Education Psychology; Learning Theories

Learning theories are conceptual frameworks that asses how information is “absorbed, processed, and retained during learning”. Cognitive, emotional, and environmental influences, and prior experience, all play a part in how we understand or view the world. This information is acquired or changed, and knowledge and skills retained. Education today is based on these basic and fundamental Educational psychology theories. Educational psychology is the study of how humans learn in an educational settings. The effectiveness of educational interventions is the best when psychology of teaching and social psychology schools are clubbed together as an education organized body. Educational psychology is concerned with how students learn and develop, often focusing on subgroups such as gifted children and those subject to specific disabilities. The schools that I have chosen to learn, compare and write upon was the behaviorist school and the constructivist school of thought. The behaviorist school understood the learning theory, is based on a modification in knowledge through controlled stimulus/response conditioning. Behaviorism can perhaps be best summed up by the following quote from the famous psychologist John B. Watson:

"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I 'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select -- doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors."
--John Watson,
The term behaviorism discusses the school of psychology founded by John B. Watson based on the assumption that behaviors can be measured, trained, and changed. Behaviorism was established with the publication of Watson 's classic paper "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It". Behaviorism, also called behavioral psychology, is a theory based upon

Bibliography: http://www.exploratorium.edu/ifi/resources/constructivistlearning.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_%28philosophy_of_education%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorist