Three Learning Theories an How It Can Be Applied In Teaching

Learning is a process where someone can gain knowledge, experience and making new concepts or idea. Learning takes place when there is change in someone's knowledge.

According to western scholar, learning theories divided into 3.

First, Behaviorist, its believed that teacher knows everything and students know nothing. Students mind are like black box, its empty, and recording or saving everything that teachers teach. Reinforcement takes place in this theory, which consists of punishment and reward or also known as carrot and stick. Behaviorist happens when there are repetition, stimulus and responses. Scholar who come out with this theory is Ivan Pavlov which use dog, bell and food as the simulation. 

Many people are disagree with this theory, but somehow we also use this theory in teaching process, for example in learning grammar of a new language, the students mind was empty, and the teacher giving new information, and the students record it in their mind, and repetition should be done in order to make it stay longer in the students mind and if the students did mistake, sometimes punishment and reward should be done to, for warning the students not to do something bad again.

Second we have Cognitivist, which believes that learning take place when there is process of thinking, it also should involve inquiries. In contrast with Behaviorist, in cognitivist its believed that students has schemata or background knowledge, that someone has naturally. The scholar who believed in this idea is Piaget, which   illustrated it with a child,a  hammer and a nail. In Piaget's example, a child was given a hammer and a nail. Even he never did something like that before, when he was given those things, he knew that he should tap the nail to the wall using the hammer. This happened because there is something what we call as pre-requisite knowledge.

Last we have Constructivist, where students have schemata and should think outside of the box, they should think critically and create something new, they also should discover their own knowledge. Scholars who believed in this theories are Bruner, Kuhn and John Dewey.