Social Cognitivism vs Behaviorism Objectives

Ormrod (2011) says behaviorism "focuses on how environmental stimuli bring about changes in people's behaviors" (p. 285). To me this means what I do as a teacher combined with other stimuli in the child's life is what forms and shapes the child's behaviors. Essentially the child would be reacting to a set of reinforcers and punishers to exhibit the behaviors that I wanted them to exhibit in order to show me that they learned what I wanted them to learn.

If I was planning a lesson with a group of preschoolers on how to write the first letter of their name, I would look for the child to be able to do that task as a successful mark of learning that objective. They would have to complete the objective. I could use verbal encouragement as a positive reinforcement to encourage them to keep working at the task. (As a side note, this is not something that I would do in my classroom. My objective would be for the children to attempt to write the first letter of their name. I recognize that children at this age are at a wide range of developmental levels, and I wouldn't want to punish some children by withholding encouragement or a positive reinforcer because they weren't as developed as other children with fine motor and writing skills.)

From a social cognitivist perspective, I would have the children work together at a table each with paper and crayons to work on writing their letters. This way they would have other models to look form to see how to hold the crayon and make the marks for letters. I would look for signs of interests and attempts at learning to write. As a social-cognitivist, I would also remember that "new learning doesn't always reveal itself immediately but may instead be reflected in the students' behaviors at a later time" (Ormrod, 2011, p. 325).

With the self-regulation piece of social cognitivism, I would want to continue to give the children in my class verbal cues about staying on task, but I would also be aware that the children are really young, and their attention spans are still quite short. That is something that I think some teachers and adults forget with young children. I would say it is developmentally inappropriate to have the children sitting at desks doing "seat work" for extended periods of time (more than 5 minutes). Their self-regulation can increase by working at hands-on tasks for extended periods of time or working at a puzzle day after day and increasing time worked on it daily.

References: 

Ormrod, J.E. (2011). Educational Psychology: Developing Learners. Boston, MA: Pearson.