First of all, I would like to talk about my understanding of learning. I personally believe that learning is a relatively lasting process of change in behavior or thinking caused by experience. I think there are four relatively important points about learning.
First, learning occurs as a result of experience; second, learning can only be considered when individuals undergo behavioral changes as a result of experience; third, learning can only be considered if the behavioral changes are the result of contact and repeated experience; and Fourth, learning is a broad concept that is prevalent in both humans and animals.
Learning can be further divided into learning in a broad sense and learning in a narrow sense. Learning in the broad sense refers to the experience gained by humans and animals in their lives and the more lasting adaptive changes caused by the experience. Learning in the narrow sense refers to the process of acquiring knowledge or skills through reading, listening, studying, observing, understanding, exploring, experimenting, and practicing.
Next I would like to talk about the differences and connections between the 3 learning theories. They are behaviorist learning theory, cognitivist learning theory, and constructivist learning theory, respectively.
Behaviorism is now one of the major schools of psychology and one of the most influential schools in Western psychology. Its main idea is that psychology should not study consciousness, but only behavior. Because consciousness is unmeasurable, it is only necessary to study what kind of behavior an individual has in response to the stimulus of what situation. Behaviorist theories of learning, therefore, study only how an individual’s behavior is produced.
Cognitivism has been called the second revolution in psychology, born out of opposition to behaviorism, as opposed to the theory of behaviorism. It argues that the difference between humans and animals lies in the fact that humans are conscious and think, and therefore advocates the study of consciousness and opposes the study of behavior. The scholars of cognitivism believe that learning is what people get through sensation and perception, and is the organization and processing of objective things by the human brain.
Constructivism is a theory of knowledge and learning that emphasizes the human initiative of learning. They believe that learning is a process in which learners generate meaning and construct understanding based on their original knowledge experience, which is often done in social and cultural interaction. At the same time both constructivism and cognitivism emphasize human consciousness and learning as processing of the objective world by the human brain, but constructivism places more emphasis on the subjective nature of this processing. Emphasis is placed on the richness and variability of the learner’s experience.
Reference：
Newby, P. A. (1994, December). Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism: Comparing Critical Features from an Instructional Design Perspective. Performance Improvement Quarterly, pp. 50-72.
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