Read Section A. True or false? Write T or F. Albert Bandura is Canadian. He is from a town called Mundare. It is in the state of Alberta in the
north of Canada. He was born on December 4th, 1925. In 1949, Bandura got a degree from the
University of British Columbia. In 1952, he got a PhD from the University of Iowa. In the same year,
he married a teacher at a nursing college. Her name is Virginia. His first daughter, Mary, was born
in 1954. His second daughter, Carol, was born in 1958. He has written many articles about child
psychology. In 1977, he wrote a book about child development. Bandura now works at Stanford
University in the USA.
1. Bandura was born in Canada.
2. Bandura went to two universities.
3. He had three children.
4. He was a psychologist.
5. He lives in Canada.
Read Section B. Choose the best ending.
Bandura has studied child development all his life. He believes that children learn their behaviour by
observation. In other words, they watch and copy. He wrote about his ideas in Social Learning Theory in
1977. In particular, he thinks that children behave aggressively because they have seen aggression in adults.
Bandura’s ideas changed the direction of psychology, although some other psychologists disagreed with him.
They followed the theory of a much more famous person, Sigmund Freud. He said that children often
behave differently from the way their parents behave. For example, a parent who shouts at his child and hits
him might produce a very quiet and timid child.
The psychologist’s most famous work is called the Bobo Doll experiment. He first conducted the experiment
in 1961. A bobo doll is an inflatable doll about the size of a child. Bandura used 36 boys and the same
number of girls between the ages of three and six years old. Before the experiment, researchers grouped the
children on average aggression level.
The experiment involved three rooms. A researcher brought a child into the first room and then left. An adult
was sitting in one corner of the room. Sometimes it was a man and sometimes a woman. There were toy
building blocks, a hammer and a bobo doll in the adult’s corner. The researcher put the child in the opposite
corner of the room. There were many toys for the child to play with.
1. Bandura’s theory is called ...
a. Learning by observation.
b. Social learning.
c. Watch and copy.
d. Child development.
2. Bandura believes that if a parent behaves aggressively, the child will ...
a. become timid.
b. not behave any differently.
c. behave aggressively.
d. hate his or her parent.
3. Aggressive people ...
a. copy other people.
b. are timid.
c. are quiet.
d. shout and hit other people.
4. Bandura used ...
a. 72 children in his experiment.
b. 36 children in his experiment.
c. 39 children in his experiment.
d. 45 children in his experiment.
5. Each experiment involved ...
a. a man, a woman and a child.
b. a man and a woman.
c. a child and a man or a woman.
d. two children.