Rote vs. Meaningful Learning

"Meaningful learning is more effective than Rote"

(Ausubel, Novak, 1978)     

Rote Learning

    Memorization of facts or associations

           Inert Knowledge

           Applied to restricted/artifical set

Meaningful Learning

    Not arbitrary-relates to prior knowledge

    Describes number of connections or associations 

    How knowledge is constructed

        -may have key role in learning

        -could influence comprehension strategies

           Aristotle vs. Plato

    Aristotle

        Sensory experience basis for knowledge - EMPIRICISM
        No existance outside physical world - ALL SENSORY

   Plato

         Every object in physical world has corresponding abstract "idea"

        inherited

        NATIVISM
 

    Empiricism vs. Nativism vs. Constructivism 

Empiricism - Aristotle, John Locke, Thorndike

    sences are the basis of knowledge
     Biological
     "Blank Slates"

Nativism - Plato, Immanuel Kant, Noam Chomsky

    Knowledge inborn, mind must mature,
     "see what you already know" "buds need nurtured"

Constructivism - Piaget

    Knowledge constructed rather than absorbed
     People impose ideas on the world
    coming to know through experience *VYGOTSKY
     "Students are pages that will write themselves"

Law of Exercise (Use & Disuse)

Law of Effect 

Law of Exercise

    Law of Use

        When a modifyable connection is made between a situation and a responce, connection's strength is increased

    Law of Disuse

        When a modifyable connection is NOT made between a situation & response, a connection's strength is decreased.

Law of Effect

    When a connection is made and followed by a satisfying state of affairs, connections strength is increased (vice-versa) 

Educational Application of (Thorndike's) Laws

    Flash Cards

    Follow correct with praise
    Follow wrong with punishment

    Keep related words separated by time

    *  3X4 and 3+4 

                    Piaget

Scheme  Mental or physical action or process used to attain golas or solve problems

Assimilation   Finding a home in your existing knowledge

Accomodation   Change existing knowledge to fit new thing

Equilibrium  

Disequilibrium   When we try a strategy and it does not work, the discomfort we experiece

Equilibration    Ballance restored in assimilation and accomodation

Vygotsky

Zone of Proximal Development 

Spontaneous Concept (Pseudo-Concept)

Scientific Concept 

ZPD - Vygotsky's term for the range of tasks that are too difficult for children to master alone, but that can be mastered with guidance and assistance from adults or a skilled child.

Scientific Concept - "true"

    mature understanding of many catorgies

    Can label and define

Spontaneous Concept - "Pseudo-Concept"

    Can label but CANNOT define 

Information Procesing Theory

Information Stores 

Cognitive Processes

Metacognition 

Information Stores How information from environment becomes stored in memory

Cognitive Processes   Attention, Perception, Rehearsal, Meaningful Encoding
APRME

Metacognition - Thinking about thinking

Comparmental Models of Memory

James (1890)

Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) 

James (1890)

Stimulus-
Primary Memory- Imediate events (short term)
to either
Secondary Memory- Permanant, indestructable memories (long-term)
Forgotten 

Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968)

Distinguished between Memory (data retained) and  Store (where info is held)

Sensory Register

Working Memory

Permanent or Long-Term Memory 

Sensory Register

(briefly holds stimuli)
.1 to 1 second Vision
2 to 4 seconds hearing

Allows info to be held long enough to transfer to working memory

Working Memory

Hold info as a person works with it
Consciousness

Permanent or Long-Term Memory

Permanant info store
Capacity - vast and durable

Factors that Help accomodate limitations of working memory

CAD 

Chunking
assembling info into something easier to understand
"Learning is interesting"  "tirelginrniestea"

Automaticity
mental operations that can be performed with little awareness
Essnetial for developing higher-level cognitive skills (Stanovich, 1990)
ex. Driving a Car, basic math operations, reading music, typing.

Duel Processing 
visual and auditory working memory
independantly yet additively
present info verbally and visually

"Flashbulb Memory"

Why do we remember them? 

Flashbulb memory - episodic memory

Tendency to be engaged in very emotional situation

Tendency to replay
     Minds
    Discussion

Create elaborate encodings
     many related thoughts

Declarative Knowledge

Procedural Knowledge 

Declarative Knowledge
"know that"
facts, definitions, procedures and rules

Procedural Knowledge
"knowing how to"
ride a bike, use a computer, add fractions

Attention including models of and strategies for attracting;

Bottleneck Models 

Capacity limits and selective attention imply a structural bottleneck

    Broadbent-bottleneck at or just prior to perceptual analysis

   Deutsch & Deutsch - All info analyzed, bottleneck located just prior to response selection 

Perception

process by which people attach meatning to experiences (interpretation)

    influences info entering working memory

    information in working memory is "percieved reality" rather than "true reality"

Afected byi Prior Knowledge 

Rehearsal Systems

PVS 

Rehearsal Systems
Process of repeating info over and over (aloud or mentally) without altering its form

    Phonological Loop - rote learning (most repetition is done here)

    Visual-Spatial Sketch Pad 

Key Components of Motivation

GKM 

Goals

Knowledge

Metacognition 

Means-end belief

Goal: Get a job that meshes well with a family 

Means-end belief

"why is he getting a teaching certificate?"

"He thinks he can get a job where his summers are free and he can spend time with his family."

Hitler's painting goals. 

Metacognitive Processes

M

AofA

AofO 

Monitoring Goals
Examining Progress
High achieving students self-monitor more than low-achieving

Appraisal of Actions 
Evaluating actions already performed
Estimating likelihood that actions will be performed in a way in the future

Appraisal of Outcomes 
estimate likelyhood that certain future events will happen
"what will happen next"
"why do I think it will happen"

Evaluate performance after goals met
"Why did I get an 'A' on this test?"
"How do I feel about getting the job?"

Beliefs that play important role in the Appraisal of Actions Process
PS

S-E B

AB

I 

Personal Standards
Progress is compared to standards
     ties to quality and rate
Perfectionists and Satisfiers

Self-Efficacy Beliefs
One's beliefs about what one is capable of doing
similar to Agency Beliefs (beliefs about being able to personally control success)

Ability Beliefs
General sense of your skill in an area or set of areas
     "I'm good at math" - "I'm a pretty good student"
Comprise a students self-concept
    mentally arranged hierarchally
       At top is a general sense of competence

Interest
    Quality of person or object interaction
    blending attention and feeling pleasure

Origins of Self-Efficasy Beliefs
Personal accomplishments and Failures
     "no stronger predictor of self-efficasy than the grades recieved"

Seeing others who are similar succeed or fail diffferent tasks
     WE NEED MODELS!

Verbal persuasion 

Self-Efficacy

Bandura Vs Schunk 

Bandura
S-E is critical factor in whether students will achieve
     those with high self-efficasy will learn more, persist longer than low

Schunk 
S-E influences choice of activities
     Those with low S-E for learning avoid challenging tasks

Teacher Self-Efficacy

Major impact on quality of learning that students experience

Instructional self-efficacy linked with students' mathematical and language achievement over an academic year (ashton & webb, 1986)

High
View difficult students as reachable
regarding learning problems as surmountable

Low
Lack classroom management confidence
become angered at misbehavior
pessimistic about students' ability to improve
more special ed. referals

Four Processors of Seidenberg & McClelland Model

Orthographic - phonological - meaning - context

Expecially Meaning Processor 

Orthographic - Print
process and recognises strings of letters
word recognition when letters in word attain degree of activation

Phonological - Speech
Alphabetic backup system
     regular grapheme-phoneme correspondence
Seems to be connect to phonlogical loop (rehearsing)

Meaning

Context

Linguistic Hierarchy:

Phoneme - Morpheme 

Linguistic Hierarchy:
Model of Language (analogous to memory models) looks at
     Content
     Structure
     process

Phoneme
basic unit of spoken language
single speach sounds represented by a single symbol
no meaning individually
45

Morpheme
Smallest unit of meaning  in language
     Words
     parts of words
     prefixes
     suffixes
more than 100,000 words in English

How is Phonemic Awarenes Measured?

Segmentation tasks; indicate number of phonemes by
     tapping
    holding up fingers

Manipulation tasks;
     delete, add or rearrange phonemes

Blending tasks;
     given phonemes and asked to put them together

Dyslexia

What we thought - What we know 

What we thought
Visually based learning problem
     confusion in way letters seen

What we know
have substantial weakness in auditory-related skills
     phonemic awareness

Have trouble associating sounds with written letters 

Awareness of morphological units

Morphological awareness related to reading achievement in first years of school

    some studies controlled for vocabulary
    some controlled for general intelligence effects

Related to spelling 

Reading Development Strategies

Recognize the main idea

Sumarization skills

Inference-Making

Predicting

Look at cover of book and assess throughout reading and compare with thoughts at the end. 

Re-read familiar book

independent reading of a new book that was introduced

Identify letters

Write story

Cut up story and reassemble in correct order

Intruduce new book

Read new book

 CONNECT TEXT ...  Studies on adding phonics actually improve outcomes

Nature of Goals

Goals are reasons why people do what they do
     mental representations of a future state (cognitive)
     all goals have to do with personal desires

Types of Goals
Individual 

Lvs.P

Pvs.D

Avs.S 

Learning (mastery/task) vs Performance (ego)
focus on mastery                focus on avoiding failure 

Proximal (short-term) vs. Distal (long-term) goals
help more (frequent feedback)         help less
sence of mastery and progress                       

Academic vs Social goals 
                       positive interacions with teachers/peers
                        

Types of Goals
Classroom

I
C
C

Individualistic
everyone has chance to get good grades
students set goal to best that they can
     indiffferent to how others do

Competitive
only a certain number of students get the best grade
encourages students to think about doing better than others
    "the success of one student is tied to the failure of another"

Cooperative 
assignment of grades based on how well small group does on a whole
students want to do well and want others to do well as well

The Hmong
constantly monitor learning progress of peers, offering help
individual achievement de-emphasized in favor of group success
culture emphasizes cooperation

Native Americans

Mexican Americans

Southeast Asians

Pacific Islanders

    COMPETITION IS SILLY AND OFTEN DISTASTEFUL

    CREATES CULTURAL CONFLICT 

All parents (low and high SES; minority and majority) are very supportive of education

Working class/poor
childhood is a period that "naturally happens"
Directives
sense of powerlessness and frustration
constraint 

Middle/Upper Middle 
childhood is "concerted cultivation"
parent actively fosters and assesses
reasoning/directives
child criticises parents
entitlement

Genetics and Environment

Jensen - first to seriously study group or sub-population differences

supported
    IQ test as an indicator of Genetically determined views
    some humas have genetic disposition to score higher

Repetition

Connection between situation and responce (candy)

constant monitoring 

Culture of Power in the Classroom

5 Things 

issues of power in classroom

rules for participating in power

ruler of culture of power are rules of culture of those in power
upper middle class

if you're not a participant in the culture of power
     being told the rules makes aquiring power easier

those with power, are least wiling to admit that it exists.  Those without power are often the most aware of its existance 

Elementary              

Personal environment
less competition
less ability grouping
more small group activities
students less concerned with evaluation
more motivation

JR High

Level choice
Fewer positive encounters
teachers less effective
increase in whole class environment
higher standard of grading

Attribution Theory:

Assumptions, components

3 dimensions 

Attribution Theory:

initially backward looking

I do well because of me, others, something else 

Cognitive
    occurs internally
     inferred from behavior

Process involving knowledge manipulation into cognitive system

Directed and results in behavior that "solves" a problem 
    directed toward a solution 

Higher-Order Cognition
question asking
decision maker
problem solving
critical thinking
evaluative

Lower-Order Cognition
knowing
remembering
application of memorized algorithms

Bloom's Taxonomy

6 Levels 

Knowledge  Recall data or information

Comprehension  State a problem in one's own words.

Application  Use a concept in a new situation or unprompted use of an abstraction.

Analysis Distinguishes between facts and inferences.

Synthesis Put parts together to form a whole, with emphasis on creating a new meaning or structure.

Evaluation Make judgments about the value of ideas or materials.

Higher Order Thinking Skills

Focus on teaching
     infering
    generalizing
critical thinking

Critical Thinking
     make and assess conclusions based on evidence
    reasonable reflective thinking focuses on what we beleve in.