Technology

1. How does this topic fit into what I have learned already in this course?

We learn about the importance of transferring and applying what we learn to different settings, and technology is a way for students to do just that. Technology is a link for communication, and it allows both students and teachers to communicate and give feedback with each other and other professionals. It also helps move students to become better writers. Technology also is a big motivation factor for students to teach themselves new things. They are interested in learning for meaning.  An advantage of using technology when teaching is that is helps make thinking visible. We have learned about using our visuospatial sketchpad and making connections with images, and technology helps us to do just that. Last week we focused on different learning environments, and technology is a great way to connect classrooms to the community. I have a classroom web-page which allows family and friends to stay updated on what we are doing each week in class and how they can help at home. This is a great way to encourage parent involvement with their child. 

2. What am I still not clear on in this week's reading(s)?

The readings provided us with many different examples of how to integrate technology into our classrooms, and I took away many great ideas that I can't wait to try in my room. I am clear on the importance of our students in todays age using technology and I will continue to see opportunities to learn more myself. 

3. Under what conditions would I apply this material to my own teaching/work? 

Technology is a tool that not only enhances students learning, but teachers as well. We learn through technology by "doing." It is a great tool for both teachers and students to receive feedback along with building new knowledge. When teachers learn to use new technology we model the learning process for students to see. I use technology within my classroom often, but I would always like to use more if given the resources. We do a big unit on weather in third grade and we spend three weeks using tech. to track and record the weather. This is a great opportunity for students to collect and analyze real data, instead of looking out the window and saying, "Oh ya...it's cold today." It is VERY important for us as teachers today to stay up to date with technology. Kids are knowing more and more and if we can't keep up how are we teaching them new things. 

Chapter 6 & 7 - How People Learn

1. How does this fit into what I have learned already in this class? I really enjoyed reading these two chapters. It was nice to take a closer look into different learning environments and rethink the goals that I have as a teacher for what I want to see happening in my room. A learner centered environment helps students make connections between previous knowledge and new content being taught. A teacher in this environment takes a closer look at how preconceptions affect new learning. Sometimes this prior knowledge can interfere as students need to relearn new ideas. A knowledge centered environment lets students make decisions and problem solve based on the knowledge they have stored in their memory. This environment helps students learn for understanding. Assessment based environments must base grading on learning goals within the classroom. This reminded me a lot of the chapter in Cognition that referred to types of questions asked, such as nested questions. 

2. What am I still not clear on?  I think that I am clear on the four learning environments, I just still find it very difficult to align all four with the way schools are ran today. Each environment has great qualities, and seem to overlap in some ways, but it is hard to manage all these things at one time. 

3. I took away a lot of great ideas from chapter 7. I enjoyed reading about things the elementary teacher did in her classroom. I have learned to put more depth to each and every lesson. I never realized the smallest task such as taking attendance can have mathematical meaning behind it for my kids each morning. I realize the importance of having a classroom community act as a family. The impact of this connection leads to students focusing on and connecting with the material being learned. I want my students to be able to take what they have learned in class and apply it to their everyday lives, and I think these learning environments are meant to do just that. 

Language Production

1. Chapter 9 focused on language comprehension, reading & listening, and these two chapters focus more on language production. The ability of language as a whole is a complex and amazing process. Our working memory places such a large part in both language production and comprehension. In chapter 4 we learned about Baddeley's model of working memory. The writing process uses many of these same components. As we brainstorm and think to our self what we want to write, this is a procedure of the phonological loop. I make many models to hang in my classroom to help my third graders visualize what their writings will look like. They may not be able to use their visuospatial sketchpad to see the correct layout of a specific type of writing, so these posters help them with this. We have discussed how important the central executive is in so many chapters. Once again in writing the central executive coordinates the planning phase, it helps generate sentences, edits, and revises. What a complex process. 

2. I am pretty clear on the information given in these two chapters. Our workshop presentation was on language development, so we had a chance to take the research even further. Writing was interesting to read about. It is amazing to me how many cognitive processes writing consists of. 

3. We produce language in so many ways, conversations, writing, speaking, e-mail...... As the text states language is probably the most social of all of our cognitive processes which is why it is so important to our everyday life. Speaking is a difficult skill for young children. They may know what they really want to say, but getting it out is the struggle. They have to overcome limits from memory and attention in order to deliver what they want to say. I see this in the classroom daily as students retell what they have read or learned. To help with this, I will listen to what the student is trying to say and then have them repeat after me. Writing is not just important to students in school, but just as important to us in our profession of teaching. Writing and speaking share many cognitive components which is why when I teach writing we spend an equal amount of time sharing what we write each day. The writing process is difficult at the third grade level. I use many different ways of brainstorming and organizing thoughts before putting it on paper. Expectations seem to be getting higher and higher for young children and writing requirements. Free writing time is being taken from them and the fun of writing is hard to find when we worry about so many components at such a young age.  

Language

1. Demonstration 9.1 shows many connections between language and previous material that we have covered. Understanding language is dependent upon visual and auditory recognition. The template matching theory, feature analysis theory, and recognition by components are three theories that have been studied as to how we recognize things within our language. Both working and long term memory play a large part in comprehending language. Working memory helps us to take in information long enough to process and interpret it. Making inferences is especially likely when people have large-working memory capacity. Long term memory makes it possible to remember language that has been previously stored. When we are comprehending new language we rely greatly on previous knowledge stored in our long term memory. 

2. I understand that ambiguous sentences can have identical surface structures, but very different deep structures, but I agree strongly with the text when it says that we respond more quickly and accurately when language is more straightforward. I think I am just having trouble understanding some of the examples of ambiguous statements. 

3. In third grade students are working on reading fluently and adding to their vocabulary. When reading about the background of the structure of language I notices a lot of things that I already do with my students. We break apart sentences all the time looking closely at subjects and predicates. My students use the entire constituent to find clues about the meaning of the words within. We are continuously searching for context clues as we reading third grade. (You can perceive familiar words more accurately when they are embedded within the meaningful context of a sentence. Kintsch, 1998) Although in third grade we are mainly focusing on adding a rich vocabulary and reading fluently, some students still struggle with vowels and blends. I would say that I favor the indirect access hypothesis and support the phonics approach. I still help my kids sound out words when they get stuck by breaking words apart. When assessing students in class I rarely ever use negative words or an implied negative. Although these questions may require more thinking, and processing time, these were the trick questions that always got me when I was in school. I could go on and on as to how language plays a part in our classroom, without it we would be lost......

 

1. When learning about the Availability Heuristic I was thinking back to previous chapters on memory. Research found that when people were encouraged to recall pleasant events from their memory, pleasant events seemed more likely in their future, effecting the way they make decisions. In contrast if people were encouraged to recall unpleasant events they saw unpleasant things happening in their future. The belief bias, the confirmation bias, and the illusory correlation all emphasize top-down processing. When decision making we must take advantage of our memory, concepts, and previous knowledge. Although deductive reasoning uses established rules to draw conclusions, and decision making is much more difficult to distinguish if our conclusions are correct, both require thinking. Thinking requires us to go beyond information that we are given. Deductive Reasoning, Decision Making, and Problem Solving all take heuristics to help lead us to appropriate situations. 

2. I am still somewhat unclear on the anchoring and adjustment heuristic. It becomes more clear to me when I see the similarities to the availability heuristic. The highly available information is acting as the anchor. It makes sense to me that the anchor restricts the search for more relevant information in memory, so would an initial anchor be an example of when you form a stereotype when first meeting someone without knowing anything about them? 

3. Students are faced with decision making in all areas of their school work and in the real world. We do a lot of conditional reasoning tasks in class, but it is our job as teachers to make sure students are taught heuristics, or strategies to help them make decisions as they are faced with them in life. We need to make sure they know the misconceptions such as sample size, base rates, recency, and familiarity before making the decisions that they do. It is our job to show them the research to prove each heuristic,  just as the text is teaching us through demonstrations. 

1. We are surrounded with situations that involve problem solving. In previous chapters we have covered many topics that are part of the problem solving process. Solutions to problems are not always obvious due to obstacles that must be overcome. PI (proactive interference) could affect your ability to come upon a solution due to previously learned material getting in the way, as well as imagery interference as well. When people solve problems they seldom choose the trial and error approach, they take the time to plan their attack by breaking a problem into smaller parts and sometimes working backwards by looking at the big picture. Our central executive plays a large part in organizing what we need to do to find a solution. Our central executive helps in eliminating irrelevant info from the problem, and selecting strategies to use. Both bottom-up and top-down processing play a large part in problem solving as they prove to affect our ability to solve problems. 

2.  Slavery and Duffy's article was a tough read for me at first, but by rewording the principles into my own terms it helped me to better understand. I had to stop and really think about a lesson that included all of those components. I always strive to have those things in my lessons, but quickly realize how difficult it is when we are so test driven in today's education. 

3. It is important that we as teachers prepare our students for the real world that is full of problem solving. They need to know strategies to take with them when they leave the classroom and when to choose which strategy is best to use. I enjoyed reading the section on creativity because it is so important that we support and encourage our students to show originality. My goal as a teacher is to plan lessons that will enhance students intrinsic motivation. I see that the best learning takes place when curiosity strikes! 

1. I never really stopped to think about how much information we are taking in and how often we make inferences based on the information that is already known. This chapter shows just how impressive our cognitive abilities are. Four models are discussed in the area of semantic memory in this chapter. Each having similarities and differences from one another. The feature comparison model, Prototype approach, and Exemplar approach all explain how items belong is some sort of category and we classify new information by deciding where it fits best. The final approach are network models. This is approach is more complex and shows how connections are made through networks that link together in many ways. This chapter also describes how schemas and scripts influence our memory. Schemas greatly influence the inferences we make in memory. Our background knowledge or current schemas that we may already be custom to may mislead us when learning or hearing something new. I was amazed after reading this chapter of how much information we really can store and how we organize it all:)

5. (Sorry I am out of order!) The PDP approach was a lot of information to take in. The book states that it is still a fairly new approach and cannot yet evaluate whether it can accommodate actual data about a wide variety of cognitive processes. The PDP research has trouble explaining the forgetting of well learned information that occurs when we learn additional information. I would think more research needs to be done to determine the links between psyschology and neuroscience. I an unsure as to what would be a way to do this. 

2. As I was learning in this chapter how we make connections and store more and more information, I was thinking a lot about chapter 2. In chapter 2 we learned how we use our senses for recognition. We then learned how stimuli is interpreted from our previous knowledge. When we have certain schemas or scripts about information our perception plays a large part in forming new connections. Some of us may perceive something different than others. When reviewing visual perception chapter 2 refers to the PDP approach. When people see features in a word, these features activate letter units. These units then activate a word in our "mental dictionary" for that combination of letters. This examples shows how the network model links ideas together all of the time. 

3. The question this week about "How schemas influence our memory through each phase" was tough for me. I think I need more information about how each phase works. It was all kind of blending together to me and each phase wasn't as clear cut to me as maybe it should be. 

4. I use the networking model all the time in my classroom. As many people stated this week, I think that it is important for students to see the many connections that can be made throughout our memory process. When we brainstorm new ideas in class we usually make a web. We may start with only one specific idea, but we end up with related information that students might not have thought ever connected. I think having students work together to do this is helpful. Different students have information to pull from different backgrounds. One students ideas may trigger another students ideas. 

6. Learning about the structure of semantic memory is important because it helps us in organizing more and more information that we take in. Without this process we would not be able to make connections and we would be on overload. I think the four approaches in this chapter explain why we have not gone into overload and we can hold all the information that we do.

7. I use graphic organizers to represent network models with all kids. Low students probably benefit from them the most because it gives them a broader look at a topic being covered. Higher level students can make connections and show the link between topics without writing them down, but when they work together they might have a larger background knowledge to work from. 

8. I think that an easy way to learn about our semantic memory is to ask students what schemas they already have before a lesson to determine if prexisting knowledge is affecting their new learning.