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Behavioral Observastions

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Behavioral Observations

I will start out with B.F. Skinners belief in behaviorism, which states that human beings respond predictably to stimuli, and those who control those stimuli control the person. Basically this means that if you reward positive actions and punish negative actions then eventually the positive behavior will become habit. In his theory there is no free will only response to positive and negative stimuli. In essence the child is being conditioned or trained.
I saw a few of these behaviors at the elementary school. When the children were brought into the gym they had been trained to find their spot on the floor and to line up on it and wait to be told to sit down. The funny part of this to me was that the kindergartners and the fifth graders acted a lot alike while doing this but for different reasons. The kindergartners wandered a bit as if not exactly sure what they were supposed to do while the fifth graders wandered also but it was because of their attitudes not confusion. It seemed to me that they were testing the teacher. When the gym teacher took control of the class all that came to an end. She was stern but not demanding with the students and they respected her authority and behaved accordingly.

The age group that we dealt with fell into the second and third stage of Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development. Stage two is preoperational thought, what this means is that children 2-7 years old start to think conceptually and can solve physical problems. Stage three states that children 7-11 years old can think logically when dealing with physical problems.
To Piaget, cognitive development was a progressive reorganization of mental processes as a result of biological maturation and environmental experience. Children construct an understanding of the world around them, then experience discrepancies between what they already know

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