Operant conditioning focuses on using either reinforcement or punishment to increase or decrease a voluntary behavior. Through this process, an association is formed between the behavior and the consequences for that behavior.

Positive reinforcement strengthens a behavior by providing a consequence an individual finds rewarding. For example, if your teacher gives you $5 each time you complete your homework (i.e., a reward) you will be more likely to repeat this behavior in the future, thus strengthening the behavior of completing your homework.

The removal of an unpleasant reinforcer can also strengthen behavior. This is known as negative reinforcement because it is the removal of an adverse stimulus which is ‘rewarding’ to the animal or person. Negative reinforcement strengthens behavior because it stops or removes an unpleasant experience.

For example, if you do not complete your homework, you give your teacher $5. You will complete your homework to avoid paying $5, thus strengthening the behavior of completing your homework.

Behaviorism is primarily concerned with observable behavior, as opposed to internal events like thinking and emotion.

Cognitive psychologists see second language acquisition as the “building up of knowledge systems that can eventually be called automatically for speaking and understanding”

Meaningful learning, or subsumption, may be described as a process of relating and anchoring new material to relevant established entities in cognitive structure. As new material enters our perceptual field, it interacts with, and is appropriately subsumed under, a more inclusive conceptual system.

According to Freire, education must be focused on helping students to engage in critical thinking: to look beneath various canons of knowledge and to question that which they are simply told to accept unequivocally. He wanted all students to become instruments of their own empowerment, “lifting themselves up by their own bootstraps.”

The critical period hypothesis suggests people can only reach native-like fluency in a language if they learn it before a certain age.

Rogers was not as concerned about the actual cognitive process of learning because, he felt, if the context for learning is properly created with due attention to students’ affective states, then they will learn everything they need to.

In the famous experiments Ivan Pavlov conducted with his dogs, he found that objects or events could trigger a conditioned response. The experiments began with Pavlov demonstrating how food (stimulus) would trigger salivation (an unconditioned response).