Learner and Learning Process Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Learning arithmetic skills while completing a project on the celebration of Deepawali is incidental learning. The children set out to complete the project and picked up the arithmetic on the way, without any plan to learn it.

Formal learning takes place in a planned curriculum, informal learning comes from the surroundings and everyday life without structure, and non-formal learning is an organised activity outside the formal system. The learning here was a by-product of the project, which is the meaning of incidental.

Answer: A

Association is not a defence mechanism, so option (A) is right. Association is a learning and memory term, the linking of ideas or of stimulus and response. Regression, option (B), is a defence mechanism in which a person returns to an earlier, more childlike behaviour under stress. Compensation, option (C), makes up for a weakness in one area by excelling in another. Sublimation, option (D), turns an unacceptable impulse into a socially approved activity. All three of these are the ego's ways of protecting itself from anxiety.

Answer: A

The statement is from J.B. Watson, the founder of behaviourism, who claimed he could take a dozen healthy infants and train any one of them to become any kind of specialist, whatever the child's talents or ancestry. It expresses his belief that environment and conditioning, not heredity, shape behaviour. Hull, option (B), developed a drive-reduction learning theory. Jung, option (C), was a depth psychologist of the collective unconscious. Guthrie, option (D), proposed the contiguity theory of learning. None of the three made this famous claim.

Answer: C

The view that a person's psychological and physical environments are identical is the S-R associationist view, so option (C) is right. In the associationist and stimulus-response approach, the environment that acts on a person is simply the physical stimulus situation, so the two are one. The Gestalt field psychologists, option (D), such as Koffka and Lewin, deny this and separate the geographical environment from the behavioural one as the person perceives it. The functionalists, option (A), and structuralists, option (B), are concerned with the function and the content of mind, and the identity of the two environments is not their characteristic position.

Answer: B

The key gives 8 to 18 years as the age group for delinquency, option (B). Juvenile delinquency refers to offences by young persons who are under the age at which they are tried as adults, and Indian and many other legal systems apply the term to children from about 8 up to 18. The ranges of 7 to 15 in option (A), 6 to 14 in option (C) and 9 to 19 in option (D) do not match the age bounds used for juvenile offenders in the key.

Answer: B

The key gives Crow and Crow as the authors of the view that educational psychology is the science of education, option (B). Crow and Crow, in their book on educational psychology, described the subject as the study of the learning experience of an individual from birth to old age. Skinner, option (A), defined educational psychology as the subject that deals with behaviour in educational situations. Peel, option (C), and Pillsbury, option (D), are not the writers linked with this statement. The key takes (B).

Answer: C

The view that anything can be taught at any stage of development, in some intellectually honest form, was expressed by Jerome Bruner in The Process of Education. It follows from his spiral curriculum, in which a subject is returned to at increasing depth. Piaget, option (A), held that learning is limited by the child's stage of cognitive development, which is the opposite emphasis. Ausubel, option (B), stressed meaningful reception learning and advance organisers. Gagne, option (D), is known for the conditions and hierarchy of learning. Only Bruner made this claim.

Answer: B

Option (B) is the correct pairing: classical Gestalt theory of learning is the work of Kohler, who studied insight in the apes on Tenerife, along with Koffka and Wertheimer. Option (A) is wrong because Sign-Gestalt theory is Tolman's, not Bruner's. Option (C) is wrong because field theory of learning is Kurt Lewin's, and Tolman's theory is the sign-Gestalt one. Option (D) is wrong because operant theory is Skinner's; Pavlov's is classical conditioning. Only the Kohler pairing is accurate.

Answer: C

Multiple choice questions are an example of the recognition method of studying remembering and forgetting. In a multiple choice item the learner only has to identify the right answer from the options shown, which is recognition. In recall (A) the learner reproduces the material without cues, as in a short-answer question. Re-learning (B), also called the savings method, measures how much less time is needed to learn the material a second time. Reconstruction (D) asks the learner to rebuild the original arrangement of the items, which a multiple choice item does not.

Answer: B

The concept of advance organiser was developed by Ausubel. David Ausubel proposed, in his theory of meaningful verbal learning, that a short introductory statement presented before the new material links it to what the learner already knows and so helps learning and retention. Bruner (A) is known for discovery learning and the spiral curriculum. Erikson (C) proposed the eight stages of psychosocial development, and Kohlberg (D) the stages of moral development.