14 Oct Recall your personal orientation to teaching and learning and reflect upon how critically reviewing that orientation for bias is essential to designing learning experiences for adults who mi

Instructions:Read each scenario below and then select the response that best aligns to your beliefs.

QUESTION 1 of 5

You are the personnel manager in a top advertising agency that was just selected to produce a political campaign’s portfolio. The candidate isn’t popular with everyone in the agency and you’ve heard some grumbling about the work as soon as it was announced. You have put together a professional development session to address staff concerns and reinforce that developing the portfolio is business, not an endorsement of the candidate.

You believe that the locus of learning in this situation is:

Interaction of person, behavior, and environment

Social Learning

Affective and cognitive needs

Humanist

Internal construction of reality by individual

Constructivist

Internal cognitive structuring

Cognitivist

Stimuli in external environment

Behaviorist

QUESTION 2 of 5

You are a senior attorney in a firm specializing in employment law. One of the law partners assigned you to conduct the orientation of a new junior attorney and two interns. Although you’ve been with the firm a long time, you remember how difficult your first year was, so you want to position the junior attorney for success, and not scare the interns from continuing their law degrees.

You believe the purpose of education in this situation is:

Producing change in desired direction

Behaviorist

Developing capacity and skills to learn better

Cognitivist

Modeling new roles and behavior

Social Learning

Constructing knowledge

Constructivist

Becoming self-actualized, autonomous

Humanist

QUESTION 3 of 5

You are a health educator at a small, community service oriented medical center. One of your favorite tasks is the annual CPR and first aid training program. This year you need to include a session on the use of Automated External Defibrillators (AEDs), which are being installed in several community buildings. You know that most people will be recertifying in CPR and first aid, but that AED will be new to everyone.

You view your role as teacher in this situation as:

Modeling new roles and behavior

Social Learning

Constructing knowledge

Constructivist

Producing change in desired direction

Behaviorist

Developing capacity and skills to learn better

Cognitivist

Becoming self-actualized, autonomous

Humanist

QUESTION 4 of 5

You are an assistant professor in your first year of teaching. A professor with whom you work is renowned for his work with incarcerated learners. He believes your background would be a terrific complement to his own in promoting prison learning centers. While this wasn’t necessarily the direction you intended your research to take, you’re intrigued by the possibilities such a program presents for prisoners.

You believe the learning process here is:

Construction of meaning from experience

Constructivist

A personal act of fulfilling potential

Humanist

Internal mental process

Cognitivist

Change in behavior

Behaviorist

Interaction with and observation of others in a social context

Social Learning

QUESTION 5 of 5

You just joined a nonprofit organization that promotes parenting education. What convinced you to take the job was the opportunity you have to proactively address the learning needs of parents-to-be, although you know that the majority of parents with whom the organization works have been assigned parenting education by the courts.

Your efforts with these adult learners would be:

Framed by andragogy

Humanist

Framed by experiential learning

Constructivist

Toward meeting behavioral objectives

Behaviorist

Learning how to learn

Cognitivist

Framed by mentoring

Social Learning

Your Results

For each scenario above, the five reponse options aligned to five traditional learning theories:  Beahaviorist, Congnitivist, Humanist, Social Learning, and Constructivist. If you are interested, you may scroll up now to see which responses align to which theories.

Review your scores below to see the learning theory (or theories) with which you align.

Behaviorist  (1 out of 5)

Behaviorists believe that human behavior is a result of conditioning, which refers to the process of positive or negative reinforcement from the environment. For example, if a person owns a car that has a remote start mechanism, that person expects the car to start when the correct button is pushed. If the person then buys a car without a remote start mechanism, no matter how many times he or she pushes the button that used to start the car, it won’t start. The person needs to be  conditioned to expect a different response, or, in this case, the absence of a response.

Cognitivist  (1 out of 5)

Where Behaviorists consider thinking as nothing more than a behavior that results from conditioning, Cognitivists consider thinking as something other than behavior, a pattern of information processing and consideration (cognition) that affects behavior in a deliberate way.

Humanist  (0 out of 5)

Humanists promote the uniqueness of humans as agents of self-fulfillment, believing that they act deliberately by placing greater or lesser value on any given action with respect to their individual needs. For example, a person who observes a group member doing all work assigned, doing the work well, and offering to assist others might consider that exemplary behavior to be modeled. Another person observing the same group might instead notice the group member who sets boundaries on how much work he or she is willing to undertake, and consider that exemplary behavior to be modeled. Their observations and conclusions are dependent on their individual perspectives of self-fulfillment and self-agency.

Social Learning  (1 out of 5)

Social Learning Theory sounds similar to Humanism, in that learning is based on observing and mimicking others, but it is more closely aligned with the intersection between Cognitivism and Behaviorism. In humanist orientations, the goal is development of self-fulfillment and self-agency for the sake of self-actualization. In Social Learning Theory, the goal is, simply put, to get what others have while avoiding negative outcomes. For this reason, it is more typically associated with children, whose developmental stages focus on rewards and punishment.

Constructivist  (2 out of 5)

Constructivists believe that learning is an active process through which a person’s knowledge changes as new information is linked to existing, related knowledge. For example, two persons might have an identical experience, but because of those individual’s previous experiences and the knowledge gained from those previous experiences, each will interpret the identical experience differently and will integrate the new information differently.