Instructional Design Models

Instructional Design Models

I’ve always enjoyed B.F. Skinner because he was such a character. My psychology professor in college was a pure behaviorist and he even found a textbook for us that was constructed using behaviorist principles, like immediate positive reinforcement.

I had worked as a waiter for the two summers prior to taking Pysch 101. Consequently, the one exam question that I remember from that course was:

I go to the same restaurant for dinner twice a week and always have the same waiter. How would I assure the best service from the waiter?

1. not tip him at all
2. tip him each time I dine at the restaurant
3. tip him only occasionally

I knew that to answer the question properly, I had to circle ‘C’ because, according to Skinner, intermittent reinforcement would elicit the best service. But, I also knew, from my summer waiter jobs, that it wouldn’t be long before the professor would have a bowl of hot soup fall into his lap. So it was with some interest to learn that Skinnarians still roam the earth.

However, I do find myself returning again and again to our class discussion board to see if someone has responded to my entries. It really doesn’t bother me when an entry is not commented upon, but when it is…oh, boy! Intermittent reinforcement. I feel like a pigeon pecking on that lever just waiting for a little morsel to come rolling my way. So, if the blogisphere continues to grow and we introduce discussion boards and blogs into the educational process and endorse social networking as a way to aggregate knowledge: Are teaching students a new way to learn or are we conditioning students to become so attached to the web that they become a character out of William Gibson’s Neuromancer?

Behaviorism acts on what is objectively observed, not what meaning is given to what is being observed. The cognitive theories, on the other hand, look into what the mind is thinking during a certain act/action. A behaviorist would be interested in observing a thirsty person grabbing a bottle of water as a reaction to the person’s thirst. A cognitive theorist would be interested in understanding why the thirsty person chose a blue bottle of water as opposed to a clear one.

The university that I attended for graduate work in American Civilization was known for its strong anthropology and linguistic departments. The strength of those departments influenced the orientation of the American Civilization department away from the traditional American Studies History/Art History/Literature route toward a distinctive cognitive anthropological bent. I have adopted that approach in teaching American History and even in teaching Art to my high school students. I do not teach events for the sake of teaching the events themselves but as markers for the ideas that either shaped the events or evolved from them. In my art classes I teach art as a language where the viewer perceives an emotion or thought from the image that is created; it is important for the artist to master the language in order to convey the desired thought or emotion. Relative to that, one of my favorite all-time books is E.H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion. Gombrich approaches the psychology of perception from an art historical perspective as opposed to Rudolph Arnheim’s approach to perception of art from a psychological perspective (Art and Visual Perception).

Around the time I was reading Gombrich, I had a girlfriend who would grind her teeth in the middle of the night and wake me up in the process. I decided to employ a distinctively behaviorist approach to the problem. Every time I heard her grind her teeth, I’d poke her. I did this for months expecting the negative conditioning to eventually work. Last time I saw her I noticed that she managed to reverse all of the orthodontic work that her father had invested in. The behavioral approach didn’t work. And I can only wonder what was going on in her head that had caused that nightly vent of anxiety.