Blog 5 - Behavioral and Cognitive Mastery

            As you may expect, successful mastery from the behaviorist perspective relies on behavior. But how might we actually ensure students are achieving mastery of the target goal. To answer this, I believe creating learning outcomes that are clearly worded is the first and foremost important way to make sure students achieve mastery. As originally conceived by the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, creating learning outcomes from the behavioral perspective should to two things: 1). "focus on the learner" and 2). "specify what the learner should be able to do at the end of a learning activity or at the end of the course."

            In order to accomplish this, phrasing is key. We must clearly indicate the desired behavior through specific verbs. Something vague like knowing is generic, and is not a behavior. Phrases like, "Jonny will not move out of his seat during play time" are very specific and clear when mastery has been reached.

            And so, mastery from a behavioral view of learning is when the learner displays the desired behavior. Nothing more, nothing less. But we must make sure we clearly define the objective in terms of behavior to truly and unequivocally show they have reached that goal.

            However, when it comes to the social cognitive view of learning, reaching expected outcomes is quite different.  Primarily, the focus should be on self-regulated behavior, or a behavior that an individual chooses for themselves (their own standard). (Omrod, 342). This is clearly analogous to students who may want to achieve A's, while others may feel fine with C's. To actually define and pin down mastery, I'm thinking that going over personal goals with students at the beginning of the year (or once every 9 weeks, &c.,) and seeing how they would like to improve could show mastery. [self-evaluation]

            For a more concrete example, we could use the example of an elementary student who requires speech therapy. This student will inevitably have to work on all three self-regulation skills, emotion regulation, self-instruction, and self-monitoring. Why do I think this? 1). For emotion-regulation, the student may feel that they are unable to improve, and therefore alter their train of thought to a negative one, 2). For self-instructions they can think about how they will correctly pronounce a word, to make sure they can get through all the phonemes properly, until it becomes an automatic process, and 3). Self-monitoring can be demonstrated through speech tests that show how well the student is reproducing sounds. By showing them their improvement, they may be more apt to progress (Zimmerman).

While these self-regulation techniques are great, how do they confirm mastery in the cognitive view? I think that the self-evaluation technique can show progress, at least to the student.

Behaviorial View: http://etc.buffalo.edu/eventResources/Curriculum-based%20Methods%20for%20Assessing%20Learning/Curriculum-based%20Methods%20for%20Assessing%20Learning-Outcomes.pdf

Cognitive View (More or less inspired discussion, but used less directly): http://anitacrawley.net/Articles/ZimmermanSocCog.pdf