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The machine embodies key elements of Skinner's theory of learning and had important implications for education in general and classroom instruction in particular. [45] In one incarnation, the machine was a box that housed a list of questions that could be viewed one at a time through a small window. (see picture.)
The experimental analysis of behavior is a science that studies the behavior of individuals across a variety of species. A key early scientist was B. F. Skinner who discovered operant behavior, reinforcers, secondary reinforcers, contingencies of reinforcement, stimulus control, shaping, intermittent schedules, discrimination, and generalization.
It is dependent on the kind of stimulus and the person's behavioral and learning function. [5] Behavior analysis in child development takes a mechanistic, contextual, and pragmatic approach. [6] [7] From its inception, the behavioral model has focused on prediction and control of the developmental process.
In the early 1950s, B. F. Skinner and others began to point out the similarities between the learning process and evolution through variation and selection. [6] [7] [8] More recently, models explicitly analogous to gene mutation and selection by reinforcement have been applied to operant conditioning phenomena.
The theory is constructed to advance from basic animal learning principles to deal with all types of human behavior, including personality, culture, and human evolution. Behaviorism was first developed by John B. Watson (1912), who coined the term "behaviorism", and then B. F. Skinner who developed what is known as "radical behaviorism".
Radical behaviorism is a "philosophy of the science of behavior" developed by B. F. Skinner. [1] It refers to the philosophy behind behavior analysis, and is to be distinguished from methodological behaviorism—which has an intense emphasis on observable behaviors—by its inclusion of thinking, feeling, and other private events in the analysis of human and animal psychology. [2]
Skinner found that the environment influenced behavior and when that environment is manipulated, behaviour will change. From this, developmental psychologists proposed theories on operant learning in children. That research was applied to education and the treatment of illness in young children. [10]
Shaping sometimes fails. An oft-cited example is an attempt by Marian and Keller Breland (students of B.F. Skinner) to shape a pig and a raccoon to deposit a coin in a piggy bank, using food as the reinforcer. Instead of learning to deposit the coin, the pig began to root it into the ground, and the raccoon "washed" and rubbed the coins together.