EDUCATION TEACHING AND LEARNING PROCESS EDUCATION ESSAY   pt2         1900w

We know, however, despite many instructors’ best efforts and superior teaching abilities, learning does not always take place. Kozma is also correct that we must examine technology and learning beyond a behaviourist context. Learning is an intentional act (Jonnasen, 1994) and the human being doing the learning should not be discounted. Researchers have established that there is no significant difference between learning with technology in distance education courses and learning in a traditional classroom, but they do not discuss how human motivation is influenced by technology. This could be a very important missing element in the debate.

Which side you take in this debate depends largely upon how you define learning. If you subscribe to more behaviourist views of learning, Clark will make more sense to you. If you conceive of learning as a more cognitive or constructivist process, you would be more likely to agree with Kozma or Jonnasen.

From a pedagogical approach, Information-processing theories emerged from a branch of cognitive psychology that focused on the memory and storage processes that enable learning. Theorist in this area explores how a person receives information and stores it in memory. The structure of memory that allows the learning of something new, relate to and is built on something learned previously and also how a learner retrieves information from short-term and long-term memory and applies it to new situations. The well-known information-processing theorist, David Ausubel, proposed that the way a learner receives and stores information affects the usefulness of the information, for example, by transferring current learning to learning other skills.

On the other hand, the model of the behaviourist B.F. Skinner, infers that part of the Educator’s job is to modify the behaviour of students through positive reinforcement, thus under laying behaviour modification techniques in classroom management and programmed instruction. To this we may say that, the stimulus-response interaction between student and technology can be introduced through computers so as to aid instruction, by providing drills and practices on previously learned skills, from practice and tutorial software.