I would define mastery of my lessons objectives from a social cognitive view of learning by assessing if my students can successfully model back my behavior, make goals to improve a little each week, and/ or able to self regulate their behavior in order to improve their learning. There are many factors that tie into the social cognitive view of learning such as their behavior, the environment, and their cognitive abilities. With these three things working together, you can set up the perfect learning environment for you students. Continuing to reinforce these three things will ensure that students learn to their best ability. A few ways that you can induce your learning environment and use the social cognitive theory is to model to your students so that they can observe what your doing and take it in for themselves. An example of this could be working out a math problem with candy. In order to make sure the children know what they are doing say everything you are doing or thinking aloud. For example, "if I have 5 skittles and eat three, how many do I have left?" "hmmm... I have 1,2,3,4,5. Now I'm going to take away three 1,2,3. Now how many do I have left?" "1,2.. I have two skittles left." Modeling like this will give the children the knowledge and language to do it themselves. Another way is to help students set small achievable goals, such as this week I will learn how to subtract numbers from 5. Next week I will learn how to subtract numbers from 6..." There are many other teaching strategies that can be used to help ensure you have mastery over your objective from the social cognitive view of learning.
http://www.utwente.nl/cw/theorieenoverzicht/Theory%20clusters/Health%20Communication/Social_cognitive_theory.doc/
Defining the mastery of lesson objectives from a behaviorist view of learning is similar to the social cognitive view of learning but it seems to be much more concrete. Being able to see the new learned skill right away will tell me whether or not the students were able to master the skill or not. If they were not, I would add a reinforcer to get them to learn it or induce a punishment. In my elementary ed class the teacher, and author of our book, has 4 teaching strategies. The last one he talks about in his book is Direct Teaching. He says that to him this is basically a behaviorist style of teaching. In this teaching strategy he includes 4 steps:
1. Set the stage for teaching- tell class what the objective is
2. Present new material- directly tell them
3. Monitor and adjust- let the children do what you just taught them; if they get it, move on. If not, adjust the way you teach it.
4. Provide independent practice- this should be done during a separate time from the lesson
With all that explained I think step 4 would be the way to find out if your objective was learned and mastered. We had to write lesson plans during this class to show an example of this, I actually used a TOD at the end of the day, or before lunch.
I think with social-cognitivism, yes, the children might be able to mirror back to you what you've learned with modeling, but they could also mirror back what more skilled peers have done as one. With the social aspect of this theory, I would encourage that you have the children work in groups as well as with out to take full advantage of being in a group setting and having the richness of working with one another and having each other as resources. Working with others could also help to increase the self-regulation and motivation, because they're now working with peers (peers can be motivating), and they have a task at hand to do with these peers. If the peers work to help one another along, they can scaffold one another into increased self-regulation as well.
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