Summarize
the differences between Skinner and Piaget.
Skinner believed
behavior was patterned by the reinforcement contingencies in the external environment. However, Piaget believed children learned
through an innately. Children themselves
build cognitive structures as they solve problems, resolve contradictions,
coordinate perspectives and discover concepts.
Piaget
believes children use their sensory and motor skills to explore and gain an
understanding of their environment. They
do this without any intervention from parents or teachers. Skinner believes children need guidance
through positive or negative reinforcement.
Skinner believes that humans learn how ‘to operate’ in an environment
and this is dependent on a positive or negative outcome. An example of positive reinforcement can be
as simple as when a parent gives approval through smiling at a child, who has
just learned how to hold a spoon. Here,
the behavior is more likely to be repeated.
An example of negative reinforcement may be seen when a parent gives a
glaring look at a child for spitting.
The child will most likely cease to continue with this behavior. This renders a child to understand the
consequences of learning and look at the parents for cues in taking an
initiative to learn. In this manner,
Skinner believes that the children need direction and guidance to learn. Skinner deduced from his experiments that
children need immediate reinforcement in order to motivate them to learn. To elaborate further, if parents use ‘token
economy’ and give stars when a child does their homework; they need to give a
star immediately for it to have an affect.
However, this still means that a child anticipates and waits for a
reaction from a parent for approval.
Skinner did not believe that emotions help children to learn. His theory does not look at children learning
through social interaction.
Piaget
believed that children could learn socially.
For example, when a child interacts socially and and appreciates other
people’s perspective, they are able to understand abstract ideas from different
angles. Skinner did not look at the fact
that a child may have a willingness to learn.
I believe this is a major drawback of his work. A child feels ‘satiated’ if parents and
teachers give out too much positive and negative reinforcement. The child gets bored with the incentives and
also has an expectation that every time they learn or do something there is an
expectation to gain something. Piaget on
the other hand, believed that children want to learn and will do so, as they
are curious in nature. Children can
teach themselves and learn independently through their environment. He explains in his invariant stage that
governed his theory that children learn on their own without adult
intervention. Children move through
sensorimotor intelligence, preoperational thought, concrete operations and
formal operation stages by developing representations of the world; these are
called ‘schemas’. A two-year-old child
will ‘assimilate’ by looking at something such as a dog and revise his schema
of ‘animals’ to include a dog. A child
learns to accommodate when he faces a new experience. For example, a child might think a cat is a
small dog. However, upon hearing it bark
or a parent informing the child that it is a cat and not a dog; the child
becomes confused and goes through a phase of disequilibrium. For this reason, a child accommodates the new
object to fit into the world and creates a new schema for a cat. The child understands something new through
figuring out the world around him. In
this manner the child is not being shown how or what to do, instead the child
is learning himself, naturally. Skinner’s
theory does not explain the learning of complex concepts of why children
continue to use ‘unreinforced’ behavior.
Piaget’s theory explains how children think in order to learn and how
they understand complex and abstract concepts.
Skinner does address these issues.
While Skinner’s model shows how children can be taught behavior, Piaget’s
model shows how children learn independently through their environment.
