Learning – Class 11 Psychology Chapter 5 Notes & NCERT PDF

Introduction

"Learning preserves errors of the past as well as its wisdom." — A.N. Whitehead

At birth a baby can make only a limited number of reflexive responses. As the child grows, s/he learns to recognise the mother and grandfather, use a spoon, identify alphabets, write, name objects like book, orange, cow, drive a scooter and interact with others. Whether a person becomes hard working or indolent, skilled or unskilled is largely a result of learning. This chapter defines learning, explains the major paradigms (methods) of learning, the key processes that occur during learning, the factors that facilitate learning, and learning disabilities.

Key Concepts

1. Nature of Learning

Learning is "any relatively permanent change in behaviour or behavioural potential produced by experience."

Features of learning:

2. Paradigms of Learning

The simplest kind is conditioning — classical and instrumental/operant. Other types are observational, cognitive, verbal and skill learning.

3. Classical Conditioning (Ivan P. Pavlov)

Pavlov, while studying the physiology of digestion, noticed dogs salivating at the sight of the empty food plate. In his experiment a hungry harnessed dog heard a bell followed immediately by meat powder. After several pairings, on a test trial the bell alone made the dog salivate.

Determinants of classical conditioning:

4. Operant/Instrumental Conditioning (B.F. Skinner)

Operants are voluntary responses emitted by an organism that operates on the environment. In the Skinner Box, a hungry rat accidentally presses a lever, a food pellet drops, and over trials the rat presses the lever sooner — lever pressing is the operant, food is its consequence. It is called instrumental because the response is instrumental in getting food. Examples: children saying "please" to get favours; learning to operate a radio, camera or TV.

Determinants of operant conditioning:

Box 5.1 — Differences: classical responses are reflexes elicited by stimuli (respondent conditioning), operant responses are voluntary; in classical conditioning CS and US are well defined, in operant the CS is not; the experimenter controls the US in classical, while the organism controls the reinforcer in operant (organism is passive vs active); what is a reinforcer in operant is the US in classical.

Box 5.2 — Learned Helplessness: Seligman and Maier gave dogs inescapable shock (classical) and later the dogs failed to escape shock even when they could (operant). In humans, continuous failure leads to little persistence and poor performance; learned helplessness underlies many cases of depression.

5. Key Learning Processes

6. Observational Learning (Albert Bandura)

Also called imitation, modeling or social learning. In Bandura's Bobo doll study, children saw a 5-minute film of a boy acting aggressively towards a Bobo doll in three versions: model rewarded, punished, or neither. Children who saw aggression rewarded were most aggressive, those who saw it punished were least aggressive. Conclusion: observers acquire knowledge by observing the model, but performance depends on whether the model's behaviour is rewarded or punished. Children learn dressing, social manners, aggressiveness, pro-social behaviour, courtesy, diligence and indolence this way.

7. Cognitive Learning

The change is in what the learner knows rather than what s/he does.

8. Verbal Learning (limited to human beings)

Materials: nonsense syllables (CVC trigrams like YOL, NOK), unfamiliar and familiar words, sentences, paragraphs.

Determinants: length of the list and meaningfulness of the material. The total time principle: a fixed amount of time is needed to learn a fixed amount of material, regardless of how it is divided into trials. Bousfield presented 60 words (15 each from names, animals, professions, vegetables) randomly; participants recalled them category-wise — category clustering. Free recall is also subjectively organised. Verbal learning can be intentional or incidental.

9. Skill Learning

A skill is the ability to perform some complex task smoothly and efficiently (driving, piloting, shorthand, reading, writing).

A skill is a chain of perceptual-motor responses (S-R associations). A flat level of performance during transition between phases is a performance plateau. Fitts' three phases:

Practice is the only means of skill learning — "practice makes a man perfect".

10. Factors Facilitating Learning

11. Learning Disabilities

A heterogeneous group of disorders (difficulties in reading, writing, speaking, reasoning, mathematics) presumed to originate from problems in central nervous system functioning; seen even in children of average to superior intelligence. Symptoms: difficulty writing letters/reading/speaking and listening problems; attention disorders and hyperactivity; poor space orientation and sense of time; poor motor coordination and manual dexterity; failure to follow oral directions; misjudging relationships and body language; perceptual disorders; dyslexia (confusing b/d, p/q, was/saw, unclear/nuclear). Learning disabilities are not incurable — remedial teaching helps a great deal.

Examples & Activities from the Text

Key-Facts Sheet

Exam Focus

Key Terms

Common Mistakes