EdTech wants to teach us how to behave
Musings on Skinner's behaviorism, its relevance in our lives, and the problems with EdTech's focus on behaviorist learning.
Last week, we looked at PLATO's demise and saw how an empathy gap between developers and educators can often result in failure. This week we turn our focus on behaviorism: what it is, how it is still prevalent in our daily lives, and how EdTech's focus is majorly behaviorist in nature. We also discuss what this means for Education and how problematic it can be.
What is behaviorism and how did it start?
Behaviorism is a belief that all behaviors can be taught through conditioning and with the right conditioning, any person can be trained to perform any task.
Behaviorism has its roots in the early 1900s and was formally introduced in a paper by John B. Watson, an American psychologist. Much of Watson's work was focused on conducting research on animal behavior and child-rearing to support the scientific theory of behaviorism.
Throughout the 1920s to the 1950s, behaviorism grew to become the dominant school of thought in psychology. After linguist Noam Chomsky published two brutal reviews of Skinner's books in 1959 and 1971, the psychology community seemed to largely agree that behaviorism was wrong. Behaviorism fell out of favor and gave way to cognitive science. However, behaviorism is far from gone.
Key concepts of behaviorism
According to behaviorist theory, there are 2 main types of conditioning for training behaviors - classical and operant conditioning.
Classical Conditioning
In classical conditioning, the goal is to trigger a certain response with an unrelated stimulus (in this case, a neutral stimulus because it doesn't achieve a response yet). To do so, you would need to associate this neutral stimulus with another stimulus (called the naturally occurring stimuli) that naturally triggers the response you want.
The concept was originally introduced in 1897 by a Soviet physiologist named Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov noticed that a dog salivates when it is being fed, and wanted to see if he could train the dog to salivate without the presence of food.
Presence of food (unconditioned / naturally occurring stimulus) → Dog salivate (unconditioned response)
He rang a bell every time the dog was about to eat. The ringing of the bell is a neutral stimulus that Pavlov was pairing with the presence of food. Soon enough, the dog would salivate every time Pavlov rang the bell, regardless of the presence of food.
Ringing of bell (neutral stimulus) → Dog salivate (conditioned response)
In 1919, psychologist John B. Watson expanded upon classical conditioning through a controversial experiment - The Little Albert experiment. His goal was to make 11-month-old Little Albert afraid of a white rat. He identified the neutral stimulus as the presence of a white rat and wanted to condition fear in Little Albert. Watson would place a white rat in front of Albert, and sneak up behind him, and bang a hammer against a steel bar. Over time, Albert became afraid of the white rat.
Sound of banging hammer against a steel bar (unconditioned stimulus) → Albert gets afraid (unconditioned response)
Presence of white rat (neutral stimulus) → Albert gets afraid (conditioned response)
Operant Conditioning
Operant conditioning is a type of conditioning where reinforcements and punishments are used and an association is made between a behavior and consequences. The underlying theory is that behavior that is positively reinforced (rewarded) will likely be repeated, and behavior that is negatively reinforced (punishment) will occur less frequently.
A famous experiment was the Skinner Box, developed by B.F. Skinner. The Skinner Box was an enclosed apparatus with a button or key that an animal can press or manipulate to receive food or water. Skinner placed a hungry rat in his Skinner Box, where the rat would be fed a food pellet if it were to knock a lever on the side of the box. As the rat moved around the box, it accidentally knocked the lever, and food came out. The rat quickly learned to go straight to the lever for food.
Classical vs Operant Conditioning
The biggest difference between classical and operant conditioning is that classical conditioning involves associating an involuntary response to a stimulus, while operant conditioning involves associating a voluntary response to reinforcements. In the context of education, classical conditioning is passive on the part of the learner, while operant conditioning requires the learner to actively participate and perform some type of action in order to be rewarded or punished.
What behaviorism looks like for you and me
Behaviorist conditioning is used commonly in our everyday lives. Do you remember when your parents used to tell you to finish your homework before you can go out to play? Or when your teachers would send you to detention if you didn't complete your assignment? Or when you told yourself that you could buy something expensive if you get that promotion? All these are reinforcements that are used to shape a certain behavior, like in B.F. Skinner's operant conditioning.
So if you think that most behavioristic conditioning ended for you when you moved out of your parents' home and completed school, well you're pretty much wrong! You can see behaviorism and its application in everything we use today. A popular topic of discussion nowadays is how social media is designed to get us addicted to the app.
Stanford psychologist B.J. Fogg calls it “behavior design,” and his Persuasive Technology Lab teaches software engineers and entrepreneurs how to cultivate addiction and get users hooked on their apps. Graduates of his class went on to work and design products at Uber, Facebook, Google, and many of the apps we use today. Fogg is the teacher of many Silicon Valley stars such as Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger.
Behaviorism exists in our world today through "Like" buttons, nagging push notifications, autoplay videos on YouTube, and many more design decisions to increase the time we spend on these mobile apps. Through design, these companies are conditioning us to spend more time on their platform.
The behaviorism we see in EdTech today
Similarly, a lot of the EdTech companies we see today deploy the same "addiction" strategies to increase user retention. On DuoLingo, you get to go up levels in ‘fluency’ and gain stars for completing language learning tasks. DuoLingo is also notorious for its use of relentless push notifications to pressure you to complete your learning. The people have taken to the internet to speak up and create memes, and DuoLingo themselves joined in the fun on April Fools' Day. These gamification tactics are used effectively to get users engaged in the DuoLingo app, but it is unclear if it is effective to learn a new language only via the app.
There is also a rising popularity in using gamification in classes through apps like Kahoot! and Quizlet. Students partake in a quiz and answer session, earning points for getting questions right and competing with their classmates for the top rankings. Kahoot! boasts a whopping 1.3 billion players in 12 months ending in September 2020, and picked up a total of $243 million funding in 2020. Gamified quiz apps use stimuli (questions) and response (only the right answers lead to points) to foster the students’ learning. As students partake in a Kahoot! game, they're getting positive reinforcements like "Alex just hit a 3 question streak!" and "Up 10 places - Michelle is the highest climber!". Some research claims that Kahoot! can help improve engagement in students, especially amongst shy students. However, there are also cases of students hacking Kahoot! games and disrupting classes which show that gamification tools can also serve as a distraction from actual learning.
Teachers and admins are also turning to EdTech for behavior management systems like Hero K12 and ClassDojo. These behavior management systems allow educators to keep a digital record of behavioral incidents of their students, and reward or punish students. On Hero K12, teachers, parents, and school administrators can receive notifications instantly when a "behavior incident" occurs, allow students to accumulate points to use for rewards such as cutting the lunch line, and even issue hall passes and tardy slips with barcodes to be scanned.
Why behaviorism is problematic for Education
Behaviorism is no doubt extremely useful and effective in changing behaviors. However, it is important for us to consider the problems that can come when we apply behaviorism to technologies.
A big problem with behavior monitoring apps and education apps is data privacy: ClassDojo has been accused of a number of privacy invasions, including data harvesting in the U.K; in 2016, Google acknowledged that it collects and data-mines personal information on students who log in through its popular education apps. It is worrying that there is a lack of transparency and communication around terms and conditions, unclear security protocols, and lagging regulations around data privacy surrounding these companies: the more data we track on our children, the more vulnerable they are to being exploited for capitalist motivations. Big Data can provide entrepreneurs an opportunity to create innovative technology solutions to address critical problems in education, but there is also an increasing obligation to make sure we are ethical and transparent when using them.
A big limitation when using behaviorist conditioning in teaching is that critical thinking is not encouraged when grades or points are used as the only way to evaluate learning. Students using Kahoot! are more concerned with getting the right answers and earning points, but not so much why they're the right answers or how to get there. Such reward systems also encourage students to get better at memorizing information instead of seeking knowledge. By focusing mainly on the right and wrong answers, the focus is on conformity and not critical thinking or individuality. With behaviorism, students are not encouraged to create their own beliefs based on their observations and independent thought. A grades-driven approach to evaluating learning also discourages students to explore topics beyond what is tested in school. The obsession with correcting behaviors and the emphasis on assessments and grades is perpetuated by an educational system that is convinced it must prove its worth through quantifiable results. As schools compete for funding, weight is put on students to achieve better and better grades that have nothing to do with learning. One of the underlying assumptions of behaviorist theory is that all learning must be observable - and that has become the backbone of our education system. Technology entrepreneurs are so focused on using gamification to retain users and using technology to assess widely and quickly, that we must take the time to consider if that is the end goal we want for learning. Do we want our children to go through the maze of tests just to get through the other side, no matter what knowledge or mindset they gather on the way?
Lastly, an underlying characteristic of behaviorism is that there are "right behaviors" that we want to condition. The question we have to consider now is with these education apps, who are the ones setting these "right behaviors"? What are the implications for our society when we entrust this definition to for-profit companies? How might corporate culture, particularly Silicon Valley culture, clash with schools’ culture and values? The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has pledged to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to promote their vision of "personalized learning" and to “embrace the role of social-emotional and interpersonal skills, mental and physical health, and a child’s confident progress toward a sense of purpose.” Even if these companies do have good intentions at heart, it would also be difficult to imagine that the "right skills and mindsets" do not include characteristics like malleability and compliance - "correct behaviors" that would fit nicely into a corporate vision of education.
What now?
As technology entrepreneurs, it is important to ask the right questions to lead us to the right solutions. For now, we have more questions than answers, but as we acquire more knowledge, we inch closer towards finding meaningful solutions to the world's Education problems.
As much as we have talked about the problems of a behavioristic approach to improving Education, we acknowledge that certain aspects of education like assessments, grades, and monitoring will never go away (for practical reasons). Instead, we want to ask ourselves - How can assessments and grades be used to supplement learning, instead of being used as a goal of learning? How can technology be used to monitor student's progress, but not used to monitor for rewards and punishments? How can technology help teachers motivate students to be excited and curious about learning, instead of having to resort to classroom management systems to make sure they come to class on time and turn in their homework?
Technology did not introduce behaviorism in the classroom. Behaviorism existed long before the computer was invented. But we cannot blindly apply Silicon Valley's "persuasion technology" to our educational apps. We have to keep in mind that the ultimate goal of Education has and always will be to learn, and not usage metrics like "Average Time Spent on Page" or "Daily Active Users".
Thank you for reading! Whether you agree or disagree with what we've written, we love having conversations around Education. So we hope you'll reach out. Drop us a comment below! If you like what we’re doing, subscribe and follow us below. Until then, see you next week. 👋