APPLICATIONS AND EXAMPLES OF LEARNING THEORIES: A DAY AT KINDERGARTEN: 8AM to 1:15PM
This paper describes day in the week of a kindergarten class staring at 8:00 AM and ending at 1:15 PM. Hourly classroom activities are described and each demonstrates one of nine different learning theories from one of three domains (motivation, cognitive processing, intelligence).
This morning when the children showed up for kindergarten at 8:00AM, there was some work being done at the school. The machines the workers were using were very loud and bothersome and the children complained quite a bit; but the work had to be done. After about 10 minutes, however, the children seemed to forget the noise was there and went about their tasks as ususal with no complaints about the noise. This is an example of "habituation" a learning phenomenon associated with classical conditioning; it is the motivational domain and consists of a decrease in response (complaints) to repeated and ongoing presentations of the same stimulus (Kline, 2000).
Until around 8:55 AM, the children drew some pictures. They were then told to clean up and put the materials they were using away by their teacher, Mrs. Smith. To improve their behavior their teacher told them that each one was doing so good she was going to put a gold star beside their names on the wall. They were also told that the student who finished first would receive another star beside his or her name at the end of the day. This caused all the students to clean more enthusiastically. In this situation Mrs. Smith used operant conditioning which is a learning process in which the frequency of occurrence of a behavior (cleaning) is modified by the consequences of the behavior (positive reinforcement or reward) (see: Kline, 2000). Operant conditioning, like habituation, is in the motivational domain.
Kline (2000) notes that another operant technique in the domain of motivation is shaping which, ess...