Behaviorism in Practice

The key idea behind the behaviorist theory is eliciting a desired behavior through the use of rewards and punishments. The course text defines the instructional strategy of reinforcing effort is a method of illustrating the correlation between completion/effort and score. The completion/effort piece would be considered the behavior while the score is the reward/punishment. Students sometimes feel powerless in their educational world. Using technology such as Excel graphs allows them the opportunity to visually see the correlation between work ethic and success. The text homework and practice instructional strategy is a method used to to reinforce material presented in the classroom. The resources posted this week most fall under this category. The resources presented allow students to practice learned skills with reinforcement. While sometimes drill and practice gets a bad reputation, we learned from Dr. Wolfe's presentation on brain research that connections in the brain that are used more often form stronger pathways for recall.