[AAACE-NLA] Associationism, Behaviorism, Constructivism

[tsticht@znet.com]

June 30, 2007

Associationism, Behaviorism, Constructivism: The ABCs of Adult Literacy
Education

Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education

>From World War I in 1917, through World War II in the early 1940s, and up to
the Vietnam War of the 1960s and early 1970s, the teaching of reading to
illiterate, poorly literate, or non-English speaking solders was based on
three different theoretical understandings of what makes learning
effective.

During World War I,  J. Duncan Spaeth, Director of Education at Camp
Wheeler, Georgia and Camp Jackson, South Carolina, wrote the Camp Reader
for American Solders for teaching illiterate adults and non-English
speakers to speak, read, and write the English language. In what is the
earliest discussion of the theory of learning applied to adult literacy and
language learning that I have found, Spaeth explains the four communication
processes of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. He goes on to
explain, "All four processes involve the formation of association habits,
and the first principle to be emphasized is therefore repetition." This
principle followed from the understanding that  learning involves the
formation of connections or "habits" among ideas or thoughts and that this
happens automatically when the ideas are associated together repeatedly.

In the latter part of 1929, the Secretary of the Interior in the
administration of President Hoover appointed a National Advisory Committee
on Illiteracy. The next year, Dr. William S. Gray of the University of
Chicago was asked to prepare guidance for teachers of adult literacy. In
response, he prepared the Manual for Teachers of Adult Illiterates.  In
1934 this was revised by Caroline Whipple, Mary Guyton, and Elizabeth
Morriss, all adult educators, and renamed Manual for Teachers of Adult
Elementary Students.

While the shift from "illiterates" to "adult elementary education"
represented a major redirection in thinking about the needs of adult
literacy and non-English speaking adults, the learning theory of
associationism was still in effect. This is clear in a section on teaching
reading to native-born adults or limited education: "During the first
period students acquire a sight vocabulary of words of immediate value in
adult reading and learn to read and interpret simple sentences relating to
familiar experiences. This is a period in which special effort is necessary
to establish rich, vivid, and permanent associations between printed or
written words and their meaning and pronunciations."

During World War II, Paul Witty, a student of William S. Gray's, was called
upon to develop literacy programs for illiterate, poorly literate, and
non-English speaking recruits into the Army. As with Spaeth and Gray, Witty
also followed the associationist principle of repetition, repetition,
repetition to form associations among sight words and their underlying
meanings. However, in addition to associationism, Witty was aware of the
growing interest in behaviorism, with its understanding of learning as
stimulus-response sequences. In a 1939 textbook entitled Reading and the
Educative Process, Witty and his co-author, David Kopel, state, "Perhaps
the unique characteristic of modern education is its recognition and
application of the principle that the results of instruction should affect
and influence behavior (p. iv). In designing the Army Reader Witty divided
it into four units which progressed in difficulty. In keeping with the
behavioral approach, he developed pre-unit and post-unit tests to measure
the student's change in reading behavior.  This approach to the application
of behavioral principles to the design of instruction was to find a much
larger educational application in later years with the introduction and
widespread use of programmed instruction.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s I was called upon to develop literacy
programs for soldiers during the Vietnam War and into the All Volunteer
Army. In developing what was called the Functional Literacy (FLIT) program
I made use of associationism, behaviorism, and the newly emerging
constructivism. The latter was based on the cognitive psychology that
followed behaviorism in the mid-1950s and incorporated the concepts of
mental functioning between stimulus and response that were excluded in
behaviorism. The information processing models of mental functioning, with
concepts of sensory memory, working memory and long term memory provided a
cognitive architecture for analyzing some mental functions between stimuli
and responses, and the central idea was developed that knowledge is
actively constructed during learning rather than resulting from the
automatic formation of associations due to repetition.

In the FLIT program two curriculum strands were developed. The first strand
followed behavioral principles and consisted of instruction sequenced in
modules similar to Witty's World War II Army Reader, with pre-and
post-module tests to assess learning mastery of the material in the
modules. This was self-paced, individualized learning in a semi-programmed
manner. In strand two students worked in teams to study written passages of
some 300-400 words and transform them into either pictures, matrices, or
flow charts. These were social constructivist activities involving the
active use of prior knowledge to transform the new information in the
written passages from one form of representation into another
representation of the knowledge in the passages.

An important point is that, in the movement from associationism, to
behaviorism, to constructivism in World Wars I, II, and the Vietnam War,
all the literacy programs used functional context materials representing
the daily lives of the soldiers and the future work they would be doing.
This ensured that experiential prior knowledge was formed as the basis for
comprehending new knowledge, it motivated learning by making clear the
connection between the content of the lessons and its practical use, and it
facilitated transfer of literacy learning from the classroom to the "real
world" in which the soldiers would live - - or die.

It is now clear, after over a hundred years of the practice of adult
literacy education, that the ABCs of learning are still valid in various
teaching and learning situations. Repetition, observations of changes in
behavior, and the active construction of knowledge all have their
applications in the teaching and learning process. And always, teaching the
ABCs in a functional context serves the interests of adult learners.

Thomas G. Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education
2062 Valley View Blvd.
El Cajon, CA 92019-2059
Email: tsticht at aznet.net