Option #1

Comment: How do social and emotional conditions affect learning? (This, of course, is just as much the case for higher education, workplace learning, or informal learning in communities and personal life.)

Make an Update: Dorothy Espelage has taken just one area – bullying at school – where she has used the methods of educational psychology to explore the social-emotional conditions of learning. Take an area of socio-behavioral learning interest or concern to you. What does the evidence tell? What are the main concepts we need to interpret the evidence?

Response:

When an individual is provided with a safe and kind environment, it supports teamwork, social interaction, and the best possible brain growth. In other words, by influencing children's growing neural circuitry, particularly the executive functions, SEL influences learning.

As children feel safe and learn how to inhibit disruptive emotional impulses, they exhibit greater self-confidence, better behavior and enhanced memory. They enjoy the learning process and thus, readily engage and fully immerse themselves in gaining new information and skills.

Social and emotional conditions have a significant impact on learning. Male bullies are probably more prevalent in schools than female bullies, though female bullies do exist from the evidence presented in the video from this week’s class. The social skills that children and adults have acquired or have evolved from are projected in their behaviour.

An area that interests me that relates to the information provided by Dorothy Espelage on bullying is how the social and emotional learning influences children into becoming bullies in school.

While social learning theory has been praised for offering us a different perspective on how learning occurs, it is not without its flaws and has attracted criticism from those that feel it has its limitations.

Many theorists feel that it offers too narrow a view, disregarding important environmental influences and factors such as socio-economic status.

Social learning theory suggests that a person’s actions and behavior are determined by society and fails to take into consideration individual accountability.

It also fails to take into account the influence of biological factors such as genetics, with biological theorists arguing that some behaviors are in fact partly inherited.

Although a research by Bandura involving a Bobo doll clearly showed that children learn from observing, there have been other researches, such as B.F Skinner’s Operant Conditioning techniques that shows that other factors influences and affects learning.

Bandura had different children watch a video of an adult playing with a Bobo doll. In one version of the video, the adult struck the doll with a mallet and kicked it several times. In another version, the adult carried the doll around the room and played gently.

Afterwards, each child was taken to another room that happened to have a Bobo doll. The results showed that children that observed the adult be aggressive towards the doll, were also aggressive.

They imitated the adult’s social behavior. However, the children that watched the video of the adult playing gently with the doll, imitated their behavior.

This type of study demonstrates that children learn by observing. The study also helped start a very intense debate in society about television violence.

References:

Bandura’s Social Learning Theory in Education

Extracted from: https://www.educationcorner.com/social-learning-theory/#:~:text=Social%20learning%20theory%20can%20be,than%20likely%20repeat%20that%20behavior.

15 Social Learning Theory Examples

By Dave Cornell (PhD) and Peer Reviewed by Chris Drew (PhD) / February 18, 2023

Extracted from: https://helpfulprofessor.com/social-learning-theory-examples/