Introduction
The biological perspective of education refers to the view that human behavior and thought processes are influenced by biological factors such as genetics, brain structure, and hormones. This perspective suggests that education should take into account these biological factors to optimize learning and academic success.
Biology of Learning
The biological processes of learning start within neurons, which are electrically activated brain cells. Learning is achieved due to changing strength and numbers of neural pathways, which involves a process known as synaptic plasticity. Synaptic plasticity is best demonstrated by increasing the strength of neural connections in the brain. In this process, the speed of conduction for electrical signals between cells improves when an activity is performed more frequently. (Owens & Tanner, 2017)
There are two points of view for looking at the biological perspective of learning
The history of the first one is older and it belongs to the social scientists who observe human/animal behavior from the outside and develop theories regarding the activities going on in the brain related to behavior and learning. Again, there are scientists from this group who believe in the notion of mind (The subjective concept: not to be confused with the brain) and another group of scientists who do not believe in the idea of mind and developed their theories solely on the concept of the brain(physical).
The second one belongs to the neurological and brain scientists who observe brain activities through machines during the learning process. This method is relatively new and could have been possible after the invention of such machines that could look into the animals’ and human brains and record their activities.
Both of the sciences employ the same scientific model to obtain information and are bound to their general laws. Yet they differ in a lot of ways and have their tools for research. Natural scientists research brain activities in a controlled environment using the latest scientific machines such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and computerized tomography (CT) whereas social scientists work on experimental data to measure human behavior and responses to draw a picture of human mental activities.
Thinkers who worked on that and Their Contributions
The social scientists who contributed to the knowledge regarding learning are: –
Greek philosophers Plato (428-347 BC) and Aristotle (384-322 BC). Plato believed that certain kinds of knowledge are innate or inborn, whereas Aristotle thought that each child is born as an “empty slate” (in Latin, a tabula rasa) and that knowledge is primarily acquired through learning and experience.( Stangor & Walinga, 2019) From here began another question regarding the mental capabilities of a person which discusses the effect of genetic inheritance vs environmental contribution to the learning and development of a person later called the Nature vs. nurture question. (Walker & Plomin 2005).
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (1832-1920) is known as the “father of experimental psychology” and Edward Bradford Titchener (1876-1927) was a student of Wilhelm Wundt and is credited with introducing the structuralism school of thought. While Wundt is sometimes identified as the founder of structuralism, Titchener’s theories differed in important ways from Wundt’s. He utilized Wundt’s method of introspection but under much more stringent guidelines. (Alan,2022)
Functionalists, including psychologists William James and James Rowland Angell, and philosophers George H. Mead, Archibald L. Moore, and John Dewey, stressed the importance of empirical, rational thought over an experimental, trial-and-error philosophy. The group was concerned more with the capability of the mind than with the process of thought. The movement was thus interested primarily in the practical applications of research. (Britannica, 2022)
The union between theory and application reached its zenith with John Dewey’s development of a laboratory school at the University of Chicago in 1896 and the publication of his keystone article, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (1896), which attacked the philosophy of atomism and the concept of Elementarism, including the behavioral theory of stimulus and response. The work of John Dewey and his associates stimulated the progressive school movement, which attempted to apply functionalist principles to education. In the early and mid-20th century, an offshoot theory emerged: the transactional theory of perception, the central thesis of which is that learning is the key to perceiving. (Britannica, 2022).
Ivan Pavlov (1849 to 1936) was a Russian psychologist whose experiments on learning led to the principles of classical conditioning. (McSweeney & Murphy 2014)
Jean William Fritz Piaget (1896-1980) studied and contributed to the field of learning through The study of mental processes, including perception, thinking, memory, and judgments. He suggested that young children’s intelligence changes as child age and that it is not about gaining knowledge but constructing knowledge from a mental picture of the world around them. (Halpenny & Pettersen, 2013)
John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner belonged to the behaviorist perspective of psychology. (Hatfield, 2003). In an interview, B. F Skinner termed the mind “an imagery concept” and believed in the material basis of the brain. Based on the premise that it is not possible to objectively study the mind, and therefore that psychologists should limit their attention to the study of behavior itself. (Biophily2, 2016)
Albert Bandura (1925-2021) Canadian-American psychologist who developed the “social learning theory” with his Bobo doll studies illustrating the impact that observation and interaction have on learning. (Bandura, 2006)
Linda Bartoshuk; Daniel Kahneman; Elizabeth Loftus; and Geroge Miller (20th and 21st centuries) are American psychologists who contributed to the cognitive school of psychology by studying learning, memory, and judgment. Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on psychological decision-making. (Stangor & Walinga, 2019)
A few of the contemporary experts who contributed through pure scientific study of the brain are: –
Melinda T. Owens and Kimberly D. Tanner published their research on Teaching as Brain Changing: Exploring Connections between Neuroscience and Innovative Teaching. They suggested that teaching and learning are fundamentally neurobiological phenomena. However, while neurobiologists have figured out the basics behind how the brain creates and stores memories, there is still much more to discover. (Owens & Tanner, 2017)
Kim D. Allen, Matthew J. Regier, Changchi Hsieh, Panayiotis Tsokas, Maya Barnard, Shwetha Phatarpekar, Jason Wolk, Todd C. Sacktor, André A. Fenton, A. Iván Hernández published their research on “Learning-induced ribosomal RNA is required for memory consolidation in mice—Evidence of differentially expressed rRNA variants in learning and memory” and suggested that nucleolar integrity and activity-dependent ribosomal RNA (rRNA) synthesis are essential for the maintenance of hippocampal long-term potentiation (LTP). Consequently, the synaptic plasticity and memory hypothesis predicts that nucleolar integrity and activity-dependent rRNA synthesis would be required for Long-term memory (LTM) (Allen et al. 2018)
Eric R Kandel, Yadin Dudai, and Mark R. Mayford published their research on “The molecular and systems biology of memory”. They examined molecular, cellular, and circuit mechanisms that underlie how memories are made, stored, retrieved, and lost (Kandel et al. 2014).
Main Theme of the Biological Perspective
The biological perspective is a way of looking at psychological issues by studying the physical basis for animal and human behavior. It is one of the major perspectives in psychology and involves such things as studying the brain, immune system, nervous system, and genetics. Key areas of focus include sensation and perception; motivated behavior (such as hunger, thirst, and sex); control of movement; learning and memory; sleep and biological rhythms; and emotion. Bio-psychologists study many of the same things that other psychologists do, but they are interested in looking at how biological forces shape human behaviors. As technical sophistication leads to advancements in research methods, more advanced topics such as language, reasoning, decision-making, and consciousness are now being studied. (Stangor & Walinga, 2019). Charles Darwin first introduced the idea that evolution and genetics play a role in human behavior. (Desmond, 2022) consciousness research suggests that our attention and arousal systems emerge from complex interactions between the central nervous system and chemical activators that surge continually throughout the body. (Munévar, 2014).
From the social scantiest side, there are different thoughts and ideas regarding learning, understanding, and human behavior in connection with brain functions.
Structuralism is regarded as the first school of thought in the field of psychology. Structuralists are concerned with breaking down the mind into its fundamental parts, or ‘structure.’ Structuralism began with the work of Wilhelm Wundt, who created the first psychology lab back in 1879. However, it was Wundt’s student, Edward Titchener, who first came up with the term ‘structuralism’ and popularized the school of thought.
Functionalism, by contrast, jettisoned the use of introspection. Rather than focusing on analyzing the terms of mental phenomena, functionalists sought to observe more objective behaviors. Moreover, functionalists sought to examine how the mind worked in different environments rather than taking a term or a concept and attempting to analyze it in isolation. Thus, at least at a surface level, functionalism sought to understand the mind more holistically by relating mental states to actions and other states. Structuralist theories put these concerns in the background.
Behaviorism, also known as behavioral psychology, is a theory of learning that states all behaviors are learned through interaction with the environment through a process called conditioning. Thus, behavior is simply a response to environmental stimuli and it is only concerned with observable stimulus-response behaviors, as they can be studied in a systematic and observable manner.
Radical behaviorism was founded by B.F Skinner who agreed with the assumption of methodological behaviorism that the goal of psychology should be to predict and control behavior. Skinner, like Watson, also recognized the role of internal mental events, and while he agreed such private events could not be used to explain behavior, he proposed they should be explained in the analysis of behavior.
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of the mind as an information processor. It concerns the way we take in information from the outside world, and how we make sense of that information. Cognitive psychologists try to build up cognitive models of the information processing that goes on inside people’s minds, including perception, attention, language, memory, thinking, and consciousness. The emphasis of psychology shifted away from the study of conditioned behavior and psychoanalytical notions about the study of the mind, towards the understanding of human information processing, using rigorous laboratory investigation. The cognitive approach began to revolutionize psychology in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to become the dominant approach in psychology by the late 1970s. Interest in mental processes has been gradually restored through the work of Piaget and Tolma. They suggested that cognitive processing can often be affected by schemas, a mental framework of beliefs and expectations developed from experience.
In addition to the contradictory thoughts, noted above, of social scientists regarding the human capability of learning, another question which is called the nature vs nurture question has been around since Plato and Descartes.
Naturalists believe that every human is born with some unique genetically inherited innate qualities which make him/her capable of learning for any particular field and consequently eligible for any position in society and such factors are inborn and occur naturally regardless of environmental influences. As per their point of view, all of our characteristics and behaviors are the result of evolution. Francis Galton believed that intelligence and most other physical and mental characteristics of humans were inherited and biologically based. It was this idea that led Galton to develop his most controversial concept of eugenics, which is the selective breeding of humans deemed to have the most desirable traits and discouraging those with less desirable traits from selective breeding.
The advocates of Nurture, such as John Locke, believe in the idea of tabula rasa which suggests that the mind begins as a blank slate. According to this notion, everything can be learned through experience which is very close to the idea of Behaviorism. To solve the problem of the nature vs nurture debate, another theory was introduced called epigenetics. Epigenetics studies how our behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way our genes work. As per this notion, certain genetic qualities can be enhanced or defused through the intervention of the environment, however, these changes may not be permanent and can be reversed.
We can observe from the above that there are different theories regarding learning from a biological perspective. Few vary from others broadly whereas some are built on earlier theories or we can say that they are the advanced version of another theory. Another point should also be kept in mind that most of the theories are from the age when communication facilities were not available as they are now. Therefore, most of the theories reflect the observation of theorists’ time and their area of study. However, they were widely accepted and are still being followed by professionals to develop curriculum and teaching & learning methods.
Learning and Biological Perspective
Learning is defined as a process that leads to a relatively permanent change in behavior. (Houwer et al,. 2013).
Science can explain how the human organism learns. There may be a few details yet to be discovered, but we pretty much know now what is going on neurologically, physiologically, and psychologically when a person learns knowledge and skills. It follows, that for optimal results, we should try to teach according to how the brain learns naturally (Jensen 1998, Caine 1994). Good teachers have always taught in harmony with how the brain learns best, now we can all understand why their methods work.
The biological perspective sees human beings as biological beings and takes a biological approach to analyze and research education. As biological beings, humans use the brain to both teach and learn, and this means that in addition to human science, new sciences such as brain science, neuroscience, and cognitive science, are important. This is possible because we now know much about how brain activity is related to education, such as which part of the brain is active when thinking, learning arithmetic, reading, or listening to music. Since the end of the twentieth century, the knowledge contributed by brain science, neuroscience, and cognitive science, fields related to education, has grown rapidly. (Clikeman. 2015)
Two theories explain the cellular basis of learning and memory. First, the Nucleotide Rearrangement Theory states that chemical changes in the body are linked to learning. In the study conducted on rats, it was observed that learning and memory enhance in trained rates as their cortical RNA increases. More and harder training results in lower possibilities of forgetting and memory deterioration. However, when RNA synthesis is inhibited, the memory becomes impaired. (Sincero, 2013).
The second biological theory of learning and memory is the Cellular Modification Theory proposed focuses on the habituation, sensitization, and conditioning of learning and memory. The researchers found out that the increase in the release of neurotransmitters results in faster response rates of the sensory-motor neuron synapses. This, in turn, leads to conditioning and sensitization. However, low levels of neurotransmitters result in slower synaptic responses, leading to habituation. The synaptic responsivity is facilitated by the serotonergic interneurons that prolong the closure of K+ ion channels to increase the action potential’s duration in sensory neurons. (Sincero, 2013).
Hinton and Fischer (2010) consider first how genetics and experience interact to guide development, and how learning experiences shape the physical structure of the brain. They stress how cognition and emotion work in tandem. Furthermore, the study reviews how the brain acquires core academic abilities, including language, literacy, and mathematics, and discusses the atypical development of these abilities. The brain is biologically primed to acquire language, while the capacity for literacy, on the other hand, is built over time with cumulative neural modifications and varies depending on the language in question. Similarly, different instruction shapes the neural circuitry underlying mathematical abilities. Neuro-scientific research has underpinned key findings regarding learning, such as the extent of individual differences and the essentially social nature of human learning, which means that learning environments should incorporate multiple means of representation, assessment, and engagement.
Harari (2016) suggests that all human actions and feelings are the result of biochemical processes in the human body, especially in the brain. With the latest scientific discoveries, humans have become capable of changing their modes and behavior through drugs, enhancing capabilities, and even modifying genes. Moreover, with the merger of biotechnology, bioengineering, and computer science technology, the interaction between the human body and technology may enhance human capacity to a new level that we may not be able to imagine right now. In the future, it may be possible to alter the genes of an unborn child and make him/her a genius. If and when it occurs, this may be the end of old schooling and teaching methods and we can teach a newborn baby all the knowledge with the help of new emerging scientific methods using novel technologies.
Critical Analysis of the Biological Perspective of Learning
The human body is a complex machine and the brain is the most complex among all the organs. Despite all the research and theories developed over the known period, the capabilities and functions of the human brain are yet to be discovered. Social and natural scientists have done a lot of research on the brain and its results i.e. behavior but their observation and area of every research or theory was limited and could have not been able to cover all the aspects of the human brain and its functions.
Every research and theory has its limitations and there cannot be a single answer to every question in any field. Every theory or aspect has some advantages over the others and of course some discrepancies and flaws. The wise decision would be to analyze every theory, take what can be used from every theory, and create a solution according to the need of the situation and the area of requirement.
The biological perspective with all its benefits and positive contributions to the field of brain science, sees human behavior as a result of biochemical reactions in the brain formed by evolution and does not give weightage to the human consciousness and cognitive processes. The radical biological perspective is too deterministic with little free will. It oversimplifies the huge complexity of physical systems and their interaction with the environment.
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About the Author:
Shahid Essa is a blogger and M. Phil Scholar from Iqra University Karachi
