Bandura's Social Learning Theory: An Effective Approach for Children's Behaviour

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Children best learn new behaviours through Bandura’s social learning theory as compared to Skinner’s operant conditioning and Watson’s classical conditioning. The reason for choosing Bandura’s social learning theory is because children are constantly learning new behaviours when observing the model (Bandura, 1977). The model could be the peers, parents of the child, or the teachers that the child looked up to (Nielson, 2006). Observational learning takes lesser time to learn a new behaviour as children can imitate the behaviour learned instantly when they want to (Hopper, Flynn, Wood, & Whiten, 2010). When learning a new behaviour, most think of classical conditioning. In Classical Conditioning, there has to be an association between a stimuli …show more content…

This decides the frequency of the intended behaviour. Positive reinforcement strengthens the desired behaviour by rewarding something to encourage the behaviour again. Whereas negative reinforcement is the removal of the reward to strengthened the desired behaviour. Positive punishment is to discourage the behaviour by adding onto something unpleasant. Whereas negative punishment is to discourage the behaviour too but by removing something pleasant (Rodriguez, 2013). An example of positive reinforcement that proves to help parents in accomplishing the child’s task is by rewarding the child with a small sum of money when the child did his or her homework. An example of negative reinforcement would be when the child cleans up the toys after playing it to avoid from the parents nagging. An example of positive punishment would be somewhat the opposite and similar to negative punishment which the parents would scold the child when he or she does not clean up the toys after playing it. An example of negative punishment would be when the parents take the child’s toys away and would not let the child play the toys again tomorrow as the child did not clean up after playing with the

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