Topical Blog Week #8 (Due Wednesday)

What we would like you to do is to find a topic from this week's chapter that you were interested in and search the internet for material on that topic.
Please be sure to use at least 3 quality resources. If you use videos, please limit it to one video.
Once you have completed your search and explorations we would like you to:
1a) State what your topic is. Psychology and the Progressive Era

1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter. This chapter discussed the progressive era and progressive reform in John Dewey’s section, as he was interested in education reform.

1c) Discuss why you are interested in it. I am interested in this era because I find the progressive era in American history interesting as there were so many changes occurring to try and better the nation. I also like this topic because the progressive era did a lot with education reform, in which psychologists played a major role. Psychologists wanted to understand how children learned and developed.
2) Next, we would like you to take the information you read or viewed related to your topic, integrate/synthesize it, and then write about the topic in a knowledgeable manner. By integrating/synthesizing we mean taking what your read/experienced from the internet search organize the information into the main themes, issues, info, examples, etc. about your topic and then write about the topic in your own words using the information you have about the topic.
The Progressive Era greatly changed the relationship between the United States government and its constituents. What was once a country with little government interaction into workers and business affairs, changed to a government that put in place reforms to try and better people’s lives. In fact, this era is also known as the “Age of Reform”.
The reason reform came about was because of the changes that were happening within the U.S. As the Industrial Revolution took hold, many people began swarming into the cities to take jobs. The jobs tended to be very low paying and dangerous. Many new immigrants took these jobs, and ended up living in slums. The cities were dirty, physically and morally. The cities were plagued with garbage, human and animal waste, corruption from Big Boss politics, and disease and lack of sanitation was around every corner. Many middle-class Protestants wanted to change that. Reformers set about trying to help laborers who weren’t being treated fairly. They were also trying to shorten the gap between the wealthy and the poor, as the wealthy at this time held nearly all of the nation’s wealth. They also set about changing child labor laws, help form and legalize unions, and basically clean up the cities. They helped to bring sewage systems, clean water, garbage removal, and disease control to the cities.
A reform that occurred in this era is Progressive Education. People believed that it was important to improve schools, in order to improve minds, which in turn would be the basis of creating change within society. It was believed that faculty psychology was replaced by the newer approach of understanding the mind by the functional approach. The faculty approach believed that the mind could be exercised and molded to be strengthened. This went along with how strict and rigorous course work was in the time period prior to the Progressive Era.
The functional approach to psychology offered a shift in education brought about by John Dewey. Dewey agreed with many reformers, in that society could be changed if there was educational reform. “Education,” he said, “is the most fundamental method of social reconstruction for progress and reform.”(Wikipedia) He believed that students should study and engage in studies that are of interest to them, and he believes children need motivation to learn Dewey believed that there was two sides of education. The two sides were the sociological side and the psychological. If a children is interested in what they are learning it will help them build upon it. The sociological side is that children need to construct their own learning, that is, they need to interact with their learning.

3) At the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites.For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_educationhttp://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2710328?uid=3739640&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102769404567 This article discusses the Progressive Era, and I liked it because it also discussed the educational reform and John Dewey.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/eleanor-progressive/
This article was useful because it was short and concise about the Progressive Era.
http://jgape.org/essays/german-schoolmasters-psychology-psychology-child-evolving-rationales-teaching-history-us
I liked this article because it was specific to how psychology changed and influenced education reform.

1a) My topic for this week’s blog post has to do with John Dewey and progressive education.

1b) John Dewey was talk about in this week’s chapter and I think the idea of progressive education is relevant to our present day society.

1c) This topic is interesting to me because of the implications it could have for our education system if we would implement some of the basic ideas presented by Dewey. Our educational system is in major decline and radical reform is needed. I would like to look at Dewey’s ideas on educational reform and see if any of them could offer help to our struggling education system.

A little background on this great philosophers is required before going into his thoughts on education and its reform. John Dewey was born in Vermont. He was a very knowledgeable man and ended up getting his Ph.D. from The John Hopkins University in the field of philosophy. From the sources I read, he was a quiet individual who honestly spent a lot of time thinking over different ideas. That definitely has something to do with the ideas he came up with on the educational system. Instead of pushing to make his voice heard on an issue, he was busy thinking of ways to improve a system that he as well as others observed as lacking. He seems to have had conservative roots but with the pursuit of higher education, those ideas seems to fall away. After graduating with his Ph.D. he ended up at the University of Michigan where he taught several psychology classes as well as several philosophy based classes.

The second thing that stuck out to me had to do with Dewey’s thoughts on what an idea education system should be has to do with the structure of the system itself. In order to produce knowledgeable individuals that are able to think and reason on abstract ideas and adapt to an ever-changing environment, the system that is teaching them how to do these things needs to be as evolving as the world around it. This is obviously lacking as we are still for the most part basing a child’s definition of learning on his/her test scores that are administered every few weeks. The cram for the exam mentality should not even be a thought in today’s society, yet that sums up the majority of the educational standards even at the college level. Dewey believed that critical inquiry and pragmatic verification of evaluations should be the center to learning. He also believed that the educational system should be focused on the individual child and custom fit to the learning, social, and physical needs of each child specific. This doesn’t even sound remotely close to our school systems minus the fact that a teacher may grade on the curve to equal out the overall average of the class due to different learning styles. I guess this could be considered progressive in the sense that we are customizing the class to allow for differences in learning abilities.

One idea that Dewey present is that experience is key to education. That being said, he critiques this statement by talking about the “experience” itself. He clarifies that not every experience is conducive to learning. On the contrary he talks about how many experiences we can have as individuals actually promote a lack of learning. Also, he talks about how experiences need to be carefully observed to see if they are actually improving on someone’s previously accumulated knowledge or if they are proving to be a stumbling point due to several factors. These factors include being so exciting that an individual stays stuck on them and cannot learning above and beyond these individual experiences. Another issue with experiences is that they can be very disconnected from each other. This can present a problem if an individual cannot find commonalty between them. It can cause the energy gained from such experiences to be lost on the complexity of the topics each experience provides initially.

I believe Dewey’s thoughts on the educational system can be applied in several unique ways that would promote a better learning environment for today’s society. First, I think that with the advances in technology, computers, tablets and the like need to be used in the classrooms. I believe this will give the students a chance to explore learning for themselves in ways that cannot be done with a standard 50 question paper test. Second, instead of simply studying a topic and then testing all the kids over the same subject, have a general learning period where the students learn about the important parts of history or a particular theory etc. but then have them research a topic that relates in whatever way they would choose. Have the grading of students be based on their participation in researching for themselves and how well contribute to the overall learning experience for themselves rather than on how many answers they guessed right on a test.

Also, relating to the experience part of Dewey’s ideas, the class room needs to be converted on a major scale to a scientific laboratory of sorts where students are shown how to explore the wonders of the subjects they are assigned in class on their own. Of course the teachers would have to closely monitor the experiences to avoid some of the issues talked about earlier. However, when a student is positively reinforced to explore a subject for themselves, the overall learning experience will give them retainable knowledge that they can carry with them well beyond the 30 minutes it took them to guess 50 multiple choice questions on a test.

http://www.albany.edu/~dkw42/s2_dewey_progr.html

This website helped me to better understand the doctrine behind progressive education and how Dewey contributed to this line of thinking.

http://michigantoday.umich.edu/97/Sum97/mta1j97.html

This website gave me the background history for John Dewey. It did a great job of telling about his educational history as well as the other factors that contributed to how he ended up in the career path as a philosopher and psychologist.

http://www.schoolofeducators.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/EXPERIENCE-EDUCATION-JOHN-DEWEY.pdf

This website provided a detailed look at Dewey’s philosophies on educational reform especially as it relates to the structure of allowing students to experience education for themselves.

Topical Blog: James Rowland Angell (with a little bit of William James and John Dewey)

I really wanted to do this blog over James R. Angell. I do not know why, but I really connected with him and wanted to learn more about him. However, I found it extremely difficult to find sources to use. So I decided to write on Angell, but also have a little bit of my blog post also be written about William James and John Dewey.

James Rowland Angell was a psychologist and an educator. He was born in Vermont in May of 1869, and was the youngest of three children. When he was young, his family moved to the University of Michigan which became is home environment; so Angell grew up in a distinctly academic home. When he started college, his interests included: logic, philosophy, and psychology. Angell exclaimed : psychology instantly opened up a new world, which it seemed to me I had been waiting for, and for the first time I felt a deep and pervasive sense of the intellectual importance of the material I was facing. With that experience began my real intellectual life, which ultimately led me into my profession.”

In graduate school he studied under both John Dewey and William James at different parts of his program (under Dewey at Michigan and under James at Harvard). It was during these years that psychology was becoming differtiated from philosophy and into its own experimental science. Dewey was a central pioneer in progressive education. He believed in understand the development of a child’s needs would boost education and that teaching should be focused on the student rather than on the subject matter. On the other hand, James was a “pre-functionalist.” He defined psychology as “the science of mental life” and “the description and explanation of states of consciousness.” James also wrote the “Principles of Psychology” which is one of the most famous textbooks written in psychology.

And now back to James Angell, in 1893, he received an invitation to become an instructor of psychology at the University of Minnesota before he had finished working at his doctorate degree. The following year, Angell was brought in as an assistant professor to Dewey at the University of Chicago. He was in charge of philosophy and in charge of the psychology courses and psychological laboratory. Psychology based on a conceptual foundation became known as “functional psychology,” and Angell became the chief formulator. Angell is established in the history of psychology by being one of the pioneers in organizing laboratory courses, standardizing experimental procedures and more. Although the “functional,” term is not used as much anymore, its point of view and principles are commonly accepted within the study of psychology.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/James_Rowland_Angell.aspx
I used this site because I thought it would have a lot of accurate information and it seemed to have a lot written about his life and how he contributed to the development of psychology.

http://www.sonoma.edu/users/d/daniels/functionalism.html
I used this site because it helped show what William James and John Dewey contributed to the development of psychology, which helped tie in why it was so important that Angell studied under such important members in history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Rowland_Angell
I know this is not always the best source to use, but the information was accurate because it went along with what my other sources had told me. It also helped show me Angell’s childhood and why his background was mainly academic.

Blake Wedeking

For this week’s blog I choose to research Edward L. Thorndike and find out his contributions to the history of psychology. This chapter discusses Thorndike and his experimentation with baby chicks and with cats in the puzzle box. I was interested in learning more about this research and his other experiments that he concluded because I remember discussing him in my intro to psychology class and thought it was a very interesting topic. I thought it was interesting that he had critics that believed that he wasn’t able to study these animals in a natural environment because the puzzle box was not a natural environment and therefore no scientific observations could be made Mill’s claimed. I also believe that his work spawned behaviorist thinkers into examining these situations more carefully. Thorndike’s work into animal research led to his claim of the term “trial and accidental success” in which he believed that animals could escape after this trial and error learning had occurred. This man sounded very intriguing and interesting to learn about so I wanted to learn more about his life work and what other accomplishments he had made in the field of psychology.

Edward Thorndike was born in Williamsburg, Massachusetts on August 31, 1874. Thorndike graduated from The Roxbury Latin School in 1891 and from Wesleyan University in 1895. He went on and earned an M.A. at Harvard University in 1897. During his time at Harvard, Thorndike became interested in animal research with William James. Thorndike wanted to know whether animals learned through imitation of observation. To test this theory he would place cats in a puzzle box in which there was a set up of pulleys or levers that the cat had to touch in order to escape from the box. Thorndike did come to the conclusion that these animals did succeed in getting out after trial and error learning or as he referred to it as “trial and accidental success.” Since Thorndike believed that cats learned to make connections between stimuli and could in fact escape the box after trial and accidental success, he coined the theory of connectionism. He found that after accidentally stepping on the switch once, they would press the switch faster in each succeeding trial inside the puzzle box. By observing and recording the animals escape times, Thorndike was able to graph the times it took for the animals in each trial to escape, resulting in a learning curve in which they would “catch on” to what was happening.

Thorndike also studied this theory on baby chicks to see if they were capable of learning to escape from the box. After being placed in the box at a certain point, they are first would run around aimlessly but after many trial they had learned to escape from it. After several trials had been completed they eliminated their useless behavior. Surprisingly enough some of Thorndike’s trial with animals were conducted in the basement of William James household. Cattell caught notice of Thorndike’s work and was awarded an aid of $700 a year to go towards his studies. Thorndike published his findings known as “Animal Intelligence: An Experimental Study of the Associative Processes in Animals” in 1898. Later on in 1911, Thorndike would write Animal Intelligence: Experimental Studies which included the 1898 monograph and some other chapters as well.

Thorndike would go on to help the United States Army during World War I. He created both the Alpha and Beta versions that led to today's ASVAB, a multiple choice test administered by the United States Military Entrance Processing Command that is used to determine qualification for enlistment in the United States armed forces. Thorndike realized that not enough soldiers could read the alpha test so the beta test was administered. The beta test contained pictures and diagrams for the soldiers to examine and be tested on. Today, Thorndike is known to us as the father of modern educational psychology and really pushed for the understanding of animal behavior so that we could apply it to our lives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Thorndike
This site provided great information into the life of Thorndike. It also provided contributions that he made that were not so famous but worth noting. I used this site because of its great historical data and relevance to my topic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCr0gFY0JlE
This video was a great documentary on the understanding of Thorndike’s work and background in the field of psychology. I found it very useful when writing my blog because it gave me other topics to research and find out more about.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/593342/Edward-L-Thorndike
This site was a great contribution to the other site and video I had found on Thorndike. This site reinforced the knowledge I already had but also brought about new topics in his work that were not previously discussed in the Wikipedia site.

The topic that I would like to do research on or elaborate more on from the chapter is Thorndike and his mazes. This topic interested me because he brings in different types of mazes, for instance the cat pushing the button. What I would like to expand on is what is trying to be accomplished with his experiments that other psychologists did not know before, or is he just trying to build off of what theories were already made and trying them in different types of mazes.
The first article that I read in ways showed signs of his experiments not being oriented toward the same results that have already been found by other experiments. He was interested in the intelligence of the animals and wanted to see if animals could imitate others or observe how the other animals escaped the box compared to those that have never seen the task done before. There were no extra results, but he did find that the cats and dogs could condition themselves through operant conditioning. I found this point to be interesting because he did not design the experiment originally wanting to know if their minds can be conditioned through trial and error, he just wanted to see how they could observe and act upon what they saw. This experiment is a great example of how conclusions can derive on accident. Even though that the theory was already stated amount operant conditioning through rats, he still arrived at a conclusion that he was not meaning to make. The lesson that is in the experiment that I found was that there is no mistakes in an experiment and hypothesis, there is only clarification and new conclusions if the original turns out to be false. Just because he was able to see that there was no difference between the observers and those that performed the task without it seeing it done, this did not mean that it was a failed task and he had to throw out all of the information from the experiment. What he did was revised what he observed, his focus turned to the overall intelligence of his subjects and also turned to see if operate conditioning applied for the box maze, so in the end the experiment had conclusions that were noteworthy and worth all the effort put into setting it up.
The second article that I found had different results from the first, it stated that he first set up the experiment based on conditioning and intelligence of the cats. He used trial and error to reward the cats for escaping the box, in which all the cats were hungry so the reward was greater. The turn of the hypothesis threw me off so I thought it was interesting and important to note. I think this may be due to one of two things, all experiments and every aspect of the earlier psychologists’ lives were not noted at all times, so simple mistakes like what the original hypothesis is can occur. The second thing that may have happened is that the writer of this article saw the conclusion of the original box maze experiment, form that they draw their conclusion to be that Thorndike’s original hypothesis and focus was on the overall intelligence and the conditioning of the cat. I found this to be an important article worth knowing, because it brings new information to the subject that I wanted to know about and shows that he could have wanted to build off of B.F. Skinner’s conclusion with the rats and the mazes. It also is a good source of information to prove that there is going to be false articles about history and science, it is the reader’s job to form their own opinions on what seems to be the truth and stick with it. It is like most of these psychologists have their own theories, but they do not let false theories from other sources be biased to what they believe is true.
The last article that I read was about another maze that was created. This maze was based on top of water with the door in the water. The rat would have to swim to find the door in order to escape. This was an example of how the theory of operant conditioning was built off of, the reason behind doing this experiment was to see if the rat learns from trial and error and to see if operant conditioning still applies no matter the situation. I think that this article was interesting because it showed that a lot of ideas to come up with different experiments can come from building the idea off of the original theory. It was the reason that I wanted to know if Thorndike based his experiment off of theories already made before him and he wanted to expand with them or if his intentions were different and wanted to test a different theory through the different mazes and species. This is important to the study of psychology because there are psychologists that do not try to make their own theory, but they would like to expand on a theory that has already been proven multiple times. These psychologists are also important because if all of the theories were left alone after the first experiment, we would not know what variables change results, if conditioning applies to all scenarios or just a maze with walls and dead ends, ect. I find it to be important to keep building because the idea is meant to be a building block, not the only theory and I also believe that no matter how much information we accumulate, we will never have enough on any topic and we will continue to build off topics until we are satisfied with the amount of information.
http://www.dur.ac.uk/robert.kentridge/comp6.html
I like this article because it stated that the original reason why he wanted to experiments with cats and dogs was different than the conclusions that he came to. He started with trying to see the solving ability of cats and dogs. Then he moved to looking to see if they could use memory to repeatedly solve the puzzle which then he came to a conclusion that he could measure their intelligence.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/thorndike.htm
I liked this article and found it useful because it showed that part of Thorndike’s theory was based off of the same concept of B.F. Skinner’s theory. Some parts may have changed to the different mazes, but operant conditioning was also being looked at and a theory to give him the idea of the box mazes.
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Morris_water_maze
I found this article to fit into what I would like to know about this topic because it expanded the types of mazes that are used to experiment with animals. A maze does not have to be just walls with dead ends, in this experiment he used water with a hidden door which the rats had to swim through to escape which I found to be very interesting.

After reading about the Thorndike Mills controversy I decided I wanted to look more into ethology. A lot of psychology’s initial tests are done on animals for ethical reasons. Mills claimed that if we are to test animals, we need to do it in a natural setting. Any conclusions based on tests in too artificial of a setting should be dismissed, according to him. It seems to me though, that artificial settings are the only efficient way of testing animals. I decided to look more into ethology to find out whether or not it would be best to study animals in the lab or in the wild. To do this I read up on the three ethologists mentioned in the chapter: Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch.

Lorenz is famous for having geese follow him in a pond. He was doing research on the principle of imprinting, which was originally discovered by Douglas Spalding. Lorenz would study geese to see if behavioral traits could be passed on from parent to offspring. He found that if a parent goose had become fixated on following one thing (Another goose, Lorenz’s boots, or even a box on a model train) and then the offspring, without being trained to do so, would follow that same thing. Lorenz won the Nobel Prize without using any invasive techniques. This was his call to glory. It would seem that his findings weren’t all that applicable toward the general field of psychology, which you’ll see may be a recurring thing with the study of ethology.

Tinbergen became famous for his study of supernormal stimuli with Lorenz, his study of Autism, and for originating the four questions of animal behavior. He developed four questions he thought should be asked of any animal behavior. These questions were divided into proximate mechanisms and ultimate mechanisms. The first question in the proximate mechanisms was about causation, asking what stimuli elicited the response. The second question was about development, asking how the behavior changes with age. The first question of ultimate mechanisms was regarding function, asking how the behavior impacts the animal’s chances of survival. The last question was about evolution, asking how the behavior compares with similar behaviors in related species and how that difference would have occurred. His research on supernormal stimulus was pretty interesting. It seemed to me that it alone may refute the claims of Mills. He found that birds would sit on fake eggs that were brighter and bigger than their own. He also found that fish would attack a wooden fish more vigorously than a real fish if it had more vibrant markings. This means findings of ethology can be relevant, but also that findings found involving artificial settings should not be refuted so easily.

Karl von Frisch’s work was centered almost entirely on honeybees. Through a long series of studies, he found that bees have different optical perception than we do. Their visible spectrum shifts toward the ultraviolet end. They cannot detect red, but they can see an entire array of colors that you or I would perceive simply as ‘yellow’. He extensively studied their various dances. Although different species of bees have different dances, he studied one kind of bee and then generalized. He accounted for the differences afterword by referring to them as dialects within their dance of speech. Although all of this is incredibly interesting, it does not pertain to psychology all that much. This is the initial problem I saw with ethology. If you basically limit yourself to observational learning, you cant learn much more than the behaviors and natures of the animals. Experimenting with them in artificial settings, the way Thorndike did, can lead us to conclusions about learning and other behaviors or mental processes that can be recorded on a lower level with animals. Just to be sure I wasn’t dismissing ethology all too soon, I went to the modern ethologists website and read their most current newsletter. Nothing within this newsletter pertained to psychology. They study animals, because they like animals. There is little more to the pursuit of ethology in my eyes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolaas_Tinbergen
I used this link to look at what Tinbergen’s main studies were.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_von_Frisch
I used this link to look at what von Frisch’s main study was.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Lorenz
I used this link to look at what Lorenz’s studies were pertaining to.
http://www.applied-ethology.org/hres/Newsletter%20Draft%202.pdf
I used this link to see what is happening in the field of ethology today and whether or not it is a discipline worth looking into (not really)
I am aware most of my sources are wikipedia, but when looking into certain areas like this you become limited in the available resources. Also, I actually love wikipedia.

1a) State what your topic is.
John Dewey

1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
John Dewey was discussed in this chapter for a couple reasons. John Dewey was known for his progression to education and arguing against reducing reflex.

1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I found it interesting to read about John Dewey’s argument against the strategy of reducing the reflex. Also I wanted to learn more about his background.

John Dewey is known as famous American psychologist, philosopher, and educational reformer. His ideas make a significant impact. Dewey was the founder of functional psychology and one of the earliest developments of philosophy. He shaped the thought process is the 20th century. Dewey published more than 700 articles and 40 books during his lifetime.

John Dewey was born on October 20, 1859 in Burlington, Vermont. His parents were Archibald Dewey and Lucina Artemisia Rich. His mother was a Devout Calvinist and his father was a merchant who later became Union Army soldier in the Civil War. His father became wealthy after returning from the war and owned a successful Tobacco shop. John Dewey had three other siblings. Growing up Dewey was an excellent student. He attended Burlington public schools with his other siblings. By the age of 15 Dewey enrolled to the University of Vermont. Dewey became interested in philosophy after learning about the evolutionary theory. However his thought process was influenced by natural selection. In 1879 Dewey graduated and finished second in his class.

After graduating from the University of Vermont, Dewey became a high school teacher. During this time he constantly thought about leaving and pursuing a career in philosophy. He spent his time reading philosophical treaties and discusses them with his former teacher. Dewey decided to send W. T. Harris his philosophical essays. After Harris approved Dewey’s essay, he gained confidence and went to pursue his career in philosophy. Dewey enrolled at Johns Hopkins University. While attending John Hopkins, Dewey was truly inspired by two of his professors. They were known as George Morris and G. Stanley Hall. They introduced him to the organic model of nature characteristics and the power of scientific methodology. In 1884 Dewey graduated with his doctorate and accepted a teaching position at the University of Michigan. Dewey worked there for the next ten years.

While teaching at the University of Michigan, Dewey published his first two books (“Psychology” and “Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding”). During this time Dewey met Harriet Alice Chipman and married her in 1886. They gave birth to six children and adopted one. In 1894 Dewey and his family decided to move. Dewey became head of the philosophy department and the University of Chicago. He served as the as the director of its School of Education. During this time his associated himself with the thought of newly emerging pragmatic philosophy. Dewey was also elected the president of American Psychological Association.

In 1904 Dewey left Chicago and became a professor of philosophy and the University of Columbia. He was also working at teachers college on the side. While teaching at Columbia, Dewey wrote numerous essays and articles on his theory of knowledge and metaphysics. These articles and essays were later published in his books. Dewey’s educational theories became more popular while working at Columbia. Dewey was able to publish multiple books during this time. In 1930 Dewey retired from the University of Columbia with the title of “professor emeritus”.

John Dewey is known as famous American psychologist, philosopher, and educational reformer. His ideas make a significant impact. Dewey was the founder of functional psychology and one of the earliest
developments of philosophy. He shaped the thought process is the 20th century. Dewey published more than 700 articles and 40 books during his lifetime.

http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesal/p/john-dewey.htm
I choose this website because it discussed his personal life and career

http://www.biography.com/people/john-dewey-9273497?page=3
I choose this website because it discussed his childhood and accomplishments

http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/john-dewey-144.php
I choose this website because it discussed his theories and work

1a) State what your topic is. Edward Thorndike and Puzzle Box Learning

1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter. This topic relates to the chapter simply because it was introduced in the chapter under the topic of Edward Thorndike.

1c) Discuss why you are interested in it. I am interested in the puzzle box learning and the idea of trial and error learning because it makes me think about how I learn something and put it into my memory. If I do not succeed then I try again but with a different approach. I just like to think of how things can be done and how a different way can alter the outcome of the first try.

2. Edward Thorndike had an eye for mind reading but did not continue to pursue that because of the children that were involved with the studies and he could not further studies into their later years of life. So Edward developed the idea of puzzle box learning and the idea that he could figure out how we learn. He came up with the idea of trial and error learning. That is a human or even an animal will do roughly the same thing with variations over and over again until they find a way to figure something out. So for example a human will tie their shoes over and over to finally get the end result or a dog will sniff out their animal of hunt and if they do not find it the first time they will retrace their steps and end up finding it in the end thru trial and error.

He also found that with trial and error an animal would be rewarded if the situation was done correctly and it would not be rewarded if it was done incorrectly. Thus the animal will gradually forget how to do that and will begin to do the correct one because he was rewarded with the correct way to do things. This trial and error was intertwined with the idea of operant conditioning. Operant conditioning has to deal with the way we learn things and the idea that our consequences of our behavior shape the way we learn things. So again if we are rewarded because of our good behavior we will most likely keep doing that behavior.

His idea of trial and error was also known as the law of effect. I read in my readings that Thorndike had also done work in the military for research and ran tests during the First World War.

http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/thorndike.htm
This website gave me a great amount of detail about the theory of the puzzle boxes that Thorndike used with dogs and chicks. It also gave me a little bit of background about him which was great to know and understand.

http://www.simplypsychology.org/edward-thorndike.html
This website gave me a better look at what Thorndike had done. It also talked about the psychologist B.F Skinner.

http://www.goodtherapy.org/famous-psychologists/edward-thorndike.html
On this website it gave me roughly the same information the first two did based on his operant conditioning theory and what he had done as a psychologist.

I wrote on John Dewy and his ideas of progressive education. Progressive education is the ideas and practices that aim to make schools more effective organizations of a democratic society. The idea took off in the late 19th century and one common idea shared by all educators in this system believe that active participation by all students will best affect their lives. There are two basic elements that are central to the idea of progressive education: (1) respect for diversity, meaning that everyone should be recognized for their own abilities, interest and needs and the second is (2) the development of critical socially engaged intelligence which enables students to understand and participate effectively in the affairs of their community and together and as one make an effort to achieve a common good. The idea has been deemed to be child-centered and a social reconstructionist approach. Dewy saw a decline in the opportunities for local community life and small scale enterprise, he thought that young people were losing their opportunities to learn the ways of democratic participation and thought education needed to make up for this loss. The school system was being pressured to support the expanding industrial economy and preparing workers for their traditional roles that they would assume in the work force, i.e. line workers, doctors, mechanics. But the new idea of progressive education led to the start of the Progressive Education Association with the aim to reform the entire school system of America.

The Idea of progressive education is centered on the idea of letting students explore and become best at their own abilities and not just train everyone on one set of arbitrary skills that are deemed needed throughout society. The ideas of problem solving and critical thinking are skills that are fostered in this educational system; this is great for kids because although we are lead into working with these concepts indirectly we never really work fully to obtain and promote these skills in the educational system. However, when we finish the school system we move out into the world we are supposed to use these skills to make career advancements but if we never fully develop the skills we are stuck exploring them quickly. The system also looks to promote lifelong learning and social skills both beneficial throughout life. The integration of community service is great because it helps the student learn to be self-less in ways and to help give back to the community. These ideas were dropped off by that start of the Cold War when the public looked less towards educational reform but more towards production of materials to promote the country from a potential devastating war. Post Cold War the idea sat dormant for a while, now the idea however has started to make a comeback. For instance in current elementary schools students are being graded more off of projects than test, some schools have come to the point where they take few test and mainly they take the state administered tests.

I feel as if this kind of learning has a strong positive and a negative one. The positive side that I agree with overall is that using this type of educational system will promote students become what they are good and will excel with. This is great because if students are exploring and learning areas they find most interesting it will create an intense connection to the subject leading to dedication when they obtain a job. The down side I see is that every student does need to know the basic math, science, english skills.

http://www.uvm.edu/~dewey/articles/proged.html
This link provided me with insight about the history of the topic and how the reform affected Americans are the time of proposal.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/works/1960/x03.htm
This website discussed what the previous ideas of education were and problems with them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey#On_education This wiki site helped to give me a jumping off point for Dewey and his ideas related to education.

B.H.

My topic is Social Darwinism, this topic relates to the chapter because Herbert Spencer went on to develop a system of realistic individuality that was constant with evolutionary thinking. I was interested in this topic because with the government shutdown at the moment, social Darwinism is kind of in effect with government interference limited. The pseudoscience of Darwinism was so popular a long time ago and I want to elaborate on how it almost destroyed humanity. After the publication of
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1860, many governmental philosophers and devious representatives applied his discoveries to human civilization. In the 20th century, these thoughts were put into practice nearly destroying us.

Darwin’s theories on natural selection, the sun, Newton’s clockwork physics, Einstein’s relativistic interpretation of the cosmos, all sent shockwaves which are still being felt today. Certain ideas went on to claim Darwin as a God killer, it reduced civilization to the level of animals which disturbed the Judeo-Christian belief that civilization was in a high place between God and the natural world. Human species belonged to nature, not to the notions of God. Many philosophers applied Darwinism ideas to human individuals, civilization, and races. In absence of God, humanity needs to ensure its capability and constant survival. Darwin’s thesis seemed to provide a plan on how this could be done.

Darwin’s theories arrived at a hazardous time, a time when Western cultural and scientific feelings were not ready for it. It was an idea ahead of its period, and was mistaken and applied to empires where it didn’t belong. It appeared during a time of extremely rooted and putative racism, where conditions of undeveloped nations and poverty troubled minorities were recognized to ethnic inferiority. His biological ideas began to influence the minds of politicians as well. In order to exist and adapt, human civilization needs to strengthen and justify aspects of competition and struggle. This brought on the “survival of the fittest” doctrine; Spencer’s individualism arose to belief that the state should limit security and that no boundaries should be placed on commerce and no donations should be made for social welfare and education. Absence of interference leads to social improvement. Being poor meant you are “unfit, “donations would prevent maturity and you growing out of your weakness.

The most notorious application of Social Darwinism was in Nazi Germany. Heightened race conscious was taken to a greater degree creating anti- Semitism. Power could always be reasonable in a situation, with no opportunity for morals, regulation, or humanitarian principles. It explains the extreme violence during WWII, inspiring them to unite the Teutonic pioneers, destroy races, and claim other lands as the victors of more basic races.

Darwin never envisioned for this to happen. He sought to limit his concept to the biological jurisdiction. But just like many things in existence, it only takes a certain number of people to ruin it for everyone. Darwinism still has critics that still use natural selection and is widely accepted by biologists. Darwinism has its generalizations and misreading’s but science is still science. It actually fails to account for group selection theories and empathy so it remains in pseudoscience. Darwinism is the abomination to civilized society.

http://io9.com/how-the-pseudoscience-of-social-darwinism-nearly-destro-1308329496
This io9 website provided me with evidence and knowledge on how Social Darwinism almost destroyed civilization around the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism
This website educated me further on all the theories and background information regarding Darwin and Darwinism theories.

http://www.csustan.edu/history/faculty/weikart/Laissez-Faire-Social-Darwinism.pdf
This website pdf provided me with information showing how Laissez-Faire Social Darwinism and individual competition was implemented.

1a) My topic is Edward Thorndike.
1b) This chapter talks about Edward Thorndike and his learning theory so that’s how this topic relates to the chapter.
1c) Edward Thorndike was very interesting because of his work with animals. When deciding to research Thorndike I liked that he worked with animals but I also wanted to find some things out about his life and things like school.
2) Thorndike started out with a science degree and then went for a degree in French and English literature. It wasn’t until he had William James’s psychology course that he decided he wanted to switch his course of study to psychology. He became associated with the American school of thought known as functionalism. Thorndike was also know in the educational psychology area and wrote many books about that topic. One of the books he wrote was about animal intelligence because he believed that we study animal behavior not animal consciousness for the purpose of controlling behavior. Most importantly he was elected president of the American Psychological Association and became the first psychologists to be in the National Academy of Sciences.
We have seen work with all sorts of animals like; rats, monkeys, and Thorndike used cats. His most famous work is his learning theory. I thought that Skinner was the first one to come up with operant conditioning but with research I found out that Thorndike was the first and Skinners theory built on Thorndike’s ideas. Operant conditioning is the learning from consequences of our behavior. Going back to his most famous work, the one that sticks out to me and is interesting to describe his learning theory is the puzzle box experiment. With this experiment he placed a cat in puzzle boxes where they would try and work their way out to reach a piece of food on the outside. His focus for this was to see the time it took them to escape as well as their behavior while trying to do so. If the cat was successful at escaping they would learn that pressing the lever or pulling the string would give them a favorable consequence and they would adopt this behavior which would all increase their behavior of pushing the lever or pulling the string. When doing this experiment Thorndike came up with a Law of Effect which stated that any behavior followed by a pleasant outcome is likely to be repeated and any behavior followed by an unpleasant outcome is less likely to be repeated. In the end Thorndike concluded that animals learn by trial and error, or by reward and punishment. He referred to how all beings learn from the puzzle experiments he did. He believed that all learning involves the formation of connections and connections were strengthened by law of effect.

My topic is John Dewey. He is mentioned in the chapter because of his work with the reflex arc, but I am interested in him because of his work with education. As we are continuing to see in these chapters, education and psychology are certainly related in many ways. Dewey's work in psychology helped reform education.
John Dewey was born to a middle class family in Vermont. He got a bachelors degree in teaching and taught both elementary and high school students for several years before deciding that teaching was not his calling, and wet back to school to receive his Ph.D. His dissertation was in the work of Kant. He then accepted a faculty position to teach at the university of Michigan. During this time he developed his personal philosophies and beliefs in pedagogy and thought.
Dewey was a strong believer in pragmatism (which he referred to as instrumentalism). He also strongly believed in experimentation any believed that education at that time in the US was not especially effective. His beliefs in education as well as the changes he made started an educational reform in thr US. He believed that in order for students to learn effectively, they must be Abe to comprehend and relate material they were learning to material and knowledge they already have. Dewey started the Chicago Labratory School which allied many of his philosophies about teaching and education. He believed that teachers should not be in a classroom to shove information down their students throats, but rather to aid and assist students in gaining knowledge as well as provide skills tomhelp the students learn p. he also believed in "hands on" learning--that students should learn through experience. Dewey's ideas about education are still in use in schools today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey I used this Wikipedia article as a starting point--to gain some base information and to find other resources.
www.marxists.org/archive/novack/works/1960/x03.htm I used this information to learn about John Dewey's educational beliefs and practices he implemented in the lab school.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/160445/John-Dewey his site had a lot of information about Dewey's general background and schooling.

For this blog, I am going to dive deeper into the life of Herbert Spencer, who is most well-known for coining the phrase “survival of the fittest.” Because of this, many wrongly believed that he was a social Darwinist.

Spencer was born in England in 1820, and was the only one of nine children to survive past childhood. From a very young age, Spencer was taught to resist authority and be independent. Although his father was a teacher, he was very unconventional, and his uncle also had very radical views. This uncle offered to pay his way through Cambridge, but Spencer declined. Spencer had many interests, and was trained as an engineer for the railways, but later decided that he had a greater passion for journalism and writing, especially when it came to politics. He loved to read, but his major downfall was that he would not read works published by authors with whom he disagreed. Therefore, he was getting a very biased opinion about politics, among other topics.

Throughout his adult life, Spencer published many works, such as The Principles in Psychology in 1855, First Principles, The Principles of Sociology, and Descriptive Sociology. His first book, however, was Social Statics, or the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness in 1851. He sold many copies of his various books, and worked hard to translate them into many different languages.

During the course of his career, many believed Spencer to be a Darwinist. This simply is not true. It was Spencer, not Darwin that coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” although they both had differing ideas on the subject of natural selection. Spencer also believed in a systematic view of the human person. He believed that the whole is a functioning of the sum of its parts, but also that each individual part had an identity that the whole depended on. Some say that this is reminiscent of Hobbes.

Spencer was a very empirically-based man; he liked to have solid facts to back up his beliefs. Therefore, when it came to religion, Spencer that the origin of life cannot be empirically defined or discovered, and so it is unknowable. Because of this, he said, we cannot know God nor know his character or what He is like. He considered himself agnostic for the majority of his life. He said that, although we cannot know which religious beliefs are true, similarly we cannot know which beliefs are false.

Spencer’s work has been under close look lately, as people have been finding inconsistencies with his research and conclusions. One would think that someone who tried to be as empirically based as possible would not have so many inconsistencies. However, throughout his reading, his stand on topics such as rights of children, women’s suffrage, and other political issues change. Despite these discrepancies, however, Spencer is still considered to have contributed much to the fields of philosophy and evolution, and therefore psychology.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spencer/
I used this site to understand Spencer's political involvement and his political views

http://www.iep.utm.edu/spencer/#H1
I used this site pretty heavily to understand the timeline of events in Spencer's life and to understand how others received him.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/559249/Herbert-Spencer/
This site gave a great review of Spencer's writings and how they contributed to prior knowledge about evolution and philosophy.

1a) State what your topic is.

Edward Thorndike
1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
It relates to the chapter because Thorndike is one of the psychologists that is discussed.

1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
I found his ideas and experiments to be interesting so I decided to look into it more.
Edward Thorndike grew up in Massachusetts, the son of a Methodist minister. At first Thorndike did not like psychology and only began to have an interest in it after reading a book by William James. I found interest in Thorndike through his work with animals, which is one of his biggest contributions to the field of psychology. He created this experiment in which he made a “puzzle box” and put a hungry cat in it and watched as the animal tried to escape and get food, he noticed that the cats could only get the food by doing trial and error. But after having to figure out how to get food each time the experiment was recreated with the same cat it found it easier to escape. Thorndike is credited for the first laboratory study of animal learning, which I found to be incredibly interesting. From 1904-1940 Thorndike was a professor of educational psychology at Columbia

http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/thorndike.htm
I chose this link because it had a very easy to follow description of the “puzzle box” experiment.

http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesmz/p/edward-thorndike.htm
I chose this link because it gave a very good but brief biography of Thorndike.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/593342/Edward-L-Thorndike/
I chose this link because it had some good information that was not present on the other websites.

Posted for K.S.
1a.) Trial and Error learning/ connectionism
1b.) The chapter discusses Edward Thorndike’s study using animal mazes and how that created the trial and error theory. Thorndike however really thought of this theory based on trial and accident. What the animals really did was accidentally find their way either out of a maze or a box or a fence. Each time they recalled what they did the time before and were better equipped to escape again.
1c.) I find using animals to study a very effective technique. I also enjoy learning about the trial and error process when in reference to many experiments; it’s something we have always been taught to use as a possible tool. In this way we see where it was established along with how connectionism plays a role later on after the initial trial and error learning.
2.) As mentioned previously Thorndike used animals such as cats that were stuck in puzzle boxes to experiment with trial and error or what was sometimes called selecting and connecting. The cat puzzle experiment was found to prove that was a decrease in the amount of time it took was based on trials. Because this learning also proved to be incremental it shows that animals learn by doing instead of through reason or thinking. These boxes were also thought of as instrumental conditioning, where the animal is rewarded by such behavior if it escaped through a string or a button. The animal was then able to get food, such as a hungry cat.
These animals were not just making a complete realization the first time. Rather, the amount of time the animal spent in the box simple shortened each time. With this and the knowledge about what happens when they are bribed with food we see that this is what happens when all being are learning anything. This research was all based on Darwin’s thoughts and questions related to if animals and humans ability to learn was based on intelligence or thinking or reasoning. Which we learned through Thorndike’s finding are purely mechanical and include no sense of consciousness or thought process.
http://fac.hsu.edu/ahmada/3%20courses/2%20learning/Learning%20Notes/6%20Thorndike.pdf this website was able to provided slides on Thorndike’s past along with his ideas and the gist of trial and error learning and connectionism. It also showed some examples of graphs he could have used to take note of his experiment and how long it would take a cat to escape each time.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/thorndike.htm this website showed more about the cat studies along with how the stimuli were able to connect in the brain to create this effect. This site mentioned the rewards that were used and proving how that is the reason for the success and not based on thought process or a desire but rather the food incentive.
http://www.preservearticles.com/201102033839/understanding-the-theory-of-trial-and-error-learning-process-from-psychological-point-of-view.html This website mentioned Darwin’s role in Thorndike’s experiments and questioning if these animals were able to reason. Along with that it gave in depth explanations regarding the cat experiments and how each of them provided more information.

1a) State what your topic is.
Johann Friedrich Herbart (Structuralism)

1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
Structuralism was a topic that was discussed in chapter 7 and this was considered to be like anatomy. The purpose of structuralism was analysis. Structural psychologists analyze the human mind and organize it into its elementary units. Johann Herbart was before E.B. Titchener and tried to focus on the mind and it's individual units. Herbart having limited technology compared to Titchener and his latter study on structuralism. Although Herbart had different theories about structuralism, his approach was more philosophical and that concepts become forces when they resists one another.

1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
This philosopher interested me because I wanted to see where the idea of structuralism and the unconscious mind came from. Herbart wanted to investigate how the mind works; in particular, how it manages ideas or concepts. I consider myself an over thinker and I tend to be anxious. I feel that I have so many thoughts that race through my brain and it causes me to make decisions I am not 100% about making. He was wondering how people become confused and that is something I am interested in. Sometimes I become confused and I do not know why. To Herbart, it seemed that the mind must use some kind of system for differentiating and storing ideas.

2) Next, we would like you to take the information you read or viewed related to your topic, integrate/synthesize it, and then write about the topic in a knowledgeable manner.

Herbart wanted to account for the fact that although ideas exists forever, some seem to exist beyond our conscious awareness. We perceive things and store a memory of them despite the fact that we are unaware of doing so. Herbart believed that ideas form as information from the senses combines and used the term Vorsfellung which incorporates thoughts, mental images, and even emotional states. Ideas can attract and combine with other ideas or feelings, rather like magnets, according to Herbart. His thinking was that experiences and sensations combine to form ideas and similar ideas can combine. Dissimilar ideas resist one another and become forces in conflict. One ides is then forced to become the favorable one over the other and the favored idea stays in the conscious mind. The unfavored idea on the other hand leaves consciousness and becomes an unconscious idea/. Herbart saw the unconscious as simply a kind of storage place for weak or opposed ideas. Having structural solutions for the management of ideas in a healthy mind was the goal of Herbart. Freud later looked into his theories and thought the mind was much more complex than what Herbart thought.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Johann_Friedrich_Herbart.aspx
This website gave me background on Herbart's life and gave me information about his "pre-structuralism" ideas.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/262683/Johann-Friedrich-Herbart
This website gave me information about Herbart's life as well, but also talked about his role in education. Herbart believed that science should be taught at every university or school and this spread to the US.

http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2040/Herbart-Johann-1776-1841.html

The topic I chose to write about was over social Darwinism. I chose to do this topic because it was talked about in chapter 7, which is over functionalism and structuralism. Social darwinism is based off of a functionalist view. Social Darwinism believes in the survival of the fittest. Social Darwinists believe that power and wealth of a strong person should increase while it should decrease for a weak person. There is conflict between who is considered weak or strong because different groups of social Darwinists define those two categories differently. They believed it was natural selection to pick the strongest mate. They think evolutionary forces are going to happened no matter what and humans should not try to alter that in any way. The term “social Darwinism” became popular in America from a guy named Richard Hofstadter. He was an American historian. He used the term to go against facism to indicate any competitive strife, chauvism, or racism. Herbert Spencer was a social Darwinist. He wrote a book called The Social Organism. In this book he compares natural selection of humans to the natural selection of any other living organism, such as a plant. Heredity also contributed to social Darwinism. Galton thought biological inheritance was more important than the environment when identifying intelligence or a character. Other people argued that changes in the environment would change then it would cause physical changes in the person that could be passed on to their kids. Social Darwinism was popular in the beginning of the 20th century. After WWI though it lost its influence on people. People blamed social Darwinism for contributing to the German military system and Nazism. Social Darwinism was actually used as a justification for the Holocaust. They thought it was a good idea to get rid of the weak and keep the strong. Social Darwinism has been proven to be wrong. The Holocaust also proves that it can be very dangerous. There are many questions on how species survive, such as whether or not they have preferred natural selection of the strongest mate. It has seemed to bounce back between the evolution theory and social Darwinism, although there is controversy with both of these theories.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism
This website had a lot of history about social darwinsim. I used some of the facts from it in my paper.
http://autocww.colorado.edu/~flc/E64ContentFiles/SociologyAndReform/SocialDarwinism.html
This site had a lot of information and I used some facts from it.
http://www.allaboutscience.org/what-is-social-darwinism-faq.htm
I used the information about the Holocaust from this site.

1a) Edward L. Thorndike

1b) Thorndike was one of the main topics in this chapter with the many experiments and discoveries he has found.

1c) I just found him interesting in what he did, I would like to know where he came from and what some of his most famous experiments and findings.

2) Thorndike was a famous 19th century American scientist, he was one of the leaders in starting the comparative psychology movement. He started studying psychology in probably the best time in history, it was the start of Colleges accepting students for graduate level psychology. He studied at Weslyan University and graduated, he then enrolled in Harvard for his masters, but he decided never to finish his degree. What he is most famous for, which he received his doctorate for, was his studies on animal memories. He studied them using what he called “puzzled boxes” where he had cats and dogs try to get out of the box with a series of movements and, well, puzzles. He was most remembered by his ever famous “Law of Effect”.

Law of Effect is very closely related to operant conditioning, which states that a pleasant response will likely cause that action to happen more, while an unpleasant response will cause that action to happen less. Thorndike used it in his famous animal experiments, this was the basis of his animal experiments and has since moved into the realm of human behavior modification. The cool thing that Thorndike did was he used this theory to answer all of his questions about how skills are learned by humans and also animals. He would have the animals, mostly cats, go into the boxes and have to do a certain action to get out of the box. Scratch at the door, pull a sting, etc., once the cat gets out there was a reward for the cat, after a while the cat would slowly start to learn and get out faster.

Thorndike brought a lot to the field of psychology he had a couple of theories brought to the field and they are still used today. He was one of the most influential American Psychologists in history, he was part of a movement called functionalism, which is the thought that everything in the world has a purpose and that purpose is vital to the survival of society and humans. Thorndike also wrote many books, on the subject of educational psychology. One of Thorndike’s biggest accomplishments in his entire life besides being awarded his doctorate, was when he was voted in as president of the American Psychology Association as well as being inducted to the National Academy of Sciences. All of this happened, but he is most remembered for his Law of effect, what I talked about earlier. He was a very interesting person, and I think there is a lot more to him than just the Law of Effect.

http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/thorndike.htm
This was a good website showing what Thorndike’s life of education was like and what he was most famous for.

https://www.boundless.com/psychology/textbooks/boundless-psychology-textbook/learning-7/operant-conditioning-47/thorndike-s-law-of-effect-196-12731/
This was a good website showing how the theory of Law of Effect relates to his studies and his experiments. It also shows how it is a part of behavior modification.

http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesmz/p/edward-thorndike.htm
This website showed me what he did and all of his accomplishments.

1a) This week I chose to do my topic on Herbert Spencer.

1b) This chapter briefly discussed Spencer, relating him to Darwin and his theories. It mentioned him being connected to social Darwinism as well.

1c) Before reading this chapter I never knew that it was Spencer who coined the expression, “survival of the fittest.” When I think about evolutionary theories and I automatically think of Darwin so I wanted to explore a little bit more concerning Spencer and all of his contributions.

2)
Herbert Spencer was many things including a philosopher and sociologist. He was a very prominent figure within the Victorian Era, developing many evolutionary theories during the nineteenth century. His ideas did however rival with those of well known Charles Darwin. He even wrote about evolution before Darwin. His name became synonymous with social Darwinism. He contributed to a variety of subjects throughout his lifetime and even invented a precursor to the modern paper clip. Overall he is best known for creating as well as applying evolutionary theories to philosophy psychology and society, also known as “synthetic philosophy.”
Spencer was born in England in the year 1820. He was the first of nine children but unfortunately the only child to survive infancy. Growing up he had a very unstructured and undisciplined education. His father was a school teacher and influenced Spencer from a very young age towards his views of individualism. He showed much resistance to authority figures as a child and displayed heavy independence. A majority of his knowledge came from readings and conversations with his friends.
As he got older he found it very hard to decide upon a career. Eventually he trained as a civil engineer for railways. When he reached his twenties he got into journalism and political writing. He even began working as a writer and subeditor for The Economist Financial Weekly from 1848-1853. Spencer was extremely confident in his views, leading to stubbornness and a refusal to read other writers views with whom had opposing views. Some of his first writings took a stance defending many radical causes like the role of women in society. He later abandoned such views however.
During this time he was also making contact with several political controversialists.
He finally published his first work in the year of 1851, Social Statics or the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness. This text displays accounts of human freedom development.
The death of his uncle Thomas during 1853 granted him an inheritance which allowed him to write without depending on a regular job. In 1855 he published his second book, The Principles of Psychology. This text however did not gain as much success as his first.
It was also around this time that Spencer began experiencing serious health problems, mostly mental, which continued to affect him for the rest of his life. These issues drove him to seek our privacy and avoid going into public as much as possible. Spencer never did marry. His health also affected his work as he could not only write for a couple hours each day. He did though complete a nine volume set, A System of Synthetic Philosophy which he worked on from 1862-1893.
As his publications grew so did his fame. John Stuart Mill was even one of his admirers. He was especially influential in the United States. His text, The Study of Sociology was a prime focus of controversy at Yale during 1879. His reputation had peaked during the 1870’s and 1880’s. He was even nominated for a Nobel Prize for Literature during 1902. Unfortunately the last few decades of his life were very poor in health and Spencer died in 1903.
Spencer’s theories appealed to many people including Robert Nozick. Millions of copies of his texts have been sold and translated into several languages. He achieved tremendous authority throughout his lifetime but his influence seemed to decline heavily after 1900. Today he is best known for his, “survival of the fittest,” expression and his work continues to be read. A quote that stuck out to me from one of the websites states that, “the psychology he believed would do for the human mind what Isaac Newton had done for matter.”

3)

1. http://www.iep.utm.edu/spencer/

This website included a lot of great information. It was nicely organized into separate sections regarding different parts of his life and theories. It included a overall summary towards the beginning and then went in chronological order concerning his time and contributions.

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Spencer

This website had the most information. It also started off with a brief summarization of Spencer. It also included a table of contents and pictures which was nice. It went in chronological order as well, starting off with his childhood and ending with his last few years of life and all he contributed.

3. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spencer/

Like the first website, this one also included a ton of great information and was organized into separate sections as well. Unlike the other sites however this one focused a lot on his theories and views versus more personal aspects of his life such as his childhood. This site went more into depth regarding his views on aspects such as politics.

1a) Robert Woodworth
1b) Robert Woodworth established what is known as the Dynamic Psychology. He allowed for functionalism to be evolved within the college of Columbia. The chapter focuses on structuralism and functionalism and how they differ or are related. With the help of Woodworth, more information was discovered about the differences and similarities of the two.
1c) Woodworth seems like an educated individual with a great understanding of what functionalism is. Starting with physiology, Woodworth focused more on the make up of characteristics.

Robert Woodworth grew up in a complex family. His father was a schoolteacher, which is not surprising. Woodworth’s father traveled continually through the years to different states in order to teach, even Iowa was one of those states. His father had been married previously before Woodworth was born, but his mother was an important person in his life. He followed her in the way he studied philosophy and mathematics. His family history consisted of farmers, and at the time he was convinced he would just do that, but instead he pursued a career in music. However, as college began, music became nonexistent. Even though Woodworth didn’t exactly know what he wanted to pursue, he knew it wasn’t ministry, which was his parent’s choice for him. He took some time and decided upon teaching. His parent’s were not opposed at all. Woodworth took a class in philosophy that touched on psychology. Woodworth had the opportunity to work with other well-known psychologists in his time, people like Thorndike, and William James. Woodworth studied at Harvard University. He is extremely famous for his studies on mental life, and his textbook was used for undergraduates for several years. However, one main person Woodworth worked under was James Cattell, and it was under him Woodworth earned his PhD at Columbia University. Woodworth focused on functional psychology. Two important things Woodworth did in his life was write memoirs for two important men; Watson and Royce.

I chose this website because it provided a memoir for Woodworth.
http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/woodworth-robert-sessions.pdf

I chose this website because it elaborated on the life of Robert Woodworth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_S._Woodworth

I chose this website because it gives a good description of what Woodworth’s life was like and how he became the person he was.
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Woodworth/murchison.htm

1a) State what your topic is.

My topic is Edward Thorndike.

1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.


My topic relates to the chapter because Edward Thorndike used functionalism to understand the learning process of various animals. Functionalism is how different parts of the body function and operate, and how they are used to survive. Thorndike uses chicks and cats to discover their different learning methods.

1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.

I am interested in this topic because Edward Thorndike interested me in the way that he used mazes to figure out how the learning processes of different animals worked. Thorndike would stick cats into puzzle boxes, which are boxed without doors that would open only if the cat hit the trigger. He would have the cats observe other animals escape the puzzle boxes, but the cat did not seem to learn from watching others. They seemed to learn from trial and error, and by accidentally hitting the trigger. It is interesting that other animals cannot learn as easily as humans do.

Edward Thorndike was born on August 31st, 1874 in a small town in Massachusetts. His father was a Methodist minister, and they moved around a lot due to his job. Edward was nicknamed Ted, and became interested in psychology after reading William James’s textbook, Principles of Psychology. Thorndike actually studied under James at Harvard, where he obtained his masters. While he was at Harvard, Thorndike was interested in the learning process of animals. He also would put baby chicks in mazes to observe how they tried to escape. He created the mazes by standing up books. This study helped him receive his masters. After receiving his masters, Thorndike attended Columbia University to pursue his doctorate. Columbia University was the place where Thorndike traded out the baby chicks to study other animals, like cats and dogs. For his dissertation, Thorndike constructed puzzle boxes. He put cats in the puzzle boxes, and observed them trying to escape. He also let the cats observe other animals escaping to see if cats could learn by observation. After performing his study, Thorndike learned that cats learn through trial and error. Thorndike worked under American psychologist, James Cattell, and obtained his doctorate in1898.
After this accomplishment, he stayed at Columbia and was an instructor in psychology. At Columbia he studied education, human learning, and mental testing. On August 29, 1900 Edward married Elizabeth Moulton, and together they had five children.
Edward had numerous accomplishments in his lifetime after he obtained a PhD. Edward Thorndike was elected President of the American Psychology Association in 1912. He was also admitted into the National Academy of Sciences in 1917; Thorndike was one of five first scientists to be inducted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Thorndike
This source highlighted Thorndike’s early life, as well as explained his concept of connectionism.

http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/thorndike.htm
This article used a timeline, which was helpful to map out his major accomplishments in his life. This article also went into depth in other parts of his research.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/593342/Edward-L-Thorndike
The last website explained more of the books he wrote, and highlighted his collaboration with Woodworth.

My topic is John Dewey is known as an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. Dewey's ideas have influenced education and social reform, but his biggest impact was on education. Dewey felt that schools and civil society both needed attention, and he felt that extending voting rights would help this. Dewey started out as teacher at a high school and then soon ended up going to John Hopkins University where he received his Ph.D. After gaining his degree, Dewey he went to the University of Chicago where he began the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, he eventually quit due to disagreements with administration. Dewey then went on to go to China where he stayed for two years while giving lectures to students. Basically, Dewey felt that education was a place to gain knowledge and to learn how to live. He thought that education should help individuals realize their full potential, not just learn a set of predetermined skills.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey
http://dewey.pragmatism.org/
http://www.biography.com/people/john-dewey-9273497

1a)Topic Robert Woodworth: career and contributions to psychology.
1b)How does it relate to chapter? This chapter largely covered the development of the teaching of psychology within the graduate and undergraduate levels of university, including Titchener’s drill courses and Woodworth’s work with textbooks and standardizing the teaching of experimentation within the psychological laboratory. For my topic I chose to focus on Woodworth because I thought that his ‘Columbia Bible’ was a significant achievement of the time period the chapter covers and albeit its faults did a substantial amount to advance the standard of practice of experimentation and education in psychology.
1c) Why interested? I was interested in the subject of Robert Woodworth’s career and contributions to psychology because the section in the chapter mentioning the ‘Columbia Bible’ caught my attention as someone who is interested in the academia of psychology.
2) Synthesis. During his initial time in higher education at Amherst College Robert Woodworth’s study was more involved in history and mathematics than psychology, or even science. His first experience with psychology was when he took a class during his senior year of undergraduate study, but it still took him doing his own outside learning into the subject to become interested in studying it. After Amherst he attended Harvard for a time while studying both psychology and philosophy, his main interests at this time included motivation and the mind-body connection. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Harvard and then moved on to study with James Cattell at Columbia where he earned his PhD. Columbia was where Robert Woodworth spent the rest of his career teaching and researching various subjects within the scope of psychology.
Woodworth admitted that he was still very interested in philosophy and this affinity influenced his choice in topics of study during his professional career. Still, learning under Cattell had influenced Woodworth in that he took up the study of psychometrics and because of this research he was selected by the American Psychological Association to study the subject along with a committee. He was also asked to help work with soldiers experiencing PTSD during WWI by the APA, and was named the president of the organization in 1914. Woodworth published many books on psychology in various subjects, one of the most famous being Experimental Psychology, in which he outlines the standardization of methods of research, that was used in many classrooms as the foremost text on the subject for years. In his later life he became the first to receive the American Psychological Foundation’s gold medal for his research and contributions to Psychology, he continued to teach and write far into his later years as well. Overall Woodworth did make many important contributions to the field of psychology and his career certainly helped further the development of a set of regulations surrounding the methodology of experimentation.
Sources
http://peace.saumag.edu/faculty/kardas/Courses/HP/Lectures/woodworth.html
I chose this source because it provided background about Woodworth, but also because the author included commentary into a historicist understanding of Woodworth and his ideas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_S._Woodworth
I decided on this source mainly because it was difficult to find information on Woodworth that was from a source that wasn’t an encyclopedia article, or a restricted academic article. This one provides information about Woodworth’s career and background about his schooling.
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Woodworth/murchison.htm
This link details an autobiography of Robert Woodworth, which I thought would be a good source to include to gain his personal perspective into the experiments he conducted and his achievements.

The topic that I chose from chapter 7 was John Dewey’s contribution to education in America. This fits into the chapter because it was all about structuralism and functionalism. Dewey was a functionalist and used his knowledge to progress the education system in America. I wanted to look more into this topic because I enjoy reading about applied psychology, and the education realm has a massive amount of opportunities for this. I want to look more into what Dewey studied and how he came to the conclusions to which he came.

From the text, we learned that John Dewey was responsible for the movement that we know today as progressive education. Defined, progressive education is the idea that children should learn by doing (Education Portal). Dewey believed in a classroom where children were allowed to learn about what they wanted to learn about. There was no one instructor that taught each subject. The instructor was looked at as more of a facilitator than an actual teacher. They would help the students explore, not just stand at the front and lecture, or talk about one subject at a time. Dewey believed that students would learn better if they were interested in what they were learning (Education Portal).

Some critics said that with Dewey’s philosophy the teacher’s authority and classroom order would disappear. Dewey, however, was not focused on order or “who was in charge.” He was focused on the child, and what they would learn in the classroom. Other critics would say that if the children are simply learning only what they want to learn about, they will lose out on important information and skills necessary for proper development (PBS). Dewey took from others like Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who said that children learn by doing, and Fredrich Froebel, who emphasized play to facilitate their learning, to defend his argument that these concepts will be learned as the children are allowed to move freely within the classroom. Things like math, problem solving, and language (basic skills needed in life) were learned as they played and interacted with each other and with the subjects that they found interesting (Scholastic).

In contrast to the late 19th century way of viewing education, Dewey believed in a child-centered classroom. He also believed, as stated earlier, that the classroom should be run like a democracy. Not only does this mean that the children participate in their own learning, but he also believed that the teacher and the students needed to learn together. How has Dewey’s views affected us today? Traditionally, in Dewey’s time, teachers would give necessary information through the form of a lecture and the students would be asked to take a written test to prove that they learned, or probably quickly memorized, the necessary information. With Dewey’s view, you see more projects, group activities, and discussions of the material. This allows for the students to develop critical thinking skills that would be lost in a lecture only format (Education Portal).

http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/john-dewey-on-education-impact-theory.html#lesson

Although this wasn’t a complete overview, this website helped me more with definitions and application while writing and researching.

http://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/john.html

This website, although a little short, showed me criticisms of Dewey’s theory that I did not find in the other two websites.

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/pioneers-our-field-john-dewey-father-pragmatism

This website gave me a bit more of a background as to where Dewey got his ideas from.

This week I would like to talk about Edward L. Thorndike. I wanted to learn more about him because he has been repeated in several of my classes and I want to know if there is anything else to learn.

Edward Lee Thorndike was born in Massachusetts in the 1870s. He was the son of a minister and a very successful student. He became interested in psychology only after reading “The Principles of Psychology” by William James, another name that has been discussed in our text. He received his bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University, had a brief stint at Harvard where he abandoned his interest in literature to focus on psychology, and moved to Columbia University where he studied under James McKeen Cattell and received his PhD. Thorndike became a teacher at Columbia himself. In 1912 he became the president of the American Psychological Association (APA) and in 1917 he became one of the first psychologists to be admitted to the National Academy of Sciences. In 1934 he was also elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Thorndike became most known because of his studies on intelligence. He started his studies by testing on animals, like cats. We wanted to know how quickly animals could change their behavior in order to receive positive reinforcement and avoid punishment. His most common test was the puzzle boxes for cats. In order to escape these boxes the cats had to push a lever with their paw, bite something with their teeth, push against something with their tail, etc. After opening the door, the cats were further reinforced by receiving food. This is because food is always a good motivator for animals. Thorndike discovered that although the cats may have done something on accident the first time, they learned to realize what it was that was triggering the opening of the box and the delivery of food. Eventually the time of escape when put back in the box became shorter and shorter until they could escape almost immediately after being put in it.

Thorndike’s most memorable contribution to psychology was “The Law of Effect.” This is an idea that he came up with during his puzzle box studies with cats. The Law of Effect basically states that if an action is followed by something positive, then those two things will become associated. The more often that this happens the stronger the association will become, and similar actions that did not receive positive reinforcement, or received punishment, will be forgotten. He also reported a similar idea that he called “The Law of Exercise,” which stated that the more often something is done that receives reinforcement, the faster and easier the task will become because of the incentive for the reward. Thorndike was also known for his connection to the school of thought known as functionalism. He is also sometimes referred to as “the father of modern day educational psychology.”

http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/behavioral-theory-thorndike-and-the-law-of-effect.html#lesson
I used this video, well as much of it as I could before it asked me to sign up, because it very simply explained Thorndike’s use of puzzle boxes.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesmz/p/edward-thorndike.htm
This site gave a nice biography of Thorndike.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/thorndike.htm
This site talked about both Thorndike’s personal life and achievements in the realm of psychology.

1a) State what your topic is.
Social Darwinism

1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
Social Darwinism is based off Spencer’s functionalist view that was discussed in the chapter.

1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
How society operates is interesting to me. I like to see how one idea can affect an entire population, and Social Darwinism did that.

The term Social Darwinism was coined by Joseph Fisher and later by supported by Herbert Spencer during the 19th century in reaction to the political, economic, and social problems that were occurring at the time. “Only the strong survive” was the basic principle of the concept, the strong being the white Europeans. The “weak” were not to be assisted in any way in the fear that they would reproduce and create weak offspring. Welfare would be considered unacceptable because it would help the people that were struggling Although it is said that Social Darwinism can be connected to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and Natural Selection, that’s not entirely true. Although there are some things that are similar, but Darwin’s theory did not cover any economic or social issues. Social Darwinism was used to support quite a few movements, one of them being the Holocaust. It was said that the Nazis were trying to get rid of the Jews because they were an inferior group. I don’t believe their actions can be at all justified just because Social Darwinism said survival of the fittest was the way to go.

http://www.allaboutscience.org/what-is-social-darwinism-faq.htm
This site explained Social Darwinism very well and talked about how it was connected to the different issues of the time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism
Wikipedia held information about how Social Darwinism was connected to Nazi Germany.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/darwin/nameof/
This site has useful information about how Social Darwinism started.

1a) State what your topic is.
Progressive Education

1b) Discuss how the topic relates to the chapter.
This chapter is about the emergence of fundamentalism. Ideas coming about during this time that influenced fundamentalism also influenced progressive education. John Dewey, who is credited with his version of the Reflex Arc which was a major influence in fundamentalism, also played a major part in progressive education.

1c) Discuss why you are interested in it.
As an education major, I am interested in what progressive education entails. Understanding what this entails will help me understand historical psychology better, but the history of education as well.

2) 1880-1920 was known as the Progressive Era of Education. America had transitioned from an agrarian to mainly industrial and urbanized society. Because children were spending less time working in the fields, more time was left for education and this became more of a focus. During this time, the middle class was growing, America was expanding global trade, utilizing the transcontinental railroad and market, and making itself a strong competitor against the European colonial powers. This was a time of rapid industrialization, and a rapidly changing society. Schools were much more diverse educating not only American students, but also Germans, Latin Americans, Chinese, etc. Because of the rapid changes and diverse population of the times, people had two main concerns: Once again, how to maintain the viability of American Democracy, and how to create a national identity out of an increasingly diverse population? It was apparent that institutions needed to reform in order to adapt to a new era, but philosophies on how to reform varied between two major ideologies: The Right Progressives and the Left Progressives. The Right Progressives were the democratic nobility. They supported principles of Darwinism and believed that the elite should attend institutions, and the rest should attend some sort of industry school. The Left Progressives believed that public institutions could be used as a way to improve social justice, and as a tool for social engineering. This idea sounds very familiar to Horace Mann’s view on education during the Early Republic. John Dewey was known as the, “Father of Progressivism”. In Dewey’s piece titled My Pedagogic Creed he states , “Education… must begin with a psychological insight into the child's capacities, interests, and habits… These powers, interests, and habits must be continually interpreted - we must know what they mean. They must be translated into terms of their social equivalents - into terms of what they are capable of in the way of social service”. This highly influenced the school system of the time, which focused on realistic application of content, critical thinking, experiential and cooperative learning, and a child-centered curriculum. Unions and tenure was also introduced during this time to support teachers and their rights. This also emphasizes the democratic versus economic view of education during this time.

http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/progressive-era#Education-Reform (Information about what was going on during this time period. I chose this because not only did it have good information about education during this time, but a little backround info about other things as well.)

http://www.slideshare.net/pricekwarhawk/the-progressive-era-of-education (Specific info about progressive education. I used this source because it had a lot of great information about progressive educaiton)

http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.htm (quote from John Dewey. I thought this would be a good source because he was known as the father of progressive education and this piece of his was very influential to progressive educaiton)

The topic I chose from chapter 7 is Edward Thorndike and trial by error.

Chapter 7 was all about structuralism and functionalism. One of those functionalist that they talked about in the chapter was Edward Thorndike and connectionism. Functionalists were more focused on the functions of consciousness rather than its structure like the beliefs held by those in structuralism.

I chose to study Edward Thorndike because he was a very prominent functionalist who believed that learning through trial and error was better than relying on anecdotal evidence. I think one of the biggest ways I have learned most the information I have absorbed over the years was through trial and error and I was fascinated to find out the individual who created this theory.

Edward Thorndike was considered a functionalist but more importantly he is also known as the father of modern educational psychology. His most prominent work stemmed around animal research as well as trial and error theory of learning. Thorndike’s best known theory contains three laws the first is the law of effect. This theory came out of his research on cats and how they learned to escape from puzzle boxes. Essentially the law of effect says that satisfaction must come immediately after a successful response, otherwise the desired response will not sink in. The second law is the law of readiness which means that interference in someone who is going to perform an act causes that subject to become annoyed and making someone perform an act they don’t want to but is forced to makes that subject annoyed as well. The third law is the law of exercise which simply put means we learn by continuously doing something through repetition, but we forget to do something when we no longer continue to do it. He also found out that rewards are much more effective motivators than punishment. Edward was a major figure in the theory of active learning which emphasizes letting children learn themselves instead of instruction from teachers.

http://www.child-development-guide.com/edward-thorndike.html
I used this website to gather information on the three primary laws of Thorndike’s theory.

http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesmz/p/edward-thorndike.htm
I used this website to gather information on the cat experiments that created his theory.

http://www.instructionaldesign.org/theories/connectionism.html
I used this website to gather information on Thorndike’s connectionism theory and what its comprised of.

The topic the I have chosen to write this essay about is Edward Thorndike, and his work with comparative psychology. This is related to chapter 7, because Thorndike has a whole section written about him in this chapter and the things that he did for comparative psychology. The book even says that Thorndike's discoveries link past comparative psychologists with future ones, such as Pavlov and Watson. The reason I am interested in Thorndike, and his work with comparative psychology, is because I find his work very entertaining. Anytime I am able to relate studies to animals and actually see the physical things being done, and discoveries being made, it helps me to learn it better, because it makes more sense and gives me a visual.
The three aspects that I am going to be talking about in this essay are his research with mazes and baby chicks, his research with cats in puzzle boxes, and lastly about what kind of discoveries he made from these experiments.
The experiment that Thorndike did with baby chicks was one of the first experiments he did while he was still at Harvard. He had just recently became very interested in comparative psychology and wanted to conduct an experiment to see if animals could learn with experience. Thorndike stood textbooks up vertically, and created a maze out of them. Then he would place recently hatched chicks into the maze to see if they could find their way out. He did indeed find that the chicks with more experience were able to find their way out faster. However, he didn't do much more research with chicks than that, because he was kind of poor, and when Cattell offered him a fellowship at Colombia, he had to take the offer and move there. His research in comparative psychology was not done at Harvard though. Thorndike moved into bigger and better things that helped him make an impact in psychology, such as cats in puzzle boxes.
After Thorndike's research with the baby chicks, he moved over to cats in puzzle boxes. What he did, was build boxes that were 20 inches long by 15 inches wide by 12 inches tall. These boxes had a door attached to them that was able to open by a pulley and a string. This door would open when a button would be pushed or a lever would be pulled inside the box. Thorndike would place that cats inside these boxes, and see how long it took the cats to get out. He then would record the times in a graph, and called it a learning curve, because that is kind of what the data would show, is an S curve. At first the cats would be very agitated and wouldn't have any idea how to get out of the box. Then, by accident, the cat would step on the button that opened the door, and they would get out. Each time they went in the box from there on out, they would find the button and get out a little bit quicker and quicker, until finally it would taper off.
Thorndike had gotten similar results for both experiments. He hypothesized that the animals would be able to learn by observation, and eventually pick up on what other cats or other chicks were doing, and then would be able to get out of the maze or box faster. That isn't the results he found though. The time was no faster if the cat was just put in the box, compared to a cat that had been watching another cat in the box. So, this lead Thorndike to come up with a different type of learning, and that is called trial-and-error learning, or connectionism. This means that the cats had learned to make connections between stimuli in the boxes and successful escape responses during the experiments. So, from trial to trial, unsuccessful behaviors drop out, and the successful ones are strengthened. So, Thorndike concluded that rather than animals mainly learning from observations, they tend to learn more from trial and error, and he had graphs and data to support this.
After Thorndike was able to find out that animals were able to learn from trial and error, and due to connections they made between stimuli and successful escapes, he was able to come up with the law of effect. This obviously just doesn't apply to animals either. He was able to use animal research to help create a law that was completely relevant for humans too. This law of effect stated that any behavior that is followed by a good consequence is going to be repeated, and any behavior that is followed by a negative consequence is going to be stopped. This was a big discovery in psychology, and helped lead to many other ways that comparative psychology could be used to help us learn more about our human ways.
http://peace.saumag.edu/faculty/kardas/Courses/HP/Lectures/thorndike.html
I used this website to give me more information on the research that Thorndike did with the mazes and chicks experiment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Thorndike
I used this website to give me more information on the cats in the puzzle boxes, and how exactly that experiment was conducted, and the results he got from it.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/edward-thorndike.html
I used this website to give me more information on the law of effect, and what Thorndike had discovered.
Terms: Edward Thorndike, trial and error learning, connectionism, law of effect, Watson, Pavlov, Puzzle boxes, Maze, comparative psychology, learning curve

1) For this assignment, I decided to do more research on Thorndike and his research involving trail and error learning. Thorndike was talked about during a portion of the chapter and I wanted to learn about his work in more detail rather than just knowing the surface information.
2) The three aspects of the topic I am going to talk about for this assignment are Thorndike’s background, his experiment and research, and his contribution to psychology.
3) Thorndike is a very common name within psychology and his research and findings are still being used today. Despite learning about him numerous times throughout my education, I realized I knew very little about his background before psychology. Edward grew up in Massachusetts and his father was a minister. He was not really interested in psychology until he read the classic book The Principles of Psychology by William James. However, Thorndike did not pursue psychology until he was enrolled at Harvard where he was earning his master’s degree in English and French literature. It was there that he took a psychology course that was taught by none other than William James. After that course Edward decided to switch his program and began to concentration on psychology. He graduated and then became a psychology professor at the Teachers College at Columbia University.
It was at Columbia University that he began researching and developing his theories. He is most famous for developing the puzzle boxes in which he observed how cats were able to develop strategies and get out of the boxes. He conducted multiplied studies in order to test his theories surrounding behavior. With all of his work and theories, he became very strongly associated with functionalism. Throughout his work, Thorndike made one of the most ground breaking observations within psychology that changed the field forever. He realized that behavior was influenced by not only stimuli and responses being associated, but it was influenced significantly by being modified by consequences. This was a big break through and people began to realize that one limits ineffective action through learning from previous behaviors.
Because of his ground breaking research, Thorndike is considered the father of modern education psychology. Along with that, he is credited for the development of behaviorism and the law of effect which are both still used constantly and widely credited in the field today. Edward had a very important role in psychology and was one of the first people to noticed that behavior is something that can manipulated in, not only animals, but humans. His work has sparked and inspired countless studies and theories within the field and can be seen as one of the major building blocks for psychology.
4) URLs Used:
http://www.simplypsychology.org/edward-thorndike.html
This website gave me great information on Thorndike’s contributions to psychology and his experiments. It also expanded on how exactly his findings impacted the field and is still seen in the current day.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesal/p/james-mckeen-cattell.htm
The website listed above is where I got the information about Thorndike’s background and what sparked his interested in psychology. It also gave me some information on his contributions to the field of psychology.
https://www.boundless.com/psychology/textbooks/boundless-psychology-textbook/learning-7/operant-conditioning-47/basic-principles-of-operant-conditioning-thorndike-s-law-of-effect-196-12731/
My final website provided information on his research and its contributions to the field of psychology. It gave me good insight into what exactly he was looking for with watching the cats navigate his puzzle boxes.
5) Terminology Used: Thorndike, trail and error learning, puzzle boxes, William James, functionalism, behavior, stimuli, response, consequences, education psychology, behaviorism, law of effect,

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
My topic for this week is Edward Thorndike. He fits into the chapter because he was a famous functionalist. He was the one that studied cats in puzzle boxes and how long it took them to escape. I am interested in Eduard Thorndike because of his experiments with the puzzle boxes. I found his experiment interesting both because of what he did and because of the results that he obtained. I want to learn more about his theory of trial and error learning and his theory of connectionism.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
I will talk about Edward Thorndike’s life, his theories, and his contributions to psychology.
3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
Edward Thorndike was born in Williamsburg, Massachusetts. Edward Thorndike became interested in psychology after reading William James’ book. After graduating from Weslyan University he enrolled in Harvard so that he could study with James. While at Harvard he was interested in how animals learned. He did study’s with chicks in mazes. He wanted to see how long it would take the chick to learn the maze. Some of the mazes were easy and some were more elaborate. He noticed that after a few trials the chicks became better at learning how to escape from the maze. After Thorndike graduated he went to Columbia University to complete his PhD with Cattell. IN 1899 he became a professor at Columbia University. While at Columbia he was interested in studying human learning, education, and mental testing. In 1912 Thorndike was recognized for his theories and was elected president of the American Psychological Association.
Edward Thorndike was thought to be the father of modern educational psychology. He was interested in how animals learned new responses. Edward Thorndike did his most famous experiment with cats. He would place the cats into these boxes that he created. The boxes were called puzzle boxes because the cat would have to solve the problem to be able to escape from the box. So what he did was place a hungry cat into the box and he would time it to see how long it took the cat to escape the box. After the cat would escape the box he would give it food as a reward. Even if the cat would escape on accident he would still give it food to condition the response. After the cat would escape he would then put them back into the box and see if their time would improve. He found that as the cat was put in the same box it would learn how to get out to get to the food. While he was conducting this experiment Thorndike realized that the cats were using trial and error learning. They would try one thing and if it didn’t work they would try another. From this theory he came up with his theory of connectionism. He thought that from one trial to the next the unsuccessful attempts of the cat would drop out because they were not reinforced, and the successful attempts would be strengthened because they were rewarded. From his experiment with the puzzle boxes he developed laws of learning. The two laws that resulted from this experiment were the law of exercise and the law of effect. The law of exercise states that the more that you perform a task the more likely it is to continue. The law of effect says that when you are rewarded for the task it is strengthened and likely to continue. These weren’t his only laws of learning that he would develop. He would develop more later in his career. Thorndike was interested in how learning occurred, so that he could help develop a curriculum in school that would facilitate learning. One of his other important laws of learning is the law of readiness. The law of readiness says that if a child is ready to learn the experiences will be positive and will produce greater learning. I think this is one of his important laws because if a child isn’t ready to learn a specific task the learning won’t be positive and the child won’t want to continue learning. I think because of Thorndike we have a curriculum in schools today where tasks start out easy and we are reward for successful and unsuccessful attempts at first, but as we learn and improve we get to the more complex subjects and they build off of the easier subjects learned earlier in life.
Thorndike contributed a lot to psychology. He was one of the first psychologists interested with educational psychology. His laws of learning helped to develop curriculum in schools that facilitated learning. His studies with the cats and puzzle boxes would lead him to develop his theory of law and effect. The theory of law and effect stated that if we receive a reward our responses are strengthened if no reward is received then the results weaken. This theory would lay the ground for B.F. Skinners research. Thorndike’s research not only influenced Skinner but many other psychologists for his time. Without Thorndike the field of psychology and the way schools teach may have been different.
4) Finally, at the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Thorndike this site helped with his life and his contributions to psychology.
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/thorndike.htm this site helped with his life and his studies with puzzle boxes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEKM51c3lys this site helped with his life and with his laws of learning.

-Edward Thorndike, functionalism, puzzle boxes, trial and error learning, connectionism, William James, Cattell, American Psychological Association, Laws of learning, Law of readiness, law of exercise, and law of effect.

1) I decided to choose the topic of Edward Thorndike and some of his contributions to psychology. This fit in with the chapter because Thorndike was mentioned and some of his research was discussed. I am interesting in this because I find psychological testing to be interesting and I thought it was cool how he used cats to test this research.

2) Three topics I want to talk about for this assignment are a little about Thorndike, his research with cats and puzzle boxes, as well trial and error.

3) Edward Thorndike is most well known for his research on educational psychology and testing of this. Often, he is known as the father of educational psychology. Along with this, Thorndike was actually a psychologist to study operant conditioning and Skinner built off some of his ideas, even though Skinner seems to be the most well known for this. Thorndike was also known to be a part of the functionalism side of psychology. Another aspect of Thorndike was his use of animal research, making him a part of comparative psychology as well. Thorndike studied with William James and also proposed two laws based off of his research. One of Thorndike's main and most well known research studies involved animals in puzzle boxes. Thorndike first began with baby chicks. He placed these chicks in mazes and tried to get them to find the exit of the maze. The chicks did not do well at first. They simply jumped and made noise, trying to get out. However, after a few times of trying the chicks seemed to figure out how to get out of the maze. Next, Thorndike decided to try this experiment with cats. He used 13 different cats in these boxes. Thorndike placed food outside of the box where the cats could see and the way to open the box was for the cats to find the lever and push on it to get out. In the beginning the cats seemed to just behave sporadically and did not know what to do. They would scratch at the cage or bite it in an attempt to escape. However, at some point the cat would figure out how to get out (generally by accident). After time, the cat would figure out that the lever was the way to get out and every time the cat was put in the box they would know how to escape. This led Thorndike to his ideas on trial and error learning. Thorndike believed that these cats learned to make connections about escaping and figured out how to escape. A few aspects of trial and error learning involve it being a gradual process. Like with the cats, they did not learn immediately what to do after one time of being in the box. The process was learned over time after trying multiple things and failing before finding one that worked. Another aspect of this process is that the learner must be motivated to succeed. If the cat did not have food outside the box it may not care about escaping. In this case, trial and error learning likely would not occur. Thorndike also said that the error responses and not escaping would start happening less often once they figured out how to escape. Also, the time it takes the cat to complete the task will decrease as well because they have learned how to do it quickly after multiple trials. This led Thorndike to come up with the law of effect which said that behaviors that result in good outcomes will likely to be repeated but when behaviors have bad outcomes they are less likely to be repeated. This information also led to the law of exercise. This law stated that the connection between a stimulus and response would strengthen with practice. This also goes with what Skinner thought about operant conditioning as well. Thorndike also applied this research to humans as well. He said that there were three areas of intellectual development. These areas were social intelligence, abstract intelligence, and mechanical intelligence. Much of Thorndike's work led to advances in education and psychology. Thorndike is well known for his contributions to psychology.

4) http://teachertraineeaide.blogspot.com/2013/05/behaviourist-thoery-thorndikes-theory.html - this website helped talk a lot about Thorndike's work with cats and puzzles boxes and also a lot about what trial and error learning features were.

http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/thorndike.htm - This website also helped contribute to more about Thorndike and a little extra on his research with the puzzle boxes as well.

http://www.intropsych.com/ch08_animals/thorndikes_puzzle_box.html - This website helped with these combined as well and showed examples of what the puzzle box looked like and more on how it worked.

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
My topic is Edward Thorndike. This fit in with what we read because he was discussed toward the end of the chapter. I am interested in Thorndike and his studies because I have always enjoyed learning about different ways of learning and the theories behind it.

2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
The three aspects I would like to talk about are Thorndike’s background, the theories/laws of learning, and the puzzle box created by Thorndike.

3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
Edward Thorndike graduated in 1895. He studied animal behavior and the process of learning. When put together these two concepts led to the development of connectionism. This is when a certain behavior becomes connected/associated with a certain stimuli through the process of trial and error. He first proposed the law of effect and the law of exercise in his dissertation which was later published in 1911 and called Animal Intelligence. He stated that with these two laws it would be possible to predict the behavior of animals and humans. Thorndike was one of the first psychologists to study animals learning in a laboratory.
There are a total of 5 laws of learning, law of effect, law of exercise, law of primacy, law of intensity, and law of recency. The law of effect states that learning is strengthened when a pleasant outcome is associated with the behavior. This also works in reverse. Learning with be weakened when there is an undesirable outcome associated with the behavior. The law of exercise states that repetition is key to the learning process. The more a person does a behavior the more likely that it will be remembered. The law of primacy states that things that are first are more easily remembered. For example, you are less likely to forget the first thing on your shopping list compared to the 5th thing. The law of intensity states the the more exciting and real the stimulus is the more likely the behavior will be learned better. And lastly, the law of recency states that that the last thing that was learned will be the easiest to remember. For example in the grocery list example, it will also be much easier to remember the items at the end of the list rather than those that are in the middle.
Thorndike discovered the law of effect and the law of exercise using something the called the puzzle box. His experiment was done by placing a cat in the puzzle box. The door was held shut by a simple latch. He then placed a small piece of fish outside of the door. The cat sees/smells the fish and tries to reach through the bars to get the fish, but it does not work. The cat then decides to scratch at the door, once again it does not free the cat. Now the cat begins to move around the box. It bumps the latch and run to the fish. Thorndike then places the cat back in the box shuts, the door, and places new piece of fish by the box. Through the process of trial and error the cat quickly learns how to get out of the box in order to to obtain the piece of fish.

3) At the end, please include working URLs for the three websites.

http://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-L-Thorndike → This site gave me good information about Thorndike’s background

http://www.drillpad.net/DP_IRL_Laws.htm → This site had good information about the 5 laws of learning

http://www1.appstate.edu/~beckhp/puzzlebox.htm → This site had a lot detail information about the puzzle box experiment

Terms: Edward Thorndike, trial and error, law or effect, law or exercise, law of recency, law of primacy, law of intensity, behavior, connectionism, puzzle box, process of learning

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
I chose E.B. Titchener, of whom we read about in this chapter, and I am interested in him because I wrote my reading assignment over Structuralism and he was a main character involved with it.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
I am going to discuss his life, his accomplishments, and the role he played in structuralism.
3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
Edward Bradford Titchener was born in 1867 in England. He attended The Prebendal School and Malvern College and then went on to Oxford from 1885 to 1890. When he was at Oxford he began to read the works of Wilhelm Wundt. He then went on to Germany to study with Wundt, completed his doctoral program, and went on to take a position as a professor at Cornell University where he taught his view on the ideas of Wundt to his students in the form of structuralism. After coming to America, he broke away from many of Wundt's theories when Titchener founded the structuralism 'school of thought.' Where Wundt was concerned with studying consciousness, Titchener simply wanted to describe an individual's current thoughts at any point in time. Titchener believed that all thoughts can be broken down to basic elements, and more specifically, sensations. Titchener would say that when you identified the object, you put together memories of sensations from your past (color, shape, texture, smell, and taste).
Beginning in 1898, Titchener was the main contributor to structural psychology, which deals with the components and arrangement of mental states and processes. During his studies, he translated 11 German works, including titles by Wundt and Oswald Külpe. He personally wrote eight works, many of which went through several revised editions and were translated into a number of languages. By far the most important was Experimental Psychology, 4 vol. (1901–05), consisting of two student manuals and two teachers’ manuals. It was used to train students in the laboratory method and the manuals were patterned on those used in qualitative and quantitative experiments in chemistry.
Among Titchener’s other works was A Textbook of Psychology, a comprehensive, yet concise, exposition of his psychology. Though a charter member of the American Psychological Association in 1892, he did not remain with it for long. In 1904 he founded the Society of Experimental Psychologists.

4) Finally, at the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
Next make list of the terms and terminology you used in your post.
structuralism
Edward Bradford Titchener
Wilhelm Wundt
school of thought

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_B._Titchener
I used this site to learn more about his personal life and education.

http://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-Bradford-Titchener

I used this site to learn about his accomplishments.

http://study.com/academy/lesson/edward-titchener-psychology-contributions-lesson-quiz.html

I used this site to explain his involvement with structuralism.

I chose to talk about E. B. Titchener. I found him interesting because he only really cared about the "normal" adults mind. I think it's interesting that he only wanted to study the general adult mind because I feel like our society is so interested in learning about the different types of minds that there are, not "typical" people.

Three aspects I will be talking about are a little bit of background on Titchener, his research on elementary mental processes, and his contributions.

Titchener was raised by his grandfather, for the most part, and though he lived in America for many years, he still continued his proper middle-class English gentleman behavior. He was extremely good in school, and he took control of his learning when he realized he had a "weak" background in science. He was very intent on detailed work and began to judge people based on their lab experience. After completing his doctorate, he went to teach at Cornell University, as the other choices of his weren't interested in new psychology. From then on, he was prominent figure in structural psychology.
Titchener discovered three types of mental processes, which are sensations, images, and affects. Sensations are basic perceptions, images are the components of ideas, and affects were the building blocks to our emotions. Each of these processes have different features which include: quality, intensity, duration, and clearness. He later shifted his focus from being observable to classificatory.
Since he was so interested in the generalized adult mind, Titchener contributed information to psychology that was hard to replicate to others when research was done on just random people. He was also a major figure in the structural area of psychology and found the experimentalists, which continued studies after he was gone.

http://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-Bradford-Titchener - I chose think website because it condensed what the book said about Titchener into a few paragraphs, so I could better summarize his background.
https://quizlet.com/52794555/titcheners-structural-elements-of-human-conscious-experience-flash-cards/ - This website helped me with the different definitions of the mental processes, which is why I included it.
http://www.geniusrevive.com/en/component/sobipro/195-edward-titchener.html?Itemid=0 - This website listed more of his contributions to psychology.

Terms: Titchener, structuralism, elementary mental processes, experimentalists

What we would like you to do is to find a topic from what we have covered in this week's readings that you are interested in and search the internet for material on that topic. You might, for example, find people who are doing research on the topic, you might find web pages that discuss the topic, you might find youtube clips that demonstrates something related to the topic, etc. What you find and use is pretty much up to you at this point. But use at least 3 sources (only one video please and make sure it adds to the topic).
1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
My topic is Titchener. It seemed as if he was brought up really often throughout this chapter and his discoveries are something that are worth noting
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
• Titchener’s life
• Structuralism
• Functionalism
3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
Edward Titchener studied at Oxford originally focusing on biology. Soon after he changed his mind and started to study comparative psychology. He graduated from Oxford in 1890 and started to study with Wundt in Germany. He eventually earned his Ph. D. He took a job at Cornell being a professor of psychology in New York. This is where he developed structuralism. He believed that all thoughts could get broken into sensations. Structuralism didn’t last long after his death. He claimed that when you piece together sensations from past experiences when identifying an object. Functionalism was formed after as a reaction to his theory. It worked to explain the mental processes in a more accurate structure. Instead of focusing on consciousness, functionalists looked at the purpose of consciousness and the behaviors included. It also worked to show individual differences. He advocated that psychology was a science since science deals with facts not theories.
4) Finally, at the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesmz/p/edward-titchener.htm
This website gave me a short biography on Titchener. It talked about his early life as well which made it easier for me to understand where he was coming from. It allowed me to see if his earlier life made any difference in how got to his accomplishments.
http://study.com/academy/lesson/edward-titchener-psychology-contributions-lesson-quiz.html
This website told me a lot about how he developed his structuralism theory. It went on in further detail about it than the book did.
http://psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychology/a/structuralism.htm
This website gave me a little more detail on the structuralism theory. It also is where I got information about Titchener’s Functionalism Theory.
Next make list of the terms and terminology you used in your post.
• Titchener’s life
• Structuralism
• Functionalism
• comparative psychology

This week I chose to research John Dewey and a few of the many contributions her made to the world during his time. He was an important part of this chapter as he is often considered the one who got the functionalist approach to psychology off the ground. However, as the chapter briefly mentions, John Dewey had many other contributions which I wanted to research. First, I found his background rather interesting as he was influenced by a variety of people and ideas in his time. These people and theories would go on to contribute to his own personal ideas, so I think it is worth discussing this background first. I would then like to discuss two additional concepts which Dewey took great interest in. He was first and foremost a philosopher, so I decided it would be important to look further into his philosophical ideas which I will relate here. As mentioned in our text, Dewey was also a significant contributor to education, so I found it worthwhile to study this contribution of his as well.

John Dewey was heavily influenced by the environment and those around him as he began formulating his own theories later in life. He was born in Vermont in 1859 and would come to receive a degree from the University of Vermont. It was during his college education that he came into contact with many ideas which would be very important later on. It was in college that Dewey was first exposed to the idea of evolution and natural selection. He readily took to these ideas, contending that life was not stuck in one place but was constantly adapting. This idea alone would influence both his philosophical views and educational theories later in life as he argued that the importance of the interaction between humans and their environment was of utmost importance. After he graduated from the University of Vermont, Dewey taught in a high school. It was during this time as a teacher that he found his passion for philosophy. After just two years of teaching, Dewey decided to study the topic further; he enrolled at John Hopkins University. Here he met a man which has also been discussed in our text: G. Stanley Hall. This man was an experimental psychologist and instilled in Dewey the importance of scientific study in all areas of human nature. After completing his doctorate, John married his first wife, Alice Chapman who would also come to heavily influence Dewey’s work. Dewey was a thinker at heart, but Alice constantly encouraged him to test his theories in the real world. Additionally, the children they had together would come to play a large role in Dewey’s contributions to education. After marrying his wife, Dewey spent 10 years at the University of Michigan and then accepted a position at the University of Chicago which was one of two centers associated with functionalism as mentioned in our text. It was here that Dewey made his most important contributions to the field of education. From the University of Chicago, Dewey moved on to Columbia until his retirement in 1930. During his time at Columbia and for years afterwards, Dewey continued to develop his philosophical theories and became an important national figure on many different ideas until his death in 1952.

One of the key ideas which helps to understand John Dewey’s contributions to psychology as discussed in the textbook and to other areas is the position he held in philosophy. Above all else, Dewey was a philosopher and often held that his theories in this area influenced all of his other contributions. Dewey went against much of the traditional philosophical world in that he rejected the idea that the human body and mind were static or unchangeable. Instead, Dewey took to the beliefs held by Darwin, that nature was constantly changing organisms including human beings themselves. He took a pragmatic view of the world much like his contemporaries. He developed a metaphysics which looked at the attributes of nature which affect human experience and thus cause adaptations. He called these characteristics precarious, histories, and ends. He defined precarious events as anything which makes the human experience more difficult, that is, any obstacle, danger, surprise, etc which the human being must then figure out how to navigate or adapt to. A history, as described by Dewey, was a process of change with a known outcome. Knowing the process and the outcome is important as one can then modify the process to produce a desired outcome. This meant that “no person’s fate is sealed.” It was the idea of histories which came to be extremely applicable to Dewey’s development of his approach to education. The final characteristic Dewey mentions is ends or goods, which is the deliberate outcome of a history. He did not believe in an absolute good, instead Dewey argued that any end which promoted human existence, taking into account precarious events, was a good. Thus, there is a course which produces a certain outcome. Precarious events can interrupt this course and it is up to us to develop a solution by reanalyzing the now changed course and adjusting to produce the originally desired outcome. By adapting to these precarious events, Dewey said that one obtains knowledge. In John Dewey’s mind, ideas played a key role in getting around such events. Through active participation in the events in our lives, we develop ideas which are instruments to help give us a better sense of the world. Therefore, it is not surprising that Dewey called his philosophy instrumentalism. Dewey believed that ideas were simply a way for humans to direct the course of their lives for the betterment of human existence.

One application of Dewey’s philosophical ideas was in the area of education. He was, and continues to be, a very prominent figure in the progressive education movement. He saw education as a manifestation of the larger society, one in which an individual must adapt to the precarious events they experience through the use of ideas. Thus, he maintained that children should learn in a community through experience with a variety of ideas. He established a school at the University of Chicago which he used to test his pedagogical ideas in an actually classroom environment. There were many practical classes including cooking, sewing, and carpentry which taught the kids basic lessons as well as practical ones they could then employ when they entered society. However, many objected to this form of teaching noting that basic skills such as times tables and reading were neglected in favor of more specific real-world skills. In reality, it is a balance between first-hand experience in a group setting and individual learning which contributes best to the education of our youth.

It is clear that John Dewey had a variety of influences which would later contribute to his theories in a variety of areas. He was very influential in psychology, but he was also a substantial individual in the areas of philosophy and education. He brought popularity to the functionalists which also establishing his own philosophical idea of instrumentalism and advancing progressive education. This man is one to remember going forward!

http://www.iep.utm.edu/dewey/
This website provided great background information on John Dewey as well as detailed information on his main contributions.

https://www.ait.net/technos/tq_09/4eakin.php
Dewey’s influence on education was the main topic of this website, but I was also able to gain some valuable information on his mentors.

http://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Dewey
This website gave supplemental information again on Dewey’s background as well as key information on his philosophical ideas and contributions to education.

Terminology: John Dewey, evolution, natural selection, functionalism, instrumentalism, progressive education, G. Stanley Hall, experimental psychology, pragmatism, pedagogy

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.
My topic for chapter 7 is Dewey's reflexive arch. This is related to the chapter because Dewey changed his theory from being a functional for a structural approach which are two themes of the chapter.
2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
I would like to first address what reflexive arch is, next I would like to discuss how Dewy changed his theory to structuralist, and finally the experiments surrounding the reflexive arch.
3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.
The reflexive arch as it was originally understood that there would be a response that was separated from a stimulus. This theory was said to have been the "staple for functionalism and then later contributing to social behavioralism. To understand what the actual act of reflexive arch is you can look at an experiment done with a hot object, when a person reaches out and grabs the object the pull away from the object. Their nerves send a message so that the negative stimulus can be stopped. The message is carried to the efferent neuron, and then to the afferent neuron and in my research interestingly enough avoids voluntary parts of the brain because it would take to long for a person to respond. It is easy to see from this example how it relates to functionalism, a persons mind or psyche is constantly trying to change and adapt to the environment that it is around. An example given in the text is a child reaching out and touching a candle and the reaction they have by moving their arm away from it. A final example is the knee jerk This like the hot object allows us to see how one can adapt. Though Functionalism was a growing field Dewey resorted to a structuralism approach that the experience adapted the mind. Dewey challenged the ideas that Wundt and Titchener had (they are talked a lot about in our chapter) he believed they they has made the human mind out to be a little to simple, thus the idea of functionalism started. Many works that I read credited this theory as the start of the functionalist school.
4) Finally, at the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post
https://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Dewey/Dewey_1896.html
I used this website to create a ground work for the contributions to psychology and what role it plays in psychology today which I feel is important to understanding the history of psychology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW3ANs1HYNM
I used this video to see an example of reflexive arch, and also an experiment that was done.
http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/184/John-Dewey.html
I used this article to see who and how Dewey was influenced

1) The topic I chose for this week’s topical blog is the psychologist Edward Lee Thorndike and all of his contributions to the field. This relates to the sections that we read because one of the chapters was completely about Thorndike and his experiments with cats finding their way out of a puzzle box that he created. The reason why I chose this topic is because I had learned a little bit about Thorndike and his experiments in my high school psychology class, but we didn’t really go that much into detail on him. I think that his work is fascinating and really added a lot to how we study psychology today. Even just the one experiment with a cat escaping from a puzzle box helped change and shape the way that we understand how people and animals learn behaviors that have consequences to them.

2) The three aspects I am going to talk about for this blog are Thorndike’s puzzle box experiment, Thorndike’s law of effect, and Thorndike’s overall contributions to psychology. These all relate to each other and shows how we learn from the past and add onto what we already know. All three are relevant to understanding how the mind works, how psychology has come a long way, and in turn how it adds to why we study history

3) Thorndike's experiment on cats escaping from a puzzle box was very simple to setup and test. . A hungry cat was confined in a puzzle box while a dish of food was put right outside. The cat, in the box had to pull a string in order to come out of the box. The cat in the box made several random movements until at last it succeeded in pulling the string. The door of the puzzle box opened and the cat was able to come out and eat the food. Right away, Thorndike put the cat back into the puzzle box for the next trial. The cat again made random behaviors, but again succeeded in pulling the string. After being repeated for several times, Thorndike noticed that as the repetition increased the error then reduced. And the cat showed slow, gradual and continuous improvement in its performance over successive trials. He concluded that the cat’s learning in the puzzle box can be explained in terms of relationships between stimulus and response.
One of the main ideas that Thorndike observed in his experiments with his puzzle box was his law of effect. According to the law of effect, responses that are immediately followed by a satisfactory outcome become more strongly associated with the situation and are therefore more likely to occur again in the future. Conversely, responses followed by negative outcomes become more weakly associated and less likely to re-occur in the future. The law of effect was one of the three laws of learning that Thorndike developed. The other two laws of learning are the law of readiness and the law of exercise. The law of readiness implies a degree of concentration and eagerness. Individuals learn best when they are physically, mentally, and emotionally ready to learn, and do not learn well if they see no reason for learning. The law of exercise states that those things most often repeated are best remembered. It is the basis of drill and practice. It is clear that practice leads to improvement only when it is followed by positive feedback. While Thorndike only came up with three laws of learning, he got things started and others added onto the idea with more principles.
During his experiments, Thorndike also realized the concept of trial and error as a way of learning. Some of the features of trial and error are: learning by trial and error is gradual process; in order for learning to occur, the learner must be definitely motivated; the learner makes random and variable response; some responses do not lead to the goal while some responses do lead to the goal; with the increase in number of trials the annoying responses will tend to be eliminated and the satisfying responses will be strengthened and repeated; the time taken to perform the task decreases with successive trials.
Some other contributions that Thorndike made to psychology is that he made an important distinction among three broad classes of intellectual functioning. Standard intelligence tests measured only abstract intelligence. Also important were mechanical intelligence - the ability to visualize relationships among objects and understand how the physical world worked, and social intelligence - the ability to function successfully in interpersonal situations. Thorndike added a lot to psychology and especially the field of functionalism and connectionism. He added a lot to psychology’s history and helped us come up with the views and ideas that we have today.

4) Links: http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesmz/p/edward-thorndike.htm
this link helped me understand Thorndike’s work and theories and overall contributions to psychology
http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/ethorndike.shtml
this link helped me understand more about Thorndike’s ideas and especially his work with human intelligence
http://teachertraineeaide.blogspot.com/2013/05/behaviourist-thoery-thorndikes-theory.html
this link helped me understand about his puzzle box experiment and how he came up with trial and error and his law of effect along with the other laws of learning

Terms: Edward Thorndike, puzzle box experiment, behaviors, consequences, law of effect, laws of learning, law of readiness, law of exercise, trial and error, functionalism, connectionism

1)
-The topic I have selected is on Edward Thorndike. He fits in with chapter seven since he was one of the famous functionalists, and structuralism and functionalism is the main topic of this chapter. I chose this man since I love animal research, and animals as well. I thought he was interesting since he studied baby chicks and cats mainly on how to escape from his puzzle boxes. I am always bored with Pavlov and Skinner’s animal research, so I liked that his was unique from theirs. I also thought it was interesting that his explanation for the findings on behaviorism was the same as that given by Morgan, the trial and error learning and connectionism.

2)What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?
-The first aspect is on his biography that helped made him the man he is today. The second aspect is about his baby chicks and maze experiment. The last aspect is on his cats in the puzzle boxes.

3)
-Edward Thorndike first started his animal behavior research with William James at Harvard. He also did research with Cattell at Columbia University where many other functionalists went like Robert Woodworth. There at Columbia, where he spent most of his career at is when he first proposed his two behavioral laws, the law of effect and the law of exercise, in his doctoral dissertation, which was published in 1911 as Animal Intelligence. He regarded adaptive changes in animal behavior as analogous to human learning and suggested that behavioral associations, also known as connections, could be predicted by application of the two laws. The law of effect stated that those behavioral responses that were most closely followed by a satisfying result were most likely to become established patterns and to occur again in response to the same stimulus. The law of exercise stated that behavior is more strongly established through frequent connections of stimulus and response. Thorndike and Woodworth found that learning in one area does not facilitate learning in other areas; where specific training in one task seemed to cause improvement in learning another, the improvement could be attributed to common elements in the two exercises, not to overall enhancement of the subject’s learning abilities. He emphasized the use of statistics in social science research, chiefly through his handbook, An Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social Measurements. Other important works in the early part of his career were responsible for many of the earliest applications of psychology to classroom instruction in arithmetic, algebra, reading, writing, and language. He first started his baby chicks maze since he wanted to show the relationship between mental-processes in lower animals and those in humans. He set up these mazes in William James’ basement, then took it to Cattell’s labs. He studied the chicks’ intelligence and instinct by asking them to escape from simple mazes formed by placing books on the end. He would place them in location A, and then observed to see if they could find the exit. They would jump at the walls and were very noisy. They finally gave up on those behaviors and were able to find their way out of the maze. He mainly known for his puzzle box studies with cats. He repeated his experiments often and would control the learning history and the environment. He decided to use hungry animals and they had to simply pull at a loop of cord, pressing a lever, or stepping on a platform. He would record the time it took to escape and their behavior. The cats experimented with different ways to escape the puzzle box and reach the fish. Eventually they would stumble upon the lever which opened the cage. When it had escaped it was put in again, and once more the time it took to escape was noted. In successive trials the cats would learn that pressing the lever would have favorable consequences and they would adopt this behavior, becoming increasingly quick at pressing the lever. He put forward a “Law of effect” which stated that any behavior that is followed by pleasant consequences is likely to be repeated, and any behavior followed by unpleasant consequences is likely to be stopped. He used 13 different cats in his puzzle boxes. At first the behavior is random and not methodologically thought out, like clawing at or biting the wood slats to get to the fish. The correct response occurred at first by luck, then started becoming successful more often and quicker. His Law of Effect is similar to Skinner’s operant conditioning. The Law of Exercise is the connection between stimulus situation and response would strengthen with practice. Thorndike was a great researcher who was creative and wanted to improve animal research.

4)
-http://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-L-Thorndike- I chose this site since it is credible and it applies to mainly the first aspect of his biography.
-http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Thorndike/Animal/chap3.htm - This site is a credible resource and applies to my learning for the second aspect mainly.
-http://www.simplypsychology.org/edward-thorndike.html- This site is credible since it is a psychology site and applies to mainly my third aspect of the cats in the puzzle box experiment.
-http://www.intropsych.com/ch08_animals/thorndikes_puzzle_box.html- I chose this site since it helped with my understanding of the third aspect and his two laws of behavior.
Thorndike, structuralism, functionalism, Pavlov, Skinner, Morgan, behaviorism, trial and error learning, connectionism, William James, Cattell, Woodworth, Law of Exercise, Law of Effect, puzzle boxes, operant conditioning

1) Once you have completed your search and explorations, I would like you to say what your topic is, how exactly it fits into the chapter we have covered this week, and why you are interested in it.

My topic for this week is going to be introspection. This fits into the chapter we are reading because introspection is a tool that was used to support Titchener’s structuralism and that was a main part of the chapter. I am interested in this because I wanted to learn more about what it actually meant to introspect and how it was connected to structuralism and why we don’t use it today.

2) What are three aspects of the topic you want to talk about for this assignment?

I am going to first talk about and define structuralism, then I will talk about what introspection is and how it is connected to structuralism and finally, I will talk about the decline of introspection and how introspection is used today.

3) Next, I would like you to take the information you found from the various sources and integrate/synthesize them into the three aspects of the topic, and then write about the topic.

Structuralism was founded in Germany by a Wilhelm Wundt. E.B. Titchener was Wundt’s student in Germany but moved to America and brought structuralism with him. Structuralism is a kind of study of a humans mind from birth till present time but it breaks down experience into small components and tries to combine them to make more complex components. An example of this would be how your experiences throughout the day make up consciousness. The reason that Titchener supported structuralism was because he thought that the only things that were needed to describe conscious experiences were sensations and emotions. He did not see the point of knowing how or why these experiences happened when trying to define consciousness because the feelings and sensations were real enough. One of the main ways to measure feelings and sensations is called introspection.

In the laboratory, Titchener would have people trained in introspections so he could do experiments with them. Introspection is when a person, during an experience, reflects on their own thoughts, feelings and thought processes. Titchener would get the people who were trained in introspecting to focus on their thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of situations to try to see how thought processes work. For him, this helped uncover consciousness more than functionalism did because he thought emotions were more important when relating to experiences. There were many criticisms to introspection and now days, it seems to have completely disappeared. When Titchener died, his ideas about structuralism pretty much went with him because many other psychologists at the time did not view introspection as a valid way to experiences. One reason why is because there was no way to measure feelings and perceptions. How can you tell if there are any patterns between people if there was no control? Behaviorists criticized introspection because the stimuli and responses couldn’t be measured. I would have to agree with the criticism of introspection because it is hard to experience something to the fullest and be writing down your thoughts about it as its happening. Even if you were trained in it, your attention would have to be focused on the experience or writing. I think both would suffer if you were concentrated on experiencing and writing at the same time.

This leads me to my final point; introspection is not a valid way to scientifically measure experiences because it is a kind of memory. I find this criticism to be the strongest and makes the most sense. We have seen how faulty our memories can be and it is a proven fact that our memories are malleable. So who’s to say that when a person is reflecting on their experience, they aren’t misremembering how they felt, especially if it was an unpleasant experience and they don’t want to remember it. In one of the articles I read, they talked about whether or not introspection was really retrospection because people were reflecting back on how they were thinking and feeling at the time.

In conclusion, Wundt and Titchener’s structuralism did not maintain its popularity in the United States after Titchener died. This is because he had not released a refined statement on what it was and the way it was measured was not accurate. Introspection seems like a valid way to measure experience, but when you put the reports next to observable behaviors and functionalism, it doesn’t hold its ground. Today, introspection can be found in philosophy and even in cognitive psychology but it is no longer viewed as scientifically valid. I found this topic to be very interesting and now I feel like I have a better grasp on the concept of structuralism, introspection and why it lost popularity.

4)Finally, at the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. For each URL you have listed indicate why you chose the site and the extent to which it contributed to your post.

http://www.britannica.com/science/structuralism-psychology I used this site to get a better understanding of what structuralism was and how it was connected to introspection. I found it helpful because it was simple, strait to the point and gave some insight as to what Titchener thought about structuralism and why he didn’t like functionalism.

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Introspection I used this article to get a better grasp on what introspection truly is and I also used this for the criticisms against introspection. This site also gave some examples of what introspection was used for. I used this sites information the most in this blog.

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Introspection This site gave me an example of, in my opinion, one of the biggest reasons why introspection is not a valid way to measure experience because it asks the question, “Is introspection actually retrospection?” I found this one very interesting and it gave me some insight as to why introspection doesn’t seem to be around a lot anymore.

5)Terms: Titchener, Wundt, structuralism, introspection, functionalism, consciousness.

1)
My topic for this week is based on James McKeen Cattell's invention of mental tests. I became interested in it because I know that standardized mental testing is a big thing in recent and present society. I thought it was interesting that his method's failed to show any substantial correlation between his measurements and intelligence or personality. Though it seems today that we have quite a few different method's of testing mental capacities and I wanted to learn more about these processes and how they differ from Cattell's original work.

2)
While researching Mental tests I came to find out that there are three different types of mental tests aside from IQ tests used today. I will be talking about those three: clinical interviews, personality assessments and behavioral assessments.

3)
In a shift to functionalism, psychology needed a way to measure qualities of functions in order to compete with the science research based structuralist approach. Galton was arguably the first to initiate this procedure in way that would record and compare results. James Cattell was the next to attempt to create testable variables of the mental state, following direct influence of Galton. Though both of these early pioneers failed to find anything statistically significant, we have found some procedures to do this very same thing that we consider reliable and accurate. First, the clinical interview, which is an interaction between a patient and a specialist with a specific purpose in mind. Usually this purpose is reflective of an issue that a client seeks professional help with. There are many types of these interviews with many purposes. Some interviews are conducted with intent to diagnose a mental disorder, some are more therapeutic and intended to debrief a client or to help them rationalize a situation after a crisis occurs. The difference between these interviews and a regular conversation are that it is centered around achieving a specific purpose, the roles of professional and client are clearly defined and it occurs at a set time and place. This is important because a conversation with this same client about an issue could have no central theme, can be ended at any point and can be redirected since roles aren't entirely defined. When trying to determine the mental status of a client, to diagnose them with a mental disorder or to gain any other bit of information to be used as a conclusion on the state of a client, one “must be aware of voice intonations, rate of speech, as well as non-verbal messages such as facial expression, posture and gestures.” These bits of information can be just as important as processing details provided by the client intentionally. This test is the most standard and gathers a basic context for most other mental assessments; not surprisingly, it is typically paired up with the other mental test methods that I will be discussing. The next assessment we will be looking at is that of personality measurement. While there are many people who attempt to measure personality, one attempt that is commonly used and generally accepted is the Big Five trait theory. This theory was established by two psychologists, Allport and Odbert, who conducted a lexical study in which they extracted all words in the dictionary that could be used to describe personality. From there, these psychologists tried to create groups in which to house these terms, which was then reduced by ninety nine percent of it's original volume by Cattell which was later re-categorized by Fiske, Tupes and Christal and condensed into five relative personality terms. These five terms, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extroversion, neurotocism and openness are measurable characteristics that are theorized to encompass all of personality traits. The test is administered by questions about ones personal life mostly centered around their preferences. The test is layered with components that help minimize the participants ability to falsify information or to sway the results toward their favor, but the participants are still encouraged to complete it with the utmost honesty for greater accuracy. This test is used to better understand clients and to help them work with issues that they may have due to some of these characteristics. Some combinations of extreme variations of the traits are also used to link the possibility of certain mental disorders. Finally, I will be discussing the last of the common mental test forms, behavior assessment. The Functional Behavior Assessment is a specific behavioral test that I will be explaining in order to reach a generalized idea of behavioral tests as a whole. Behavioral assessments are used to find target behaviors, their purpose and what factors feed this behavior. It is used commonly in behaviorally challenged students to help strengthen relations with them and to ensure that the behaviors no longer interfere with the learning of other students. The FBA uses two different processes to attain the necessary information, direct and indirect. Indirect is used for minor, infrequent issues and involves a small interview process, a hypothesis and a plan for reduction in the future. The direct approach is used in severe and frequent situations with a more strict interview and plan that is conducted on an assessment sheet. This takes data collection and planned interventions to deal with consistent issues.

4) https://www.gvsu.edu/cms3/assets/2CF6CA25-D6C6-F19E-339DC5CD2EB1B543/itmodules/pbis/datacollectionfbatools/sp0009-_functional_assessment.pdf
This link gave me most of my information on behavioral assessments, and was chosen because it was a university website that puts its reputation on the line along with all information that it publishes.

http://pages.uoregon.edu/sanjay/pubs/bigfive.pdf
This link gave me most of my information on personality assessments, and was chosen because it was a university website that puts its reputation on the line along with all information that it publishes.

http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/class/Psy364/Telch/Lectures/OnScreenPresentations/Interviewing/ppframe.htm
This link gave me most of my information on clinical interviews, and was chosen because it was a university website that puts its reputation on the line along with all information that it publishes.

Mental tests, functionalism, structuralism

1. Puzzle boxes. Thorndike was an educational psychologist that provided the theory of law of exercise, law of effect, as well as connectionism and trial and error learning. This topic is used heavily in the educational psychology world. It is also used in behavioral psychology. Thorndike is considered the curve into the conditioning learning of psychology in behaviorism, which provided a transition into the work of Ivan Pavlov and John B Watson. This study also provides an experimental psychology background in the testing and conduction of the study.
2. Motivation. Functionality of puzzle box. Analysis.
3. Motivation.
Motivation here refers to the food that the instructor put next to the puzzle box to provide the cat the necessary incentive to escape from the box but did not leave the cat in a frightened state. If the cat was frightened it would bring in the ethical issues combined with studies. What we can see in a cat that is frightened is panic and a failure to connect with trails. Motivation needs to be consistent when in the study to provide the proper experimental analysis as well as derive consistent results. Without motivation there is a theory that the cat would not want to escape, and there for any time trials would be inconsistent with the study protocol. I do believe that if the study was created with a motivation similar to fear then the study would be deemed unethical.
Functionality of the Puzzle box.
The functionality of the puzzle box closely relates to the consistency of the puzzle box. The functionality that I want to refer to would be the cat being able to pull levers and open the puzzle. If the levers are out of reach or if it is something that the cat may pull or push easily the cat may not connect the trail learning. The cat should be able to open the box without assistance. Along with that the boxes need to be able to maintain the cat’s efforts to find a lever. If a lever is broken or tilted in a way the cat can’t reach it like it did last time the study has failed to produce the function it needs to and will not be represented by trial and error learning. One last thing that is important is the safety of the box. Cats should not be harmed in the attempts to escape. If there are nails sticking out that a cat could run into, or sharp edges that a cat may get injured on could hurt the study’s integrity. Functionality is an important concept in the puzzle box studies because without it we would not be able to get an accurate assessment of the experiments.
Analysis
Analysis refers mainly to what the observer does. The observer should be able to see if the box is functionally efficient and consistent with the experimental procedure. In a way the observer might need to do some trial and error learning themselves in conducting the proper study and following a consistent pattern. What is also very important is the instrumentation of the observer. The timing of the study should be one that is consistent on a day to day basis or the timing of the experiment itself should be consistent with the instrument tools used. Another form of analysis that we can look at is the label of a healthy cat, or one that is accurately portrayed as motivated. It is the instructor’s responsibility to make sure that the cat is in a state in which it is able to complete the test. If the cat escapes and decides to not eat the food its supportive evidence that the cat has taken on a new motivation for getting out of the box and is in a different state of mind when doing prior testing. Analysis is used for the observer. If used correctly it can explain how and why a study worked as long as the analysis is consistent and provides the accurate measurements.
4. http://www.uni.edu/~maclino/bm/book/sec3.1.pdf
This link gives informational findings of the Thorndike puzzle boxes. It provides the experimental process and conclusions of the study. The experimental conclusions are shown and explained in a detailed and praise manner. I used this web source to provide the aspects given with observatory remarks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDujDOLre-8
This video provides the viewer with demonstrative feedback for the Thorndike Puzzle boxes. This video also has a narrator explanation of the events that transpired. This explanation includes the connection of learning a new skill and what the trial and error process is. I used this video to aid in a better understanding and new perspective of the Thorndike Puzzle box experiments.
http://teachertraineeaide.blogspot.com/2013/05/behaviourist-thoery-thorndikes-theory.html
This web source provides the theory behind trial and error learning and what we should look at when discussing the subject matter. The web source provides a list of attributes that aid to trial and error learning. This source gives an accurate and summarized experimental study of the puzzle boxes as well. I used this source in providing a more behind the scene perspective of the educational piece provided by Thorndike.
Terminology: Law of exercise, Law of Effect, Trial and error, Connectionism, Educational Psychology, Edward Thorndike, Ivan Pavlov, John B Watson, Behaviorism, Experimental Psychology.

The group “The Experimentalis” was a society formed by E.B. Titchener in 1904, and thus it has been around for around 111 years. In its conception it was founded as a small organization to bounce ideas around in an informal way among male colleagues at Cornell University. These men would gather, smoke, and talk about current research in the field and in their labs. They would give input and criticisms to other club members. Titchener had a strong hold on the society and only gave that up at the event of his death. He refused to admit women into the society, but a year after his death the society voted to allow women and to change their name to “ the Society of Experimental Psychologists.” in 1928. Even today the society abides by what Titchener’s original wishes of small, quaint, informal meeting of the minds. The past bylaws of the club stated a maximum number of club members to be that of 50 or less, this limit has hence been removed, but in trying to keep the group small and elite they only take on 9 new members each year. It has a current membership of between 200-300 people, which is around six times that of the original maximum for the society originally set by Titchener. Also it admits members now from such fields as Social Psychologists and Developmental Psychologists.

Titchener’s original reason for forming the group was becauses of his “dissatisfaction with the American Psychological Association (APA)”. “ He disliked the topical diversity of the APA meetings, which included discussions and presentations that strayed from his narrow definition of psychology’s subject matter”. I mean this guy literally made a group to circumvent the APA, and allow a Round-Table discussion of sorts among those in the society. That would take some serious guts, seeing as how huge the APA is now, there word is law in the psychology community. He also like it said had a narrow view on what he considered a psychological subject matter. I wonder what he would think of today’s Psychology and all its diverse branches and fields. Would he admit that they are indeed psychological matters, or would he just see them as smudges on the field he had a passion for. For that matter what would he think of certain therapy techniques?

Little did Titchener expect, but the APA in the 1920’s used a page from his book and tried to make their meetings more laid back like his as to attract more people to them, which almost led to the experimentalists “dieing out”. But the group endured, and is still alive today, it even survived his death in 1927, though it has made some major alterations to his original construct, that is progress. They are now more open minded and do not discriminate against membership based on andy form of false superiority. Titchener may have rolled over in his grave when the society thought about affiliating themselves with the APA in the 1940’s, but as far as i understand they did not, which in itself goes to show how far they have come as a society.

the society holds a meeting every spring at host universities,and allows only members of the society along with the hosting universities staff and students. Normaly around 40 to 60 society members actualy show up to the meetings any given year, as most are elderly. They keep taking on new members to keep their group alive.”The 2016 SEP conference will be held April 21-23 at Columbia University, hosted by Herb Terrace”. So if anyone wants to attend transfer there next year and become friends with Professor Terrace.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/uncategorized/100-years-of-the-experimentalists.html
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/hop/8/4/347.pdf
http://www.sepsych.org/history.php

Titchener, Experimentalists, Society of Experimental Psychology