🧪 Educational Learning Theory Simulation

Educational psychology offers three canonical accounts of how a student's mastery grows with practice, and they don't agree with each other. This simulator runs all three side by side as real bar-chart curves over 40 practice trials: a behaviorist reinforcement-strength model (exponential approach to asymptote, driven purely by reward rate), a cognitivist working-memory model shaped by the well-documented spacing effect (massed cramming versus distributed practice), and a constructivist schema-threshold model where mastery stays flat until enough prior knowledge scaffolds an "aha" moment, then rises as a sigmoid. Each of the three environment sliders only feeds the theory it belongs to, so pushing reinforcement up does nothing for the constructivist curve and vice versa — a direct, quantifiable illustration of why these theories prescribe different classroom interventions for the same struggling student.