Describe an example from your life of when you were taught using each method described in this article: behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism.

Behaviorism:

From the reading, we learned that behaviorism is a learning theory in which emphasizes that learning occurs through repetitive interactions with the environment and constant feedback responses. The most common example of this type of learning theory is positive reinforcement. To elaborate, positive reinforcement refers to when responding to a certain behavior with a positive stimuli. I remember an example of a time when I was taught in such a way was back in grade 3 of elementary school where our teacher gave us a reading log. Every time we spent an hour of reading we would get a sticker indicating a slot on the log was filled. When a student would completely fill out a reading log, they would get to choose a reward from a box containing all sorts of goodies like toys, pencils, erasers, etc. In my example, the behavior learned was reading more books while the positive stimuli was getting the stickers and choosing a reward when completing a reading log.

Cognitivism:

In contrast to behaviorism, cognitivism places emphasis on the idea that learning happens best when an individual processes the information and stimuli that they are exposed to. Utilizing mental skills including problem-solving, memory, and information processing, students are asked to think about and assess their responses. Cognitivism is frequently used by creating connections and ties to previously learnt information. An example of a time where I learned using the cognitivism learning theory was when I was trying to learn Python (a programming language) through the website w3schools, which is a freemium education platform. I had previously learned Java (another programming language) by following the tutorials on their website and found that they structured their courses in a very similar format. This was helpful when learning the new programming language because I was already familiar with how they organized the course units, and in addition there were some overlapping concepts between both the programming languages which allowed me to learn faster.

Constructivism

According to the constructivism learning theory, knowledge is created by individuals based on their own experiences. Learners will construct their own representations of the world when they interact with it and think back on it, adding new knowledge to what they already know. Personally I have experienced learning through constructivism during my computer science co-ops. While I certainly did learn a lot through my computer science courses, it impossible to cover everything and a lot of the time we are learning about the theory and not actually able to apply the concepts we learn about. For example, I had a basic grasp of databases from my lectures prior to my co-op, but I had never been taught how to directly work with them. Throughout the co-op term,  I had to work with many different databases , and I learnt a lot better by becoming more hands-on and building knowledge based on my experiences.

References

Ertmer, P. A., & Newby, T. J. (2013). Behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism: Comparing critical features from an instructional design perspective. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 26(2), 43-71.