Behaviorism vs Social Cognitive Theory

When teaching, there are many different ways to evaluate if students are learning. Two of these theories are behaviorist and social cognitive. Behaviorist theory believes that the behavior that a student displays shows whether or not he has mastered the material. The way that students learn is the result of stimuli in the environment and that is best accomplished when close together. In my classroom, I will have objectives. If I were teaching a class on fractions, the only way to know if they mastered it were to examine how they react to fractions in behavior. The stimulus could be the fraction put in front of them and the response of how they attempted to solve the fraction problem would be the behavior.

In the social cognitive theory, people are effected by watching other people. As a teacher, I would be the biggest example to my students of presenting the material that needed to be mastered. So much that you teach your students is not taught in a book but learned just through social interactions. If I wanted to see if my students had mastered certain social skills, I would show them what I believed to be good behaviors. The social cognitive view says that good behaviors would be retained while behaviors that lead to bad consequences will be discarded. I would hope that after modeling what I wanted, I would expect them to perform what I wanted to show that they had mastered it. They would see me do cursive handwriting and then practicing and performing I could see if they mastered it.