Nature and/or Nurture: The Debate Continues
B.F. Skinner’s daughter in the ‘baby tender’
Above:
10/2/1945-Bloomington, IN- Derby Skinner, 13-month-old daughter of
Prof. and Mrs. B.F. Skinner of the Indiana Univ. Psychology Dept., is an
ultra-scientifically reared young lady. Since birth, she’s lived in an
enclosed and glassed-in, bed-like playpen in which temperature and
humidity are controlled electrically. What’s more, the pen is dust-proof
so that Derby needs only one bath a week. A roller-towel arrangement
stores a 10-yard-long sheet stretched across the bottom of the pen. As
new sections are needed it’s a simple matter to roll it into place. The
Skinners are gradually reducing the time Derby spends in her pen so that
eventually she’ll only sleep in it. © Bettmann/CORBIS
Pick a Specific Learning Experience of Someone under Nine …
Now
that we have exposure to three learning theories under our belts, we
can ‘play’ with them; that is, we can manipulate the various ideas that
compose each theory and use them to construct contexts within which to
evaluate individual learning experiences.
Why do we want to focus
on only one learning experience (as if that weren’t complex enough)?
Because one problem with theories is that they are ‘symbol systems’,
which means that the conceptual symbols which we discuss or critique can
shift around considerably as we talk about them. Although it is not
pleasant to think about the butterfly which may need to be pinned on a
board for observation since it is hard to study the structure of a wing
in flight, it is good to think about trying to ‘pin down’ a theory as
much as possible to identify its structure. So…
Think about one
learning experience in detail. Use an experience of your own, or of
someone who you can observe in close detail. It is perfectly ok to set
up or to manufacture a hypothetical experience for this purpose.
Watch
DVD Video “Concrete Operations” and using Darwin’s observations of his
son, given below, as a model (with respect to trying to get the right
type of information for the question you pose) identify the critical
elements of the experience in your essay.
Darwin, Charles. ‘A Biographical Sketch of an Infant’, Mind, 2, July 1877, pp. 285-294.
http://empire1.esc.edu/
Charles
Darwin, author of the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man, wrote
his “Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” which appeared in Mind in
1877,[15]. Based on 1840 diary observations of the behavior of his own
child, Darwin’s “Biographical Sketch” exhibits extraordinary attention
to the detail of infant behavior.
Then, describe what you
perceive to be the learning process using one of the theories given
(Piaget, Vygotsky, or Montessori) as your guide, using at least 4
specific points of comparison between your observations and the theory.
Each
theorist attributes some aspects of learning to internal developmental
attributes and some to environmental and social aspects of learning. Of
your four observational points, please show both developmental and
social/cultural/environmental attributes.
Please write 600-700 words paper on this topic using APA style.
Note: Although we are not discussing the work of B.F. Skinner in this course (because his is not an organic/developmental/
theory) the first picture is included just to remind us that our
studies here are limited to a particular understanding of human
learning.
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