3) Learning in Psychology: from behaviourism to learning sciences

As declared earlier in this chapter, familiarity with the discipline of Psychology is not expected.  However, it can provide a useful orientation and so this section offers a sketch of how learning has emerged as a topic within psychology. Briefly, we find it was once prominent, then dropped from view, and now has returned refreshed by new ideas. And yet current theory still remains slow to impact professional practice. It is against this background, that an ‘acts of learning’ framework is proposed in this book: a stimulant for the conversation between theory and practice.

‘Learning theory’ is a phrase with a long history in psychology. Until the 1960s it described almost everything that academic psychology was about. This reflected the discipline’s early aspiration to explain all human activity in terms of a unified theory of how we learned. Learning was what humans clearly did well, so it is surely what will make sense of what each of them become. That unified theory cast learning not as a state-of-being that we dropped in and out of, but as something that continuously happened to us. Certainly, this version of learning was not confined to occasions where it felt intentional or deliberate – the learning required by schooling for example. Of course, such a unified and comprehensive theory needed a universal mechanism.  In this early period of psychology, the mechanism proposed was the forming of associations.  That entailed the relentless integration of responses (what we do) with stimuli and reinforcements (what is done to us). Moreover, that particular conception had a strong appeal within pedagogy, not least because the principle of association sits easily with common sense ideas about everyday learning. In the everyday world, rewards and punishments surely do affect how people act; and the linkages between external stimuli surely are registered and remembered by us. In that sense, all human psychological development did seem amenable to explanation within this ‘associationist’ learning theory.

The reach of this approach was certainly bold. But its swagger may partly explain its declining influence. Yes, it was a framework that could be engineered to fit the full range of human action, but the fit was often loose. Its explanations of human action often seemed post hoc or just-so. Even mundane. Plus, there was something uncomfortable about its vision of people as seemingly ‘victims’ of associations – rather than managers of them. So, psychology displaced the associationist model of behaviour with a more compelling alternative: namely, a computational model of the human mind (Minsky, 1986; Newell and Simon 1972). Historians of the discipline sometimes explain this shift by reference to a parallel growth of electronic control engineering and the related analytic tools of information theory. The previous associationist theorists had resisted references to mental structures – what counted for them was behaviour, not minds (hence the term ‘behaviourist’). This new computational approach was very different. It positively celebrated the human mind: casting mental activity in terms of a hidden flow of information and the individual as an agent managing that traffic.  To many, this seemed a richer model of what we are. It certainly offered a fresh object of study in relation to thinking and reasoning.

The computational metaphor of mind came to underpin what is now termed ‘cognitive psychology’ – although a more recent preference is ‘cognitive science’ (mainly signalling greater interdisciplinarity). In the early period of its growth, these cognitive psychologists never positioned the study of human learning centrally on their agenda. They were more concerned with such mental functions as perception, attention, memory, reasoning, and decision making. While these all seem relevant to learning, they tended to be researched in laboratory studies – the findings from which often resisted integration with the messy conditions of teaching.  Nevertheless, the topic of learning has lately had something of a recovery within cognitive psychology. Examples later in this book should illustrate that modern psychology can provide for practitioners a conceptual toolkit (and empirical research to authenticate it).

This brief historical sketch indirectly considers whether academic psychology has voiced ‘learning’ in a manner that meets Papert’s concerns, as they were quoted at the head of this Introduction. Behaviourism emerged early in the history of psychology and did make learning central to its perspective. But it was eclipsed. Unfortunately, the subsequent ‘cognitive turn’ did not immediately deliver a compelling new conception of learning. That may have been because early cognitive theorising continued to neglect features of the learning experience that seemed – to intuition – obviously important. Two in particular were neglected: our human agency, and our human sociality. Finding space for these has effectively moved cognitive psychology towards a more persuasive voice in relation to the understanding of learning.

3.1 Incorporating agency and sociality

First, human agency, or the subjective sense of controlling one’s own actions (Wen and Imamizu, 2022). It is often discussed within social science as ‘constructivism’. Until recently, constructivist thinking was less prominent within psychology than within educational studies – where it was long familiar through the writings of Dewey (1938) and Piaget (1929). Constructivism encourages a distinctive perspective on the nature of knowledge, and how it is best acquired. Briefly put, it insists that knowledge is constructed by the learner and not passively received, that a learner’s encounters with knowledge are strongly shaped by their existing understandings (which are sometimes idiosyncratic), and that the knowledge acquired during learning is represented mentally as conceptual structures, sometimes termed ’schema’. Schema are fluid; being configured and re-configured through the influence of learning. Constructivism is a powerful mindset within pedagogy – although, despite a natural appeal, its faithful implementation is not always straightforward (Hyslop-Margison and Strobel, 2007; McPhail, 2016; Philips, 1995).

The significance of agency is also evident within that cognitive theorising where the generative nature of thinking and learning is stressed (Chi and Wylie, 2014; WIttrock, 2010). Such theorists are wary of learners who adopt a passive disposition. Confronted with a new learning experience, what the engaged learner will ‘generate’ is a personal response that serves to promote their knowledge-building. It is a response that bridges some incoming novelty into the learners established body of knowledge. In this manner, events are interpreted through a deliberate effort of meaning-making. “Generative learning involves actively making sense of to-be-learned information by mentally reorganizing and integrating it with one’s prior knowledge” (Fiorella and Mayer, 2016, 717). However, in regard to the learner, the state of being ‘engaged’ is important. Generative thinking is not automatic. In fact, research revealing its importance has done so by inviting students to be generative, in situations where perhaps they might not have done so spontaneously. Brod (2021) has listed some examples. For instance, students faced with a learning task can be asked to make predictions or to ask questions out loud, both of which serve to elaborate material they are studying.  These function as useful generative responses to that material, even though they are externally prompted. Spontaneous or imposed generativity increases the depth of learning. The expression of agency through such active and productive relationships with novel material will be a repeated theme in later chapters of this book.

A second theme that was neglected within early cognitive theories of learning was the profoundly social character of human experience. The term ‘sociality’ is an ugly word. Yet it is useful, because it goes beyond a narrow conception of what ‘being social’ normally implies. This narrowness occurs when ‘social’ is taken to refer only to our one-to-one engagements with other people: our ‘interpersonal interactions’ (as this might be expressed in psychology). Of course, ‘sociality’ is in part about this but it is also about ‘being in society’ more broadly. Or as suggested by the dictionary definition, ‘society’ is about “living together in an organised way”.

So, sociality in relation to learning should imply two directions of research. In the first place, the narrower sense of how learning occurs through close exchanges with other people: i.e., the social interactions within that “living together” part.  Yet those exchanges reside in contexts and those contexts may have a shaping influence on how and what we learn.  So, in the second place, ‘sociality’ also requires understanding learning as experiences located in the hurly-burly of social structures: i.e., the settings in which person-to-person exchanges are actually embedded. This is the “organised way” part of how we live together. Through our participation in the practices of these settings, our learning comes to be shaped by the options that they provide. This is a subtle point and deserves elaboration.

Consider a very simple case: family dinner-time. A young person who is regularly in such a setting may learn many things. Food and its preparation – it’s a meal after all. But much other knowledge may be exchanged and acquired in the course of family conversation. However, the routine is more than just another reservoir of information for the learner. Their participation also involves exposure to certain ways of talking, reasoning, arguing, debating, and so on. Or, put abstractly, exposure to certain forms of discourse. In addition, taking part requires the active reading and interpretation of the motives, emotions and dispositions of those around you. The example is simple, but if scaled up to more complex and pervasive social structures, then the significance of such ‘membership learning’ becomes more obvious.  The school is a compelling example of learners also being exposed to not just new knowledge content but to modes of discourse, modes of participation.

Recent attention to the sociality of human learning may reflect the growing influence of Vygotsky’s writing (1978, 1986, although translated from work published in the 1930s). That is an influence that may surface quite often in this book.  However, although Vygotsky’s perspective on learning is often termed a “social” one, it is more properly termed “socio-cultural”. This is not a minor semantic point. The term captures an interpretative scheme that treats human behaviour as situated culturally and historically (in such contexts as domestic mealtimes). It does, of course, foreground those interpersonal exchanges that we term ‘social’. But it also foregrounds the consequences for learning of “living together in an organised way”: our engagement with cultures of learning. This may explain increasing use of the phrase ‘cultural transmission’ in contemporary discussions of learning. The phrase reminds us of the paraphernalia of culture – its tools, rituals, designs-for-living – these all mediate our exchanges with other people and, thereby, shape the direction learning takes.

This book’s concern is with how cognitive psychology, as sketched in this section, offers us concepts foundational to human learning. That is, how learning takes place, the circumstances governing its outcomes, and the psychological functions it recruits. It was suggested above that psychology has lately recovered its interest in learning as a topic. That revival owes a lot to the liberating impact of accommodating the two issues just discussed: namely, agency and sociality. They have each been married into cognitive psychology, creating a unified approach now often termed ‘the learning sciences’ (Fischer, Hmelo-Silver et al, 2018; Nasir, Lee et al, 2021; Pea and Linn, 2020).  (Again, the plural form emphasises the multi-disciplinary ambitions of this perspective.)

Beneath this broad-brush sketch of learning as a topic for psychology, there exists detail. Detail about how learning takes place; insights drawn from fieldwork and laboratory observations of learning-in-progress. But also detail of a more interpretative kind. That is, more abstract but explanatory concepts and theories within psychology. These are interpretations that overarch our understanding of learning as a human resource: as if asking “but how does our ‘learning engine’ work”? In the final part of this chapter something will be said about why a deeper understanding of such things is a worthwhile investment and, then, something more will be said about the strategy adopted in the rest of this book for promoting that understanding.