learning and the Principle There is compelling evidence that learning by humans is controlled in large measure bv three factors: the individual's genetic endowment, his personal hierarchy of values, and the pressure of his social environment. While the first of these is an accident of birth, the other two are subject to at least some influence by teachers and the education process. Studies in this area have been revealing. Behaviorists tell us that each individual appears to he committed to an underlying, highly complex, constantly changing hierarchy of values [46, 333(1969)], and that voluntary hehavior in general, and learning in particular, are controlled primarily by the priorities and priority patterns in this hierarchy. Thus learning begins after the mind becomes aware of a stimulus and the individual decides the stimulus is of sufficient interest to initiate thinking. When thinking results in memory storage of the information, learning is said to have occurred. For complex learning, such as that involved in higher education, the value hierarchy must favor receptivity in acquiring more knowledge and new dimensions of understanding as well as constant expansion of the value sphere and continuous evaluation of priorities and patterns of priorities among values. According to this model, the major bar to learning in the intelligent functioning individual is a conflict of values. B. F. Skinner and his school of behaviorists believe they have found a way to greatly facilitate or induce learning, mainly by providing rewards for learning that the learner finds acceptable. The method, first described in 1938, is known as "operant conditioning" and i t induces learning or behavior modification by means of a series of repeated three-term learner-environment interaction sequences descrihed as stimulus, behauior, and immediate reinforcement. According to this idea, if the leamer emits a behauior in response to a stimulus and the environment positively reinforces this behavior hy immediately changing in a manner obviously contingent upon it, the learner will he encouraged to repeat the behavior in response to the same stimulus. For fast and accurate learning the positive reinforcement must he immediate so as to single out the behavior beingreinforced, and must never come until the behavior has been emitted. The size of the reinforcer is less important than its immediacy and contingency. Hence, a student can he induced to study harder by repeated small successes in solving problems, or so he can proceed to something he likes better. Imaginative manipulation of reinforcers and of the reinforcement schedule has induced learning of greater complexity. Thus, withholding a reinforcer after giving it every time during early learning stages sometimes encourages the learner to try variations in the behavior which, if desirable, can then he reinforced, and the learning of this modified hehavior encouraged. This approach has led to the rapid learning of complex chains of behavior such as dance routines, and machinery and vehicle operation. The reinforcement principle has been used in programmed instruction, for teaching good study habits and general prohlemsolving skills, and in improving less tangible qualities such as perserverence, self-control, cooperation and courage. Negative reinforcement, including punishment methods,
Ieditorially speaking
and uncontrolled development, exemplified by what many 'call permissiveness, have consistently led to undesirable behavior and poor or destroyed learning relations. The "punished student most often shows a diminished desire to learn, a loss of confidence, defiance, enxiety and guilt. The "uncontrolled" student generally becomes bored, delinquent, alienated and anti-social. Not all teaching methods based on the reinforcement principle have come up to their promise. Programmed instruction and related small step, immediate feedback, self-paced learning techniques have been highly successful in teaching routine operations, manual skills and low level cognition,-but all too often they have failed to propel students beyond the unnatural, simplistic, and shallow reinforcers chLacteristic of easily mastered material to those natural and self-reinforcers needed to promote and master higher level learning. Some Student allegedly has said of this that the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in ourselves or in Professor Skinner's theory, hut in the nature of our reinforcers. By far the most successful reinforcement methods of nourishing and preserving learning relations are: a) eliminating the positive reinforcement for undesired behavior and substituting positive reinforcement for desired hehavior incompatible with the undesired, and h) a technique known as self-contracting. An example of substitution might he placing a student who is weak in math skills hut strong in qualitative reasoning in a study environment where math skills have primacy, and building his effectiveness and confidence by appropriate reinforcers. Later the environment can be alteredt.0 include study requiring math skills and qualitative reasoning, the latter brought hack at full strength since it had been displaced b;t not diminished or degraded by the substitution. Self-contracting is a self-management approach to learning in which a student is taught the design and use of personal or self-reinforcers (based on his own value hierarchy) to develop improved study habits and problemsolving abilities; he finally learns the reward of seeing for himself that he can understand or that he can produce. A most important aspect of reinforcement theory is that our behaviors form feed-back loops such that the learner in moving toward a goal not only is constantly adjusting his hehavior in accordance with signals from the environment, hut he also is causing the environment to change in accordance with his responses. This is known as countercontrol, and we see it, for example, in the modified behavior of a teacher whose students consciously or unconsciously apply reinforcement principles. The implications of reinforcement studies are many and far reaching. They include recognition that nature and other people have been shaping each of us, and we them, since birth; that workable, sophisticated hehavior control techniques now are available for use by us and on us; that we can ignore understanding and using them only at considerable risk to our personal and professional effectiveness; and that in the final analysis an individual's behavior, while influenced by the environment and by others, is controlled ultimately by what he values most. WTL Volume SO, Number 4. April 1973
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