Social Cognitive Theory: the Cornerstone of Classroom Life

According to social cognitive theory raised by Bandura (1983), people can learn new actions merely by observing others performing them, and observers do not have to perform the actions at the time of learning. In fact, social cognitive theory stresses the idea that much human learning occurs in a social environment in which people acquire knowledge, rules, skills, strategies, beliefs and attitudes. Accordingly, three types of interaction occur between individuals and societies : behavioral, environmental and personal, and through enactive and vicarious learning and observing different models behaviors, affective, cognitive and behavioral changes take place in an individual. This will be considered as the building block for what teachers and learners can work on understanding Quality of Classroom Life which involves multifaceted interpretive processes based on frameworks of expectations of what constitutes a good or a poor quality of classroom experience (Allwright, 2006).This study aims to investigate the role of social cognitive theory in the quality of classroom life including complex and idiosyncratic ways in which understandings not only vary among classroom participants but are also bound to be different from the perspective of an external observer of the classroom situation.