The Theory Application Paper Heaven Leek. Community...

Theory Application Paper Heaven Leek Community College of Aurora For many of years, psychologists and theorists have studied and tracked what influences a human s growth, learning, and overall development. Although there are many different views of why people may develop the way they do, there is no true correct answer. According to learning theorist, B.F Skinner, he believed that all human behavior was determined by environmental influences. This is what as known as behaviorism. Skinner referred to his own philosophy as radical behaviorism and suggested that the concept of free will was simply an illusion. All human action, he instead believed, was the direct result of conditioning (Cherry, 2005). Throughout this paper my focus will be on learning theories- specifically the concept of behaviorism. A learning theory explains how information is taken in, processed, and remembered during learning. Many influences, ranging from cognitive and emotional to environmental and prior experiences, are taken into consideration when figuring out how a huma n understands something. Unlike a cognitive theory, learning theories do not look at how the way of thinking (i.e thought processes, mental processes) influences a person s development. Some learning theorists who had made the biggest impact in regards to this theory were B.F Skinner, John B. Watson, and Ivan Pavlov. These contributors all assumed a learner starts off with a clean slate and one s behavior becomes