Investigating Historical Theories that Explain Causes of Behavior and How Different Theories Affect Intervention Choice

Why are philosophies important when making decisions?

As you think about this question, review the Donkey Fable ...

Decisions people make to facilitate or manage children’s behavior depend on their beliefs, philosophies, and theories about why children behave the way they do.

If we understand the different beliefs people have, then we will understand why they make the decisions they do. Knowing this helps us make better decisions.

This may seem like a big task, but historically people attribute behavior to only six general categories.

Knowing these categories and understanding what beliefs relate to each can help to not only understand what people attribute behavior causes, but to make decisions on how to intervene and alter behavior.

A summary of the Six Historical Models for Causes of Behavior.

To demonstrate how each of these models have been used in school settings a set of six case studies describes interventions based on each historical theory.

Imagine a study being conducted by a group of educational researchers to investigate how school systems; with different theoretical points of view: behavioral, cognitive, psychodynamic, environmental, humanistic, and biophysical; can effect student behavior. To achieve their results imagine a student, Chris, being placed simultaneously into six parallel universes, or him being cloned six times and dropped into six different educational settings ... Years later the results of the study were compiled and published as:

  1. A Case Study in Six Perspectives: results in textual format or
  2. Results in multiple slide presentations in the case study directory (Flash format)

Match each case to one of the six historical theories.

Enjoy!

 

Dr. Robert Sweetland's notes
[Home: homeofbob.com & schoolofbob.com ]