Constructivists

According to Kliebard^[2], John Dewey created an active intellectual learning environment in his laboratory school during the early 20th century. Neuroscience now supports this form of active learning as the way people naturally learn^[3]. Active learning conditionalizes knowledge through experiential learning. Smith^[4]writes that John Dewey believed education must engage with and expand experience; those methods used to educate must provide for exploration, thinking, and reflection; and that interaction with the environment is necessary for learning; also, that democracy should be upheld in the educational process. Dewey advocates the learning process of experiential learning through real life experience to construct and conditionalize knowledge, which is consistent with the Constructivists.
Maria Montessori’s key points contribute to both Humanism and Constructivism; however, the following quote from her emphasizes her value of experiential learning to conditionalize knowledge:
"Scientific observation has established that education is not what the teacher gives; education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment. The task of the teacher becomes that of preparing a series of motives of cultural activity, spread over a specially prepared environment, and then refraining from obtrusive interference. Human teachers can only help the great work that is being done, as servants help the master. Doing so, they will be witnesses to the unfolding of the human soul and to the rising of a New Man who will not be a victim of events, but will have the clarity of vision to direct and shape the future of human society^[5]."
Montessori’s beliefs are consistent with the Constructivists in that she advocates a learning process which allows a student to experience an environment first-hand, thereby, giving the student reliable, trust-worthy [conditionalized] knowledge.
David Kolb, in his books Learning Style Inventory Technical Manual^[6]and Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development ^[7], emphasizes the importance of conditionalized knowledge through experiential learning. David A. Kolb and Roger Fry created the Kolb & Fry Model out of four elements: concrete experience, observation and reflection, the formation of abstract concepts, and testing in new situations. He represented these in the famous experiential learning circle [after Kurt Lewin]. Kolb and Fry (1975) argue that the learning cycle can begin at any one of the four points, and that it should really be approached as a continuous spiral. However, it is suggested that the learning process often begins with a person carrying out a particular action and then seeing the effect of the action in this situation. Following this, the second step is to understand these effects in the particular instance, so that, if the same action were taken in the same circumstances, it would be possible to anticipate what would follow from the action. In this pattern, the third step would be to understand the general principle under which the particular instance falls ^[8].
Kolb’s beliefs are consistent with the Constructivists in that he includes Concrete Experience as part of the learning process and requires a student to test knowledge by acting upon the environment, thereby, giving the student reliable, trust-worthy [conditionalized] knowledge. Kolb’s work closely parallels recent work in the field of neuroscience, exemplified in the writings of James Zull

behaviourism

Behavioural (or "behavioral") theory in psychology is a very substantial field: follow the links to the left or right for introductions to some of its more detailed contributions impinging on how people learn in the real world. How I have the effrontery to produce a single page on it amazes even me, whatever my reservations about it!
Behaviourism is primarily associated with Pavlov (classical conditioning) in Russia and with Thorndike, Watson and particularly Skinner in the United States (operant conditioning).

• Behaviourism is dominated by the constraints of its (naïve) attempts to emulate the physical sciences, which entails a refusal to speculate about what happens inside the organism. Anything which relaxes this requirement slips into the cognitive realm. 

• Much behaviourist experimentation is undertaken with animals and generalised. 

• In educational settings, behaviourism implies the dominance of the teacher, as in behaviour modification programmes. It can, however, be applied to an understanding of unintended learning.

For our purposes, behaviourism is relevant mainly to:

•  Skill development, and

• The "substrate" (or "conditions", as Gagné puts it) of learning

Classical conditioning:

is the process of reflex learning—investigated by Pavlov—through which an unconditioned stimulus (e.g. food) which produces an unconditioned response (salivation) is presented together with a conditioned stimulus (a bell), such that the salivation is eventually produced on the presentation of the conditioned stimulus alone, thus becoming a conditioned response.

 

This is a disciplined account of our common-sense experience of learning by association (or "contiguity", in the jargon), although that is often much more complex than a reflex process, and is much exploited in advertising. Note that it does not depend on us doing anything.
Such associations can be chained and generalised (for better of for worse): thus "smell of baking" associates with "kitchen at home in childhood" associates with "love and care". (Smell creates potent conditioning because of the way it is perceived by the brain.) But "sitting at a desk" associates with "classroom at school" and hence perhaps with "humiliation and failure"...
This site goes further into Watson's ideas, beyond Pavlov, and the "Little Albert" experiment.

Operant Conditioning

If, when an organism emits a behaviour (does something), the consequences of that behaviour are reinforcing, it is more likely to emit (do) it again. What counts as reinforcement, of course, is based on the evidence of the repeated behaviour, which makes the whole argument rather circular.

Learning is really about the increased probability of a behaviour based on reinforcement which has taken place in the past, so that the antecedents of the new behaviour include the consequences of previous behaviour.

Summary of Skinner's ideas On operant conditioning Skinner's own account Wikipedia on operant conditioning And here with diagrams of experimental set-ups and video
The schedule of reinforcement of behaviour is central to the management of effective learning on this basis, and working it out is a very skilled procedure: simply reinforcing every instance of desired behaviour is just bribery, not the promotion of learning.
Withdrawal of reinforcement eventually leads to the extinction of the behaviour, except in some special cases such as anticipatory-avoidance learning.

Notes

Two points are often misunderstood in relation to behaviourism and human learning:

• The scale: Although later modifications of behaviourism are known as S-O-R theories (Stimulus-Organism-Response), recognising that the organism's (in this case, person's) abilities and motivations need to be taken into account, undiluted behaviourism is concerned with conditioning and mainly with reflex behaviour. This operates on a very short time-scale — from second to second, or at most minute to minute — on very specific micro-behaviour. To say that a course is behaviourally-based because there is the reward of a qualification at the end is stretching the idea too far.   
• Its descriptive intention: Perhaps because behaviourists describe experiments in which they structure learning for their subjects, attention tends to fall on ideas such as behaviour modification and the technology of behaviourism. However, behaviourism itself is more about a description of how [some forms of] learning  occur in the wild, as it were, than about how to make it happen, and it is when it is approached from this perspective that it gets most interesting. It accounts elegantly, for example, for ways in which attempts to discipline unruly students actually make the situation worse rather than better.
• (This point is heretical!) For human beings, reinforcement has two components, because the information may be cognitively processed: in many cases the "reward" element is less significant than the "feedback" information carried by the reinforcement.
  

Read more: Behaviourism http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/behaviour.htm#ixzz1rdmK07RN
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