Technology and Behaviorism

Often times when students get their tests back in my class, they are surprised at their scores. Usually it is not in a good way. They expect to do a lot better than they did on the test, and as they are grumbling about their grades, I ask them, “How much did you study?” I usually get the response of “a lot,” which after some discussion usually ends up totaling around 5 minutes. I had only imagined that I could arrange it so that I could graph their effort and their scores to show them the correlation. After reading the section on Mrs. Powell’s math class, I feel inspired to follow her strategy. In order to show this correlation, she had her students graph their effort and their grades to visually display their effort and their scores to find the relationship. Ultimately, most of her students saw, by creating this excel file, that the more effort they put into their work, the better they did in the class. (Pitler et al., p. 156 -157, 2007). As a teacher of seventh graders, this is a concept most of them do not realize. I often see them expecting “A’s and B’s” but are frustrated and confused why they did not get them. By doing this, students should be motivated to work.

Another way that behaviorism is enforced in education is by utilizing technology both in and out of the classroom. By using tools such as a wiki, students can work on building a project outside of class, which promotes team collaboration, critical thinking skills, and also reinforces the content discussed in class. “Technology facilitates homework and practice by providing a wealth of resources for learning outside of the classroom making it easy to work on collaborative homework assignments and providing drill and practice…” (Pitler, et al, p. 189, 2007). When students were to learn about biomes this past semester, I had my students use wikispaces.com to create interactive presentations about each biome that they could then references for later assignments. They created amazing projects, and really enjoyed working on them. This was intended to be an in-class assignment, but my students took it upon themselves the first night to work on the projects outside of class. It worked out extremely well, and the students were quite motivated to do their work.

As we continue to move through technology age, students will have access to a great amount of technology, and in order to utilize it as an effective tool, teachers must be creative and design lessons that allow students to use it within the classroom. From my experiences, any time a student has access to technology in school, they jump at the chance, and ultimately use it as an incentive for learning the content. This idea, which is very simple in reason, is the primary belief behind behaviorism, which is an effective process in the classroom.

References:

Pitler, H., Hubbell, E., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). Using technology with classroom instruction that works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.