Law and Theories of Learning

Laws of Learning

On the basis of his hypothesis, Edward L. Thorndike proposed several laws of learning in the early 1900s. They have been restarted and augmented throughout the year. The laws of preparedness, exercise, and effect are the first three fundamental laws. The addition of the additional three rules came later, as a consequence of experimental research.

The Law of Readiness

This law demonstrates the learner's intent to engage in the educational process. According to him, being ready is being ready to take action. When a person is intellectually and physically prepared to receive stimuli, they can learn. People learn best when they are ready to learn, and they won't learn much if learning has no apparent benefits. It urges us not to force a child or anyone to learn before they are ready and also to not pass up any learning opportunities when they are already prepared.

The Law of Effect

According to this concept, learning is effective when it leaves the learner satisfied and gives them pleasure. The learner's progress on the learning path is halted when they experience failure or dissatisfaction. The importance of incentives and sanctions in the learning process is emphasized by this law. Receiving a reward for learning anything stimulates and pushes a person to continue on the same road with more vigor and passion, while punishment of any type discourages people and makes them resent that learning.

The Law of Exercise

This law places a strong emphasis on the value of drill work, repetition, and practice in the learning process. The most memorable things are those that are repeated the most. Each time practice is done, learning is ongoing. These include physical application, manual drill, recall, review, and summation. The goal of all of these is to develop learning habits. It is divided into two subparts: the law of use, which speaks of the strengthening of the connection with practice, and the law of disuse, which speaks of the weakening or forgetting when the practices are stopped.

Theories of learning

Conditioning theories

Classical Conditioning

By repeatedly pairing a neutral stimulus with a potent stimulus, classical conditioning, often referred to as Pavlovian conditioning or responder conditioning, is a learning process in which an intrinsic reaction to a potent stimulus eventually arises in response to a previously neutral stimulus. Through his research with dogs, Ivan Pavlov developed the fundamentals of classical conditioning. Together with operant conditioning, classical conditioning formed the basis of behaviorism, a psychology school that peaked in the middle of the 20th century and continues to have a significant impact on both the research of animal behavior and the practice of psychological therapy (ethology). Of the fundamental learning processes, classical conditioning is currently the best understood, and research into its brain underpinnings is progressing.

Classical Conditioning

Pavlov's dogs were fed by employees in lab coats. Even when there was no food present, Pavlov observed that the dogs started to drool once they saw lab coats. Pavlov questioned why the dogs didn't just salivate at food, but also at lab coats. Every time he fed the dogs, he rang a bell as part of a research he was doing. The dogs soon began to salivate at the sound of a bell.

The dogs, according to Pavlov, were showing classical conditioning. He put it succinctly as follows: there is a neutral stimulus (the bell) that by itself won't cause a response, such as salivation. Additionally, the food is a non-neutral or unconditioned stimulus that will elicit an unconditioned reaction (salivation). However, if the neutral stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus are presented simultaneously, the dog will gradually come to link the two. After some time, the unconditioned stimulus—like the dogs drooling when they heard the bell—will no longer elicit the same reaction as the neutral stimulus when presented alone. We refer to this as a conditioned response. Consider a conditioned response as something we learn, whereas an unconditioned response is entirely natural.

Operant Conditioning

Operant conditioning, also known as "instrumental conditioning," is a type of learning in which the strength of a behavior is altered by its outcomes, such as rewards or penalties, and the behavior is regulated by antecedents known as discriminative stimuli that eventually serve to signal those outcomes.

Although stimulus control is a component of both operant and classical conditioning, the type of control varies. The stimuli that are present when a behavior is rewarded or penalized become the behavior's controller in operant conditioning. A youngster might learn, for instance, how to open a box to get the candy inside or how to keep their hands away from a hot stove; both the box and the stove are discriminative stimuli. Contrarily, in classical conditioning, reflexive behavior is under the control of stimuli that indicate important events. For instance, a child may start to salivate at the sight of a candy wrapper or tremble when they hear a door slam and associate it with an irate parent.