A classroom that still faces the teacher

The introduction is almost a motto: to educate a human being is to make that person a better being. Education can take many forms, the author adds, but most of it is still organized around the teacher. When a student is treated as a passive being who receives the teacher's instruction, and that arrangement is written out as a theory of learning, the paper calls it behaviorist learning theory.

The emphasis, repeated more than once, is change you can see. Behaviorist learning theory stresses a change in observable human behavior. Through learning, behavior should be regulated, and that regulation should lead, finally, to a change in what the person does. The same method, the paper says, is often used not only in the classroom but at home, when a parent is teaching a child. The scene is ordinary on purpose: a desk, a grown-up who leads, a child whose visible conduct is the thing being worked on.

Two kinds of conditioning, and a third name at the side

The review is organized as a split. Classical conditioning and operant conditioning are explained as behaviorist learning theory. Bandura's social learning is then pulled slightly to one side and discussed on its own. Under that heading the paper lists self-reinforcement and self-efficacy, reciprocal determinism, and observational learning and imitation, and it promises an account of the principles of social learning. The point of the split is not to abandon behaviorism. It is to ask, as the author writes, what important influence the development of cognition has alongside behavior.

Those Bandura terms stay, here, as the paper names them. Self-efficacy is the sense that one can act; observational learning and imitation are learning by watching someone else and trying the same move; reciprocal determinism is the idea that person, behavior, and setting work on one another. The extract does not give a classroom experiment or a count of children, and none is added.

A comparison the outline promises

After the two accounts, the paper says it will look at what behaviorist learning theory and social learning theory have in common, where they differ, and what those two ways of thinking might imply for the work of educating a person. That comparison is announced clearly; the extract does not actually carry it out. This page therefore stops at the fork in the outline. If you are writing your own review, the useful discipline is the same one the author set: explain the two conditionings, give Bandura his own section, and only then try the comparison — and do not borrow a result this report does not state.

Sources

1. A campus summary of learning theory, treating classical and operant conditioning as behaviorist learning theory and setting Bandura's social learning beside them, with self-reinforcement, self-efficacy, reciprocal determinism, and observational learning named as its concepts.

Last updated: 14 November 2026