his school of thought holds that attitudes, opinions, feelings and all things mental and/or emotional are not pivotal to understanding learning. As B.F. Skinner (1976) put it:
The mentalistic problem can be avoided by going directly to the prior physical causes while bypassing intermediate feelings or states of mind. The quickest way to do this is toààconsider only those facts which can be objectively observed in the behavior of one person in its relation to his prior environmental history. (p. 23)
Skinnerian views such as those just stated are often called "radical" because the claim is made than any fact about a learner's mental state is reducible to facts about his or her behavioral dispositions. What a given learner knows, is but a repertoire of behavior. Schunk (2003) states that in strict or radical behavior theory, knowledge is viewed as action or rules for action and consists of a set of essentially passive and largely mechanical responses to environmental stimuli. In radical behavioral theory, people can be said to possess understanding or knowledge if and only if they possess the appropriate repertoire of behavior.
In a discussion of learning within the behavioral framework, Miltenberger (2003) notes that learning is viewed as the transmission of a behavioral response from teacher to learner. Therefore, the purpose of education is viewed as presenting the student with an appropriate repertoire of behavioral responses to specific stimuli and to reinforce those responses through an effective reinforcement schedule where " an effective reinforcement schedule" is defined as the consistent repetition of the material, often broken down into small, progressive sequences of tasks delivered with continuous positive reinforcement. Behavioral theory further notes that without positive reinforcement, learned responses will quickly become extinct. This is because learners will continue to modify their behavior until they rec...