
3. There is a lack of directions.
4. There is also a lack of clarity in the directions.
5. Positive reinforcement is lacking.

Skinner suggests that any age-appropriate skill can be taught using five principles to
remedy the above problems:

1. Give the learner immediate feedback.

2. Break down the task into small steps.
3. Repeat the directions as many times as possible.
4. Work from the simplest to the most complex tasks.
5. Give positive reinforcement.

Books

Skinner is popularly known mainly for his books Walden Two and Beyond Freedom and
Dignity. The former describes a visit to a fictional experimental community [33] in 1940s
United States, where the productivity and happiness of the citizens is far in advance of
that in the outside world because of their practice of scientific social planning and use of
operant conditioning in the raising of children.

Walden Two, like Thoreau's Walden, champions a lifestyle that does not support war or
foster competition and social strife. It encourages a lifestyle of minimal consumption,
rich social relationships, personal happiness, satisfying work and leisure.[34]

In Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner suggests that a technology of behavior could
help to make a better society. We would, however, have to accept that an autonomous
agent is not the driving force of our actions. Skinner offers alternatives to punishment
and challenges his readers to use science and modern technology to construct a better
society.
 Skinner’s Educational Theory

1. Theory of Value:

When we learn to make an origami pigeon or memorize a poem, we acquire behavior .... The stimuli
which take control are generated by the behavior itself That may seem like an inferior kind of
knowledge, but verbal behavior is brought under the control of other kinds of stimuli in the same
way. We teach a very young child to speak a word by priming it. We say "Dada" or "Mama" and
reinforce any reasonable approximation. We bring verbal response under the control of an object by
showing the object, speaking the word, and reinforcing a fair approximation. We hold up a spoon,
say "spoon", and reinforce any reasonable response. Later we wait for a response to be made to the
spoon alone. We teach what a word means by speaking the word and holding up an object. Later,
we reinforce pointing to the object when we have spoken the word. Children do not need such
explicit instruction, of course. They learn to talk, but much more slowly, under the contingencies of
reinforcement maintained by a verbal environment.

2. Theory of Knowledge:

Cognitive psychologists have turned to brain science and computer science to confirm their theories.
Brain Science, they say, will eventually tell us what cognitive processes really are. They will answer,
once and for all, the old questions about monism, dualism, and interactionism. By building machines
that do what people do, computer science will demonstrate how the mind works.

We can trace a small part of human behavior and a much larger part of the behavior of other
species, to natural selection and the evaluation of the species, but the greater part of human
behavior must be traced to contingencies of reinforcement, especially to the very complex social
contingencies we call cultures.

3. Theory of Human Nature:

Actions consists of the structures and processes by which human beings form meaningful intentions
and, more or less successfully, implement them to concrete situations. The word "meaningful"
implies the symbolic or cultural level of representation and reference. Intentions and implementation
taken together imply a disposition of the action system -- individual or collective -to modify its relation
to its situation or environment in an intended direction.

4. Theory of Learning:

Learning is not doing; it is changing what we do. We may see that behavior has changed, but we do
not see the changing. We see reinforcing consequences but not how they cause a change. Since
the observable effects of reinforcement are usually not immediate, we often overlook the connection.
Behavior is then often said to grow or develop. Develop originally meant to unfold, as one unfolds a
letter. We assume that what we see was there from the start.

Copies or representations play an important part in cognitive theories of learning and memory where
they raise problems that do not arise in behavioral analysis. When we must describe something that
is no longer present, the traditional view is that we recall the copy we have stored. In behavioral
analysis contingencies of reinforcement change the way we respond to stimuli. It is a changed
person, not a memory that has been "stored".

5. Theory of Transmission:
Teaching is more than telling. When the doorman said "taxi" we "learned" that a taxi was waiting, but
we were not taught. Then we were first told, "That's a taxi," we learned what a taxi looked like but
again we were not taught. Teaching occurs when a response is primed, in the sense of being
evoked for the first time, and then reinforced. For example, a teacher models a verbal response and
reinforces our repetition of it. If we cannot repeat all of it, we may need to be prompted, but
eventually the behavior occurs without help.

The same two steps can be seen when we teach ourselves. We read a passage in a book (thus
priming the behavior), turn away and say as much of it as we can, and turn back to the book for
prompts if needed. Success in saying the passage without help is the reinforcing consequence.

6. Theory of Society:

A culture commends and rewards those of its members who do useful or interesting things, in part
by calling them and the things they do good or right. In the process, behavior is positively reinforced,
and bodily conditions are generated that may be observed and valued by the person whose self it is.
It is a self that is especially vulnerable to scientific analysis.

7. Theory of Opportunity

I simply must not publicly express my low opinion of them, (educational psychologists,

administrators, reformers and many others) for they are already sufficiently disposed to reject any
help from a science of behavior.

(Skinner considered them) "badly educated... shaped by cheap successes... [with] a grim faith in the
status quo ... they think metaphorically, illogically, or not at all. They assimilate a new idea to serve
part of the established set and forget it. They are smug, unambitious.

8. Theory of Consensus

My questioner might have asked Darwin, "if natural selection is so powerful, why have people
believed so long in the creation of the species according to Genesis?" The myths that explain the
origin of the universe and the existence of living things, especially man, have been extremely
powerful and are not yet displaced by a scientific view. Mind is myth, with all the power of myths.

Sources:

Books:

Tulio, Lovely. Foundations of Education Book One. Mandaluyong City, Philippines. Cacho
Hermanos Inc., 2000

Skinner, B.F.. Science and Behavior. New York, USA. The Macmillan Co. 1953

Internet:

http://www.newfoundations.com/GALLERY/Skinner.html

http://www.answers.com/topic/b-f-skinner