7.5

I read the chapter by Nel Noddings titled Critical Lessons: What Our Schools Should Teach.  The author’s main point is that student need to be taught critical metacognitive skills to help them understand how they learn best, what strategies work well for them, and what their key interests are.  Noddings suggests that students should be given assignments requiring them to engage in introspection, but fears that schools will not opt to provide such assignments for fear of the type of discussions it may elicit.  I can recall such an example in my own schooling history.  When I was a Junior in high school and in an Honors English III class, we were assigned to read Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau.  I loved the book and have re-read it many times; however, I remember the heated discussions it elicited in my class and observing the discomfort of my teacher in having to discuss such topics that she herself was highly opinionated about.  This was also the only time in my school career that I felt that I was truly penalized in grading for having a different opinion than my teacher.

I do not believe that the thoughts of this article really fit into a social cognitive framework since much of what Noddings discusses in individualistic.  Instead, I feel that Nodding would fit better with an Information Processing theory or maybe even a Constructivist.  I would say he would agree with Information Processing theory because he talks about the importance of building schema and how to aid retrieval through the use of tricks and mnemonic devices.  In some ways, I could see Noddings as a Constructivist as well because he discusses the importance of building knowledge to maintain interest.

Noddings would describe a failure in learning as a complete lack of interest and a failure to learn important metacognitive skills to develop a system for learning that works for the student.  I think that how other theorists view failure hinges on whether they believe that failure is something that happens to the student or in the student.  A behaviorist might say that a student has been failed by a lack of proper reinforcement procedures to develop good habits.  A constructivist might believe that a student failed because he or she did not build strong enough schemas and associations to make learning meaningful.  Information processing theorists may say that a person fails when they do not have the right equipment to learn at a commensurate rate with peers.  The major difference is who or what controls the failure.

I do not believe that there is a specific recipe for success.  I think that we have discovered some things that may help, but nothing will work every time for everyone.  Goal setting tends to improve motivation and help people be successful as does impulse control.  However, neither of those things can guarantee success.  If goals are too lofty or impulses are controlled so much that there is never any risk, success could be inhibited.

Questions:
Teachers always ask me how to improve motivation.  What types of intervention is suggested for students who are struggling with motivation?
Does a high level of motivation lead to burn-out?
What are some factors that help to explain the vast amount of individual differences in motivation?
Is there a developmental component to motivation?

7.4

So, after observing my own behavior after reading the assignment for this post, I have realized that at least in some areas, I have a fixed view of ability.  Ever since finishing the reading and video watching for this activity (on Monday) I have been actively avoiding the blog post.  Why?  Because I believe that I am not good at creative things.  Any time I see an assignment that asks me to do something creative, I roll my eyes, complain, and avoid.  I lost all motivation when I saw that I was supposed to do something creative.  I can see through self reflection how closely my fixed view of ability is to my motivation.  When I believe that I am very capable and prepared to complete a task, I am motivated to get it done; however, when I feel like I am not capable I seem to able to find every reason to put it off.

7.3

A key point made by Bandura is that there are many processes occurring when a person is learning be observing a model or using the social cognitive theory.  The first process is the attentional process.  Bandura said, "People cannot be much influenced by observed events if they do not remember them" (p. 1).  Bandura touches on two important points that were also thoroughly discussed by James, attention and memory.  These two points are interwoven to such an extent that one cannot exist without the other according to many of the readings we have read throughout the course.  However, is it possible to pay attention but fail to remember or to remember something despite a lack of attention?  Is there a way to measure such actions?

Bandura's second process is the representational process.  This is also tied closely to memory and is how modeling is coded into the memory.  Sensory receptors intake modeling as they would any other information and code it into memory to be utilized, referenced, and connected to later. 

Translational processes are the behavioral component of modeling theory.  Translation occurs when people take something modeled in put it into practice.  For example, my son copies many things we say at this age.  He often uses the same inflection that we use when he repeats us.  This is translation.  He took in something we said in a certain context, committed it to memory, and then carried it out as a behavior.

Motivational processes are the most confusing to me.  Bandura describes them as "processes that regulate whether people act on what they have learned observationally" (p. 2).  I believe that this is related to James discussion of the will.  I believe that Bandura would say that we have a choice about whether or not to translate modeling into behavior.  If we translated everything we observed into behavior, what would we be but copying robots?  I think Bandura is saying that we have a choice about what to use and not to use from what we observe other humans doing.

7.2

I have always had high self-efficacy in math.  I have always felt like I was good at math and it seemed that I could learn new concepts easily.  When I compared my skills to my peers, I felt like I was better at math; therefore, improving my self-efficacy as it was mentioned in the chapter about how students compare themselves to others.  I also always got good grades in math.  However, I remember the phenomenon that the author discussed about how lower grades for high achieving students can damage self-efficacy.  Since I believed that I was good at math and was accustomed to getting high grades in math, so when I received a lower grade, my confidence was bruised.  The greatest test to my self-efficacy in math was during my senior year of high school when I decided to take Calculus.  It was the first time I felt like I was not as good as my peers and that I was falling behind.  My confidence was shattered and I ended up dropping the class half way through the year.  Luckily, some success in undergraduate and graduate statistics classes helped to recover some of the self-efficacy I had in the area of math.

7.1

These areas can influence one another.  For example, if students did not get enough sleep and the lights are low, they may not be able to pay attention well.  Also, a student with above average intelligence may have a teacher who does not challenge him or her and that student loses engagement in class.  It is necessary to have good factors going in all areas to optimize learning.

6.5

I can see where this professor is coming from.  A few years ago, I might have answered differently, but I feel as though I have seen this phenomenon first hand in myself and in others since starting graduate school.  My first semester, I was in a statistics class where we had lab in a computer lab.  It was introduction to statistics and not very exciting, but I remember watching other students in class surfing the internet or messaging each other.  It was very distracting.  But, worse of all, I have seen this phenomenon in myself.  I got an iPad a little over a year ago.  I was so excited to free my life of paper, notebooks, and 3-ring binders.  I started taking class notes on my iPad.  I feel like my attention suffered greatly.  It was very tempting to browse away from my notes and do something else.  The cognitive load of switching and controlling impulses took my mind further away from the content.  I know it did.  But, I saved a lot of paper.

6.4

I believe that self-control or self-regulation plays a large role in learning.  I see everyday at work that the students who are struggling are often described as not having good independent work skills, initiation, or self-control.  Both the article and the Colbert video mentioned attention and how control of attention can aid self-control.  In students with ADHD, we often see deficits in executive functioning.  Executive functioning are the skills like organization, good work habits, and impulse control.  These students are unable to attend to to the most important aspects of school.  They are said to have little self-control.  It is impossible to inhibit responses as James said is necessary for having will when you are unable to direct your attention properly.  The article called the manual shifting of attention cognitive change.  The researcher on Colbert also talked about the necessity of shifting attention away from the marshmallow in the experiment.  The children who could wait for two had to shift their attention away from the fact that they could get one.

I believe that prospection plays a large role in success as well.  The article discussed how people who have strong future goals tend to be able to use better self-regulation skills to achieve those goals.  The same is true of the marshmallow experiment.  Children who were able to set their sights on two marshmallows were more motivated to wait.  I believe that this is why those children who waited were more successful later in life.  That goal setting and achieving tendency probably stuck with them.  I can relate to that.  I have know what I wanted to be and what degrees I wanted to obtain since I was a sophomore in high school.  That clear goal has helped propel me through undergraduate and graduate school with no breaks or wavering.  I had friends who started college more unsure about what they wanted to do in life.  Those friends were more likely to take time off, not finish, or finish but start working in a different field.  I believe that my ability to goal set has helped me to be successful in life and I imagine the same is true for the children from the experiment.

6.3

James' chapter on The Will appeared to integrate many of the ideas from the other chapters.  Some of these ideas included attention, habit, and the acquisition of ideas.  I picked up on the concept of attention as it relates to The Will as I read the chapter, but my understanding of the relationship was further solidified through the video.  Toward the end of the video, the speaker discussed how James related attention to beliefs.  We pay attention to what we believe in and we believe what we pay attention to.  This concept made a lot of sense to me.  It is hard to believe something that we are not paying attention to.  However, belief is a complex concept in and of itself so I wonder how James would further explain belief and what it mean to believe.  Perhaps in the book on religion the Dr. Usher has mentioned he discusses this idea further.

James made the distinction between habit and will by discussing inhibitions.  James says, "Voluntary action, then, is at all times a resultant of the compounding of our impulsions with our inhibitions" (p. 87).  James discusses how we do not react to every thought in a motor or behavioral way.  We have inhibitions that help us push down some impulsions completely while substituting others.  I am reminded of how I have to make decisions about what to work on while I am at work.  School psychology requires a significant amount of juggling with multiple evaluations and reports in progress at a time as well as interventions and consultation.  If every time a project came into my mind, I started working on it, I would never get anything done.  So I have to use inhibitions to chose what I work on and for how long before I switch to another task, even when other tasks may cross my mind as I am reminded of them. 

I was struck by how much I believe James would support the current initiative for Positive Behavior Intervention and Support (PBIS).  The principle behind PBIS is to reward good behavior instead of punishing bad behavior.  The chapter and the video both discussed how James felt it was better for students to learn to chose good for the sake of good instead of substituting it for bad.  This is the idea behind PBIS and research has shown that this approach is successful at managing student behavior and improving school climates.  James seemed to have seen the advantage to this approach even at the time when teachers were still allowed to use corporal punishment, which I find interesting.

6.2

The first video about mathematics instruction reminded me of the article we read this week on problem solving.  The speaker emphasized the importance of the approach and designing the problem.  If students are allowed to build their own problems, I believe they are more likely to make better connections.  For example, the problem he gave of the water tank.  When he gave students real life examples, they were better able to pull from prior experience.  Students might think about a time they had to fill something up or create visuals of other water tanks they have seen.  James would say that building these connections is crucial for sustaining attention, engaging memory, and learning new concepts.

The second video about the marshmallow experiment reminded me of working in the school system.  We try to approach evaluations as a team.  There is a strong emphasis on collaboration.  However, just like in the video, if we spend too much time trying to decide who is in charge and building one plan, it may not work right and we run out of time.  However, like the Kindergarten students, sometimes we need to prototype.  We may need to try out different options.  I think this is especially true for writing IEP goals.  While we do not want to experiment with a student's education, we can experiment in the best way to write goals and which areas should be priorities.  I think that trial and error is often looked down upon because of the error component; however, sometimes it is the only way to arrive at the best answer.

6.1

Problem solving is analogous to learning because much of learning involves problem solving.  The way teachers teach is often by having students solve problems.  Learning is also necessary to have good problem solving skills.  Through learning, students learn how to approach problems in a productive way using prior knowledge.  I do not believe that all learning is problem solving.  I believe that we can learn without solving problems.  I think of learning from reading a book.  I would not call reading problem solving; however, we often learn from what we read.

Most of the problems I try to solve recently involve evaluations at school.  Recently, I have been working on a Functional Behavior Assessment for a high school student who got into a fight.  Since I am probably not going to observe him getting into another fight, I had to problem solve to determine what kind of data would be useful to me.  I tend to always approach problems conventionally and have difficulty approaching them in the non-conventional way that the article mentioned was so important.  I rely heavily on prior knowledge and making connections to other situations.  The more experience I gain in school psychology, the more I have to pull from.  However, when my experience in insufficient, I seek out help from someone who has more experience.  I related much more to the discussions of logical problem solving relying on connections, prior knowledge, and prior experience than the discussions of how people can approach a problem in a creative way.  I cannot think of any examples of times when I approached a problem in a creative way as defined by the reading.  Maybe that is something I should work on.

5.4

The excerpt from The Shallows was poignant and interesting.  I did not have to read far before I started to relate.  I was especially struck by his points about not have patience to delve into long pieces of writing.  I, too, used to be a ravenous reader.  I have been blaming graduate school for my lack of motivation to read.  I assumed that having so much assigned reading and taken the joy out of reading for pleasure.  However, after reading Carr, I am beginning to wonder if technology has stolen my joy for reading.  Maybe I have fallen into the same trap that Carr described when he said, "And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation.  Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swift moving stream of particles" (p. 6-7).  I felt it even reading this text.  As I read on and on, I was interested but felt the ever growing strain of maintaining focus.  I tried really hard to read books for fun over the summer since I did not have any classes for the first time since beginning graduate school.  I picked up five or six different books that I had been wanting to read, but barely made it a few chapters before I lost interest.  However, I could watch hours of documentaries on Netflix or sift through hundreds of blogs about random things on my iPad.  My attention was better held by digital media and I do not know when that shift happened.  We see this phenomenon a lot with children with ADHD.  Parents will say, "He can play a video game or watch a cartoon for hours.  Why can he not sit still and pay attention in school."  The answer is simple according to Carr and the other authors he references.  Digital media changes so frequently that we are not required to engage in deep thought or concentration. 

I was also struck by Carr's discussion of the human brain and computers.  I feel that a lot of the information processing literature compares the human mind to a computer.  Even our PowerPoints would compare different pieces of memory to computer parts like hard drives.  Carr says, "[People assume] that the brain operates according to the same formal mathematical rules as a computer does - that in other words, the brain and the computer speak the same language.  But that is a fallacy born of our desire to explain phenomena that we don't understand in terms we do understand" (p. 176).  According to Carr, long term memory is much more complex than a hard drive, but a hard drive is something we as humans can wrap our heads around.  What did we compare long term memory to before computers?  Pulling material from long term memory is much more complex than pulling it from a hard drive.  Retrieval requires effort and connections and activation.  Pulling information from a hard drive only involves locating and selecting.  While I computer is a great analogy for information processing, it does a disservice to the awe inspiring magnitude of the human brain.  The human brain is capable of so much more than a computer.  My computer does not inherently know that certain files should be grouped together in one folder because they are all for the same class.  I  have to tell it that.  Our brain does know how to organize material into groups and make associations to help us find that information later.  Our brain's ability to organized has influenced computer organizational structures, but it still takes the human to keep the computer organized.

I feel like I could go on and on, so I will only discuss one more point.  When Carr was discussing memory and the purpose of memorizing material he wrote in reference to someone else's thoughts, "[They] were not recommending memorization for memorization's sake or as a rote exercise for retaining facts.  To him, memorizing was far more than a means of storage.  It was the first step in a process of synthesis, a process that led to a deeper and more personal understanding of one's reading" (p. 178-179).  I believe that James would have supported this notion.  Memorizing is helpful because to memorize you have to connect.  And when you connect you learn.  Memory can be a powerful too for learning if it is fully taken advantage of and if adequate connections are made.  James would argue that children cannot learn by rote memory without connections and associations.  Carr would agree, as I would I.  Learning must be meaningful and interesting (another James point).  If students can connect what they are learning to something interesting, they will learn it all the better.

5.3

The video I chose is Ted Talk on how to improve memory and break Miller’s Law of 7.  The law is well known and we have mentioned it in class.  The average person can hold seven pieces of information in their short-term memory at a time.  The speaker suggests that this law is not true.  He talks about how he is a memory athlete and competes in memory challenges in Australia.  One example he gave was a man who memorized the entire Sydney phone book in 23 hours.  The speaker give three principles to improved memory.

The first principle is Mindfulness.  James would call this attention.  The speaker says that most memory failures are actually failures of attention.  Our course discussions and reading on attention would support this fact.  When we fail to pay attention, we are likely to miss things.  The next principle is Visual and Imaginative Encoding.  This principle would also be supported by James and is assertion that connections are the keys to memory.  The speaker suggests that making more connections will increase the ability to remember more things.  The third principle is organization.  This is supported by Piaget’s ideas of assimilation and accommodation.  Thoughts must be organized to be retrieved more easily.

5.2

The chapter by James on Memory essentially supported many other chapters in the assertion that strong association is the key to learning.  James makes it clear that he believes that people need to make connections for learning to happen.  Remembering is no different in that connections are required to use memory to its greatest extent.

One section of James caught my attention in light of our discussion last week on learning styles.  James said, "You should interrogate them as to their imagery, it is said, or exhibit list of words to their eyes, and then sound similar lists in their ears, and see by which channel a child retains most words.  Then, in dealing with that child, make your appeals predominately through that channel" (p. 68).  James goes on to say that perhaps this would be possible in a small class, but it is not feasible in most classrooms.  He suggests instead that teachers try to use as many modalities as possible when teaching to try to reach all kinds of learners.  I think that Kirschner would agree with James that it is not feasible to run a classroom in this way; however, Jame appears to be acknowledging that there are different learning styles.  According to the article from last week, that is not the case.  What does James' alluding to different learning styles mean for his view on teaching pedagogy as a whole?  Can this view be backed up by modern research?

Both James and the Roediger article also spend a significant amount of time discussing the best ways to insure good retrieval.  James points out that just because we cannot immediately retrieve a piece of information, it does not mean that we have not learned it.  He suggests that the information has had an effect on the way we view the world, thus it is learned.  Roediger suggests that the best methods for good retrieval are those that require frequent retrieval practice.  As in, the more we retrieve a piece of information, the better we will retain it.  Overall, I am not sure that the two authors are saying inherently different things, but I am unsure of how Roediger would feel about James assertion that retrieval is not necessary for learning.

The Roediger article reminded me of some classes I had in high school that I did not enjoy much.  One in particular came to mind.  My freshman year, in U.S. History, we were memorizing states and capitols.  We had quizzes each week where we were given a blank map and required to fill in the states and capitols.  Spelling counted, which frustrated me because I was not a strong speller and I felt that it was unfair to count my correct answer wrong because of a minor spelling error.  However, after reading the article and James, I realize that my teacher was being clever.  I was making more connections with the materials by having to learn how to spell each item.  I was also having to retrieve the material frequently and produce the correct answers rather than recognize them.  In the long run, I probably retained more state and capitol names spelled correctly through this process than I would have had we not been continuously quizzed.

I was also reminded of the controversy surrounding state assessments and common core.  The education system is constantly under fire for spending too much time testing and teaching for the purpose of testing.  However, Roediger would defend the system insisting that the retrieval process will lead to better retention.  I do not believe that James would rebuke the process; however, I believe that he would say that the test should not be the only measure of learning.  Is testing necessary for learning or does it get in the way?