As a Student, You Are a Lab Rat

Recently, I was thinking about the old Pavlov’s dog story and how we hardly treat our students any different. While reflecting on this idea, I decided to write the whole thing up for others to read. If you’re a student, this article is about how you’re essentially a lab rat in your education.

Of course, before I get there, I’ve found that I often accidentally align with the work of Alfie Kohn. After I had written this article, I searched up my title to see if anyone had made the same analogy, and naturally Alfie had. As a result, if you want to read an article from a much better academic than me, you can check out his article titled, “Students Aren’t Lab Rats. Stop Treating Them Like They Are.“

Table of Contents

• Behaviorism and Conditioning
• Behaviorism in Education
• Students Are Not Dogs
• Constructivism as an Alternative to Behaviorism
• The Life of a Lab Rat

Behaviorism and Conditioning

Almost everyone is familiar with the concept of behaviorism, even if you haven’t specifically heard the term before. The idea falls from the belief that psychology should be studied objectively through observable phenomenon (i.e., behavior). In other words, behaviorists think of individuals as black boxes where a stimulus can be applied and a response can be observed.

Most likely you’ve heard of behaviorism through the story of Pavlov’s dog. As the story goes, Pavlov found that he could train a dog to salivate by hearing a sound (e.g., ringing a bell). The trick was to couple the sound with the arrival of food, signaling the dog to salivate. Eventually, the sound became associated with food, so the dog would salivate even if no food was present.

The result of Pavlov’s work led to the concept of classical conditioning (i.e., the idea that behavior can be trained by linking it to some natural response). This led to a variety of disturbing experiments, which attempted to tie certain natural responses like fear to some desired behavior.

Later, Skinner built on Pavlov’s work and the work of others by arguing that behavior can be modified through reinforcement and punishment. That’s where we get terms like positive and negative reinforcement as well as positive and negative punishment.

Behaviorism in Education

Often, behaviorism is framed very positively in education because of it’s ability to promote learning and appropriate behavior, especially in K-12 education. After all, you’ve probably seen a teacher employ a variety of behaviorist techniques in the classroom, such as the sticker chart which rewards positive behavior.

Likewise, you may have heard a parent or grandparent talk about a time when teachers used to be able to hit students (e.g., with a ruler). The idea being that corporal punishment was believed to be an effective way of deterring undesirable behaviors. Thankfully, we don’t really allow that anymore.

In addition, behaviorism also introduces the idea of objectivity into education, specifically when it comes to assessing learning. In other words, how do we objectively assess the learning process without being able to observe learning in the brain directly? As a result, we use performance on assessments as a way to gauge learning.

Students Are Not Dogs

With that said, what seems like a reasonable way of solving some challenging problems (i.e., leveraging behaviorism to promote and assess learning) is actually fairly damaging to the education process. In short, we have conditioned students in ways that have troubling outcomes.

The bulk of the consequences of behaviorism in education come from Skinner-style conditioning (i.e., operant conditioning). Specifically, we lean far too heavily into “objective” measures of learning to reinforce good performance. Though, even at the college level, I’ve seen behaviorism extended to achieve desired behavior like attendance (even when students would rather be elsewhere).

One of the consequences of conditioning students to perform well on assessments is that behaviorism doesn’t concern itself with the mechanisms underlying that performance. As a result, good grades can be achieved without learning (e.g., cheating, memorization, etc.). This one really bothers me as someone in STEM because we reward students who can memorize algorithms rather than students who can reason through problems.

To make matters worse, because behaviorism prescribes grades as the only way to “objectively” assess students, students become conditioned to only care about grades as an extrinsic reward, which lowers their natural curiosity. Any attempts to offer students a chance to flex their autonomy and explore their curiosity can be challenging as students tend not to engage with low-stakes assessments. This is particularly frustrating because the literature points to low-stakes assessments as helpful for learning.

Because grades are an extrinsic reward, student motivation is tied directly to grades. If students are performing well, they may feel less inclined to work hard. If students aren’t doing well, they may feel like they aren’t cut out for it. On both ends of the spectrum, students are not motivated to learn, undermining the purpose of education in the first place. The remaining students are then intrinsically motivated regardless of what the institution does (though, institutions will still pat themselves on the back for the successes of these students).

Likewise, objectivity leaves no room for nuance, which conditions students to only care about being “right,” even in situations which do not have a correct answer. This obsession with being “correct” all the time likely leads to higher levels of anxiety, lower levels of risk taking, and lower levels of critical thinking. Likewise, right and wrong is a forced dichotomy that can create a competitive environment, when education is ultimately a collaborative effort.

Of course, all of this should make sense after all. While behaviorism may work on dogs and lab rats, it has a myriad of unintended consequences on humans. We are not black boxes. We exist in the contexts within which we live. We bring life experience to the classroom. We have our own beliefs and values.

Constructivism as an Alternative to Behaviorism

Ultimately, when students enter a classroom, they should be leading their education. Everything they carry with them into the space should be leveraged to ensure the learning experience is as fruitful as possible. That means actually getting to know your students and providing opportunities for them to make mistakes and learn from each other.

If you’re wondering if there’s a term for this better way of running a classroom, there is! It’s called constructivism, and it goes far beyond behavior. For example, National University lists off some of constructivism’s core tenets:

• “Knowledge is constructed rather than innate or passively absorbed”
• “Learning is an active process”
• “All knowledge is socially constructed”
• “All knowledge is personal”
• “Learning exists in the mind”
• “Motivation drives learning”

While I’ve never personally tried to enact constructivism in my classes, I think most of it is common sense. Students need an opportunity to build on their existing knowledge. They need a chance to reflect on their understanding and confront their misconceptions. And, they need to feel some sort of drive to continue learning.

With the way I run my classroom, students are often discussing course content with their peers. These conversations force students to use their background knowledge to make educated guesses and construct arguments. The students are often wrong, but they continue to make their best guesses because it feels good to construct knowledge and to contribute to the collective knowledge of the classroom. Rather than being told what to know, the students get to take ownership over their own learning.

Just to give you an idea of what I mean, here’s a sample discussion question from this past week: what do you think the term “representation invariant” means? Given a jargon term like this, it is very unlikely that students will be able to guess its meaning. That said, given enough guesses from students, we will start to trend toward the correct definition as a class. Even better, I get exposed to the thought process that students have (e.g., “well, invariant means something is not changing and a representation is like a data structure, so maybe it’s talking about something that’s not changing about our data?”).

After a discussion like this, I promise that students will have a much better handle on the concept than if I simply defined it and walked through an example. By having the students actually use their background knowledge to try to make sense of the unknown, they’re forced to work through key cognitive processes like metacognition. They’re also forced to join their knowledge with the knowledge of their peers, thereby getting exposure to a variety of perspectives. You just cannot replicate that in a behaviorist classroom.

The Life of a Lab Rat

If you’re a student reading this, the bad news is that education is still very heavily influenced by behaviorism. The good news is that you’ve now been made aware of your status as a lab rat. Therefore, while you may not have much power or influence to make change, you can demand more of your education.

At the university level, a lot of places allow students to serve on faculty committees. If you care about improving education, I would see about being invited to be a student representative for a faculty committee.

In general, there are likely clubs that allow you to interface pretty closely with faculty as well, which may give you slightly more space to voice your concerns. You might also look to see if your department holds any townhalls or similar forum-style events where you can voice your concerns.

Likewise, you might try to get in touch with the teaching and learning department on your campus to see if they can provide any external support, especially if you’re in STEM. STEM departments desperately need training in pedagogy, even just basic active learning would go a long way.

Ultimately, it’s not your job to demand more from your education. Your job is to complete your degree. It’s the institution’s job to be doing more for their students. That said, if you have the free time, it might not be a bad idea to get more involved.

With that said, that’s about enough of a rant out of me for today. I think I’ll go ahead and wrap this one up! As always, here are some related articles:

• Using Ethnography to Advocate for Student Needs in Computer Science Education
• Post-Positivist Thinking Is Holding Tech Education Back
• We Have to End Our Cultural Obsession With Grades

Otherwise, feel free to check out my list of ways to grow the site. If not, take care!