Behavioral psychology is a psychological trend of thought that rose in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. Its main representatives are Thorndike, Watson and Skinner. Behaviorism's view of learning and teaching has profoundly influenced the worldwide education reform, and it is one of the three major teaching movements in the 20th century, which are equally famous as the program teaching movement and the discipline structure movement. Skinner's behavioral psychology project teaching is the representative of this school.

Second, the main points of behaviorism

Behavioral learning theory, also known as stimulus response theory, is one of the main schools of learning theory today. According to this theory, people's thinking is the result of interaction with the external environment, that is, a "stimulus-response" connection is formed. Behaviorists believe that learning is the connection between stimulus and response, and their basic assumption is that behavior is the learner's response to environmental stimulus. They regard the environment as a stimulus and the accompanying organism behavior as a response. All behaviors are learned. The application of behaviorism learning theory in school education practice requires teachers to master the methods of shaping and correcting students' behaviors, create an environment for students, strengthen students' appropriate behaviors as much as possible, and eliminate inappropriate behaviors.

Looking at the main viewpoints of Thorndike, Watson, Skinner and other representatives of behaviorism learning theory, we can see that their learning theory is based on the basic assumption of behavioral psychology, that is, learners' behavior is their response to environmental stimuli; All behaviors are learned. They deny that human consciousness exists as the research object of psychology, and think that the research object of psychology must be visible and measurable actual behavior. In their view, psychology is a behavioral science, all complex behaviors can be explained by the role of the environment, and all kinds of habits are formed as a result of the environment.

Third, the enlightenment of behaviorism to modern teaching

Thorndike's learning theory has guided a great deal of educational practice. The law of effect guides people to repeat, practice and drill all students with some specific rewards, such as verbal praise. His general advice to teachers is to "concentrate and practice the connections that should be combined and reward the connections you want." Thorndike cited the stimulus-response relation in mathematics. Constantly repeating the multiplication table, and always providing rewards, formed the connection between stimulation and response. In reading, let students learn high-frequency vocabulary of different grades, which also emphasizes repetition. The more S-R connections a person has, the smarter he is considered because they have more connections when solving problems.

Skinner's learning theory laid the foundation for CAI teaching, and Skinner advocated studying behavior through experimental analysis. The initial experiments were aimed at animals, such as the famous black box experiment of mice and pigeons. In Skinner's view, behavioral experimental analysis focuses on the relationship between environmental events (stimuli) and organism behavior (reactions), that is, to investigate how experimental operations cause behavioral changes. Skinner, through experiments, combined with the research results of Pavlov, Watson, guthrie and others at that time, called the response caused by stimulation reactive and the response from organisms operational. Most meaningful behaviors that human beings engage in are operable. If a certain reaction is accompanied by a kind of reinforcement, the probability of such a reaction will increase in a similar environment. And reinforcement, like the environment in which reinforcement is implemented, is a kind of stimulus, and people can use it to control the reaction. The intensive stimulation after the reaction will be more important than the stimulation before the reaction. According to Skinner, anything that can increase the probability of a specific reaction is reinforcement. Therefore, the behavior of not strengthening the wrong reaction is called dilution. If reinforcement and dilution are used reasonably, the correct reaction will be repeated and the incorrect reaction will be excluded. Others call regression negative reinforcement. This guides us to use reinforcement and regression reasonably in courseware design.

Nowadays, many people think that behaviorism is an outdated and backward theory, and teaching guided by behaviorism theory must be bad. However, according to the above analysis, we realize that behaviorism learning theory is not completely out of date even now. Behaviorist methods are sometimes very effective in teaching, such as memorizing English words and doing exercises. Only by repeated practice can we achieve the best results. In particular, it has had an important enlightenment and influence on our computer-aided teaching and distance education.