![]() While it’s been shown that this type of reward/punishment system is, in the long run, detrimental to student motivation, it is still a widely used way to produce obedient and hardworking students. Using rewards (praise and giving good grades) to encourage some types of behaviour and punishment (demerits and bad grades) to discourage others is what the modern school system is based on. Whether or not we’re aware of it, we use operant conditioning in classrooms daily. Treat the people you teach with warmth, create an encouraging environment for learning, and cultivate a safe and respectful relationship with your students. So, it’s important to make sure you condition the children you teach to view you as a stimulus that brings positive emotions. This shows that classical conditioning can also produce negative emotions and phobias (for example, test phobia in children). In another, somewhat less famous and certainly less ethical experiment in classical conditioning, an experimenter managed to get a 9-month infant to be afraid of every type of furry critter by first demonstrating a rat and then clanging very hard with a steel bar to frighten the child. It’s just important to recognise that it happens. Well, “useful” might be an overstatement. In this case, the desired (or undesired) behaviour (stepping on the lever) is enforced by the consequence that follows (eating the food). In addition to focusing on voluntary behaviours, operant conditioning also reverses the order in which stimuli are presented. After repeated exposure (although sometimes it happens after the first try), the stimulus which was before neutral (bell) and produced no reaction, begins to elicit a conditioned response (salivation) because of its association with the unconditioned stimulus (food). It’s also important to recognise the order at which the process happens: first you present the stimulus that is to be conditioned (the bell, in our example) and then the stimulus that produces the reflex (the food). What’s the difference?Īs we see from Pavlov’s example, classical conditioning deals with involuntary reflexes – salivation is simply what happens when mammals begin to eat, to help with the digestion process. The reward (food) it had received, had enforced the behaviour of stepping on that particular spot. When the cat was returned to the cage, it had learned to step on the lever somewhat quicker. The cat wandered around in its cage until it happened to step on a lever that released it, so it could get to the food. In his famous experiments, he put hungry cats in a cage and placed food right outside of their reach. And, what Pavlov is to classical conditioning, Thorndike is to operant conditioning. Operant conditioning, on the other hand, focuses on suppressing or encouraging certain voluntary behaviours through rewards and punishment. ![]() This type of conditioning deals with reflexes and involuntary behaviour. The dogs learn to associate the sound (which before that has produced no effects) with the imminent pleasure of eating and, after a while, will start to salivate at the mere sound, without the food being present at all. We’ve already given the most famous example of classical conditioning: the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov training his dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell, by presenting them with first the sound and then promptly the food. Conclusion What are classical and operant conditioning?.What are classical and operant conditioning?. ![]()
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