Learning is a central focus in today's society. Education is becoming more and more important as each year passes due to economic advances. Every child learns differently and it is the teacher's responsibility to figure out how each individual child learns. The five different approaches to learning are Behavioral, Social Cognitive, Information Processing, Constructivist, and Brain-based.
             The first approach to learning is the behavioral approach. For the behaviorist, behavior is everything that we do that can be directly observed: a child creating a poster, a teacher smiling at a child, one student picking on another student, and so on (Santrock 238). The behavioral approach emphasizes on experiences, especially reinforcement and punishment, as determinants of learning and behavior. Classical conditioning is a type of learning in which an organism learns to connect or associate stimuli (Santrock 240). Generalization in classical conditioning is the tendency of a new stimulus similar to the original stimulus to produce a similar response (notes). For example, a child is taught to raise his hand in the first grade to speak out loud in class, so when that child gets to second grade he will know how to raise his hand before speaking because of generalization. When a person responds to certain stimuli but not to others it is called discrimination. An example would be if I were to pay attention in Sociology and not in History. Extinction is the weakening of a response by removing a reinforcer. For example, if I were to stop asking questions in class because the teacher stopped calling on
             me. Operant conditioning is a form of learning in which the consequences of behavior produce changes in the probability that a behavior will occur; punishment is a consequence that decreases the probability that a behavior will occur. In positive reinforcement, a behavior increases because it is followed by a rewarding stimu...