Educational behaviors rooted in the theory of behaviorism, or at least the operant conditioning branch of it, are regularly used in software product design decision-making processes. Product onboarding, as an educational experience, is an archetypal application of these theories. For instance, within the sequence of informational popups that show a new user how to use a piece of software, the button with the positive, forward-in-the-onboarding-process call-to-action (such as "Next", or "Okay") should be consistently placed and styled, and match the styling of the rest of the product. This has the result that a user is gently nudged towards learning the visual cues and language that the product they are being educated on uses. As described by Chen, such reinforcement of the visual language used within the software would positively influence the perception category of Bloom's psychomotor domain, which deals with "the ability to use sensory cues to guide motor activity" (2005, p. 133).

The order in which new users are guided through the main features of the software product also influences the educational impact of the onboarding. In Bloom's affective domain, which includes a learner motivation dimension among others, the organization category "organizes values into priorities" (2005, p. 133). Because learner's motivation is increased when learning a high priority item, the new user onboarding process should show the most important feature (or features) first. This helps ensure that new users are able to not only see value in becoming revenue generating customers of the software product, but that they are educated the most effectively on how the software can be used to solve their business need.

Behaviorism is present in significant ways in many popular software based educational tools. For example, the online MBA program offered by Bowling Green State University relies heavily on the Connect and SmartBook products from McGraw-Hill. SmartBook is a web-based software product that uses programmed instruction as written of by Chen (2005). This behaviorist style of instruction uses a series of sets of questions each associated with a section of reading. In order to progress forward through the instruction, the learner must answer the set of questions correctly and may be required to re-experience the associated reading if the questions are answered incorrectly multiple times. This type of instruction is appropriate for the content of this program which is often centered around analyzing a financial process.

As described by Chen, behaviorist theories of learning position spaced repetition as an integral part of the learning process (2005). The idea of using repetition to impact learning can be leveraged with consistent use of language cues in software product documentation.

Consider the software documentation for a generic REST API for a todo list tool. Using this REST API, a user can create new, read existing, update existing, or delete existing todo items for themselves. The documentation for such an API, should start with the most important use case first, to influence the organization category of Bloom's affective domain as discussed above. In our example, this means that the first bit of documentation should be how to create a new todo list item.

In the language of REST APIs, a task to be done in our example is called a resource. When talking about the resource in the documentation for this API, the capitalization and styling of the resource's name should be consistent and visually distinct from other uses of that resource's name as a word. This means that when referring to the resource that corresponds to a task to be done, it should be consistently referred to as "a Todo" with a capital letter as an English proper noun.

In the contrived example of a todo list REST API, the benefits of this kind of repetition may not be evident. However, consider the REST API for a payment processing product. In that context, many of the resources needed while moving through a payment process are commonly used nouns and verbs in addition to being important foundational concepts of how the software product works. A good example is the API resource of a Charge which is the software representation of taking a payment from a customer. In the documentation around how to interact with a Charge API resource, there are sentences that read similar to:

To charge a Customer, create a Charge object.

In this example documentation sentence, "charge" is used as the English verb while Charge is typographically identified as being the API resource. In keeping with the behaviorist emphasis on repetition to influence learning, being consistent in the typographic indications of what object or abstracted concept is being referred to allows readers of the software documentation to have a positively impacted educational experience.

References

Chen, I. (2005). Behaviorism. In Encyclopedia of Distance Learning (pp. 127-147). IGI Global. ( https://www.igi-global.com/chapter/behaviorism/12097)