Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

BEHAVIORISM, CONSTRUCTIVISM, AND THE SOCIOCULTURAL
LEARNING THEORIES
Jean Lave 149
There are several perspectives on knowledge acquisition, or learning, in the discipline of
educational psychology. Cognitive psychologists like B. F. Skinner represent the associationist
perspective, in which skills and knowledge are acquired by way of associations and reinforcement.
Such associations or “habits” become strengthened or weakened by the nature and frequency of
the stimulus–response pairings. For example, if a learner is given increased opportunity to learn
a math concept, then that concept will become learned over time through sheer trial and error.
The hallmark of behaviorism is that learning could be adequately explained without referring to
any observable internal states. The ideas of Edward Thorndike represent the original framework
of behavioral psychology: learning is the result of associations forming between stimuli and
responses. Likewise, contemporary psychologist John Anderson maintains that facts are stored
and organized, then retrieved to produce intelligent behavior; learning goes from the abstract of
facts or “what,” to skills in which the learner knows “how.” These educators believed that the
mind could be trained with mental exercise, much like a muscle. The assumption being that if the
mind were properly trained, knowledge and skills would automatically be applied when needed.
The constructivist philosophy maintains that learning is achieved by doing. The major theoretical
framework of constructivism is provided by Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner—in which
learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current and past knowledge. Constructivism
asserts that there can be an observable change in learning when the learner is involved in
productive and meaningful activity. The learner selects and transforms information, formulates
hypotheses, and draws conclusions, relying on cognitive structure, or mental models, to do so.
Cognitive structure provides the meaning and organization to experiences and allows the learner
to build knowledge for advanced forms of knowledge acquisition.
Lave’s situated learning perspective comes out of the sociocultural theory on learning. It
is a relatively new and emerging theory that takes its lead from Lev Vygotsky’s notion that
social interaction plays a fundamental role in the development of cognition and James Gibson’s
theory of information pickup in which perception requires an active organism. The problem
with educational research in cognition, Lave suggests, is that it has two problems. First, the
associationist or behaviorist theory has the tendency to see knowledge acquisition as an isolated,
decontextualized phenomenon. In other words, it fails to consider the activity of learning in
relation to the context (social environment of the world). Second, the constructivist theory restricts
learning by “acting” or doing tasks in their environments. For Lave, contexts create and reflect
different forms of mental functioning and problem solving. In addition, Lave proposes that
learners do more than act in their environments; in fact, they help to create and maintain those
task environments. Lave’s work not only reinforces the sociocultural theory, but has provided a
new way of perceiving cultural thinking in educational psychology.
THREE PHASES OF THE SOCIOCULTURAL THEORY
According to Rogoff and Chavajay (1995) there are three claims of the sociocultural approach
to human cognition: (1) cognition is culturally mediated by material and semantic (meaningmaking)
artifacts such as tools and signs; (2) it is founded in purposeful activity; and (3) it
develops historically as changes at the sociocultural level impact psychological organization.
Lave concurs and suggests that learning is not independent of context, activity, and culture.
Rogoff and Chavajay (1995) distinguish three phases in the history of the sociocultural framework.
The first, in the 1960s to 1970s, was one of cross-cultural research. Many researchers
took up the task of translating cognitive tasks for populations in other cultures, and discovered