Hi Melanie,
I appreciate the specificity of your exploration of the included learning theories and the depth of the experience you bring to them. The section that stands out most to me is your writing on Behaviourism. I think that, to a certain extent, you conflate Behaviouristic assessment techniques with Behaviouristic learning. It is true that certain fields or certifications require a student to know certain facts as a baseline, and it is true that a Behaviouristic assessment, such as a multiple choice test, is often the most efficient way to test that knowledge. It does not, however, follow that a Behaviouristic learning system based on positive and negative reinforcement is essential to learning for these purposes. As someone who recently retook the written drivers exam, I can say that developing a process-based understanding of how traffic flows and why in what I understand to be a Cognitivistic way taught me more knowledge that I called upon during that test than did mock tests that hit me with a check or an x, and the knowledge that I could fold into a cognitive process has stuck with me far more than anything I memorized as an isolated knowledge object.
I also think that the assumption that Kindergardeners learn well through Behaviourism shouldn’t go unquestioned. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading Alfie Kohn’s Five Reasons to Stop Saying “Good Job!”, which outlines the way centring praise in early education risks creating a dependance on praise that may actually be harmful to a childs development. In doing so, it centres a critique of Behaviourism, claiming that presenting praise to a right answer is not necessarily useful in the personal, social, and emotional dimensions of learning for which early childhood education is responsible.