2.2 Bandura, Kohlberg, Gilligan & Bloom

Why Bandura, Kohlberg, and Bloom Belong Together

These three theorists answer different questions. Bandura explains how students learn by watching others and why belief in one's own capability matters. Kohlberg (with Carol Gilligan's critique) explains how adolescents reason about right and wrong. Bloom gave teachers a shared language for levels of thinking and a model for helping nearly all students reach mastery. Praxis 5624 items typically describe a classroom moment and ask which theory explains it or what the theory suggests the teacher should do next.

Albert Bandura: Social Learning Theory and Modeling

Albert Bandura demonstrated that adolescents acquire vast repertoires of behavior, academic strategies, and emotional attitudes not merely through direct reinforcement, but through observational learning (modeling).

• Vicarious Reinforcement & Punishment: Secondary students observe what happens to peers. If a student sees a classmate praised for providing an insightful textual analysis, others are motivated to contribute. Conversely, if a student sees a peer mocked or publicly humiliated, vicarious punishment discourages classroom risk-taking.
• Four Observational Sub-Processes:
  1. Attention: The learner must focus on the model (facilitated by high-status, relatable, or competent models).
  2. Retention: The learner must mentally encode and store the observed behavior.
  3. Production (Motor Reproduction): The learner must possess the physical and cognitive ability to execute the behavior.
  4. Motivation: The learner must have an incentive or internal expectation of reinforcement to perform the behavior.
• Self-Efficacy: Bandura highlighted self-efficacy—a student's belief in their ability to succeed on a specific task. In high school, high self-efficacy directly correlates with persistence, academic resilience, and deeper cognitive engagement.

Reciprocal Determinism

Bandura rejected the idea that the environment simply shapes behavior. In reciprocal determinism, personal factors (beliefs, expectations, self-efficacy), behavior, and the environment all influence one another. A student who believes she is "bad at math" (personal factor) avoids practice (behavior), earns low scores that confirm the belief, and may be placed in a less challenging class (environment). Changing any one of the three can interrupt the cycle, which is why a teacher's feedback and task design matter.

Moral Development: Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan

Moral reasoning—how students determine right from wrong—evolves significantly across grades 7 through 12.

Lawrence Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Reasoning

Using clinical interviews based on hypothetical moral dilemmas (most famously the Heinz dilemma), Kohlberg identified three developmental levels divided into six stages:

1. Level I: Preconventional Morality (Common in elementary; seen in struggling secondary students under stress)
   • Stage 1: Obedience and Punishment Orientation: Rules are absolute; right behavior is defined solely by avoiding physical punishment ("I won't skip class because the dean will give me detention").
   • Stage 2: Individualism and Exchange (Instrumental Relativist): Right behavior is defined by self-interest and reciprocal deals ("I'll help you with your geometry homework if you let me copy your lab report").
2. Level II: Conventional Morality (Dominant level for the vast majority of secondary students)
   • Stage 3: Good Interpersonal Relationships ("Good Boy/Good Girl"): Morality is driven by peer approval, social harmony, and fulfilling interpersonal expectations ("I won't cheat because my teacher and lab partners trust me, and I want them to think well of me").
   • Stage 4: Maintaining Social Order ("Law and Order"): Morality is defined by duty to society, respect for authority, and upholding established laws to prevent social collapse ("Rules against plagiarism exist for the whole school; if everyone cheated, grades would be meaningless and the school system would fail").
3. Level III: Postconventional (Principled) Morality (Emerges in late adolescence and adulthood; achieved by a minority)
   • Stage 5: Social Contract and Individual Rights: Laws are social contracts that should be upheld, but they must protect fundamental human rights and democratic utility; unjust laws can be changed through due process ("Civil disobedience against an unjust school dress code is warranted because the policy discriminates against specific cultural expressions").
   • Stage 6: Universal Ethical Principles: Morality is guided by internalized, universal principles of justice, equality, and human dignity that transcend statutory laws.

Carol Gilligan's Ethics of Care

Psychologist Carol Gilligan critiqued Kohlberg's model on the grounds that his initial research sample consisted entirely of males, resulting in a framework that biased moral maturity toward abstract, legalistic justice. Gilligan articulated an alternative developmental trajectory:

• Justice Orientation (Kohlberg): Emphasizes rights, rules, fairness, individual autonomy, and universal principles.
• Care Orientation (Gilligan): Emphasizes interpersonal connection, compassion, relational responsibility, empathy, and avoiding harm to others. In secondary settings, Gilligan's work reminds teachers that students who resolve ethical dilemmas by protecting peer relationships or showing mercy are demonstrating sophisticated moral reasoning grounded in relational care, not cognitive immaturity.

Benjamin Bloom: Taxonomy and Mastery Learning

Benjamin Bloom's name appears on the PLT for two separate contributions.

The Taxonomy of Educational Objectives

In 1956, Bloom and colleagues published a hierarchy of cognitive objectives: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The taxonomy gave teachers a common vocabulary for distinguishing lower-order thinking (recalling and explaining) from higher-order thinking (analyzing, evaluating, creating). In 2001, Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl revised it into verb form (remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create), placing create at the top. ETS's discussion questions ask candidates to recognize the difference between lower-order and higher-order thinking in classroom activities using Bloom's taxonomy as a guide. Chapter 6 shows how to write objectives at each level; Chapter 11 shows how to write questions at each level.

Mastery Learning

Bloom also argued that most students can reach high levels of achievement if they receive enough time and the right help. In mastery learning:

1. A unit is divided into smaller learning units with clear objectives.
2. After initial instruction, students take a brief formative test.
3. Students who have not reached the mastery criterion (often 80 to 90 percent) receive correctives: different explanations, materials, or practice, not a repeat of the same lesson.
4. Students who have mastered the unit do enrichment activities.
5. Everyone then takes a second, parallel formative test before moving on.

In his 1984 "2 Sigma Problem" paper, Bloom reported that students taught one-to-one with mastery-learning methods averaged about two standard deviations above students in conventional classes, and he challenged teachers to find group methods that come close. Mastery learning is the ancestor of many practices in this guide: formative assessment, reteaching in a new way, and flexible enrichment.

Common Exam Traps

• Moral reasoning versus moral behavior. Kohlberg's stages describe how a student justifies a decision, not whether the student acts morally.
• Gilligan is not "anti-Kohlberg." She argued that his justice orientation overlooked an equally mature care orientation; recognizing both is the balanced answer.
• Bloom's taxonomy is not a difficulty scale. A recall question can be hard, and an analysis question can be easy; the taxonomy classifies the kind of thinking.
• Mastery learning is not "reteach louder." Correctives must present the content differently.