FINAL LEARNING LOG

What?

After taking the test to see how i believe people learn best, I found that I believe in Cognitive Development the most. In the cognitive chapter I learned about the different elements of getting information and how and where it goes. Encoding, retrieval, and storage are all part of the process. We looked at the model of how memory is processed and stored. Information goes through a series of processes in order to be used as short term memory, long term memory, or is lost. You can promote short term memory by using mnemonics, chunking, and massed practice. To gain more long term memory you can try doing more hands on activities and distributed practice.

Information goes into the brain and then is processed. First there has to be some sort of stimuli or input that wants to go into the brain. These stimulus' are entered through our senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell, etc). Then the information goes through a process of sensory registry and it is quickly scanned for importance and precoding. Some information is lost here. After a processes called Attention (which is focusing on a particular stimuli), information goes into the working or short-term memory stage. Here is where maintenance rehearsal takes place along with coding and recoding. Some information is lost again. Then through the process of encoding, information is passed down to the Long term memory stage where it is stored and used in the future.

Memory is very much so connected with emotions and senses. Think about when you were a child. Visualize the sights and smells of a particular place. Now today if you were to smell that same smell, you would be taken back to that place as a child. Remember detail. The one down fall of memory is that it is always changing and reinterpreting. This leaving room for misunderstanding and confusion. Learning is a semi-permanent change in the mental process and it's mostly due to experience. There are many different reasons why people sometimes can't remember information but the most common reasons are because you may not have completely decoded the information, there is interference because something else is in the way of that memory, or because of decay, the idea of use it or lose it.

Encoding is an important process to help retain information for the future. There are several different ways to encode, here are a few:

Rehearsal
Meaningful learning (previous knowledge)
Organization (chunking)
Elaboration
Visual Imagery
Enactment
Mnemonics

I really liked this chapter and found it really helpful. Before this assignment I thought I believed in the Behaviorist Theories the most, however, I have learned otherwise. I liked behaviorist because I truly believe in the idea of motivation of students or people in general. People won't do things without knowing that there is something in it for them, so it's important to give students those motivations and also train them on how to behave.

So What?

This chapter is important for me to understand so I can better utilize different skills in my classroom. Understanding how the brain works and how my students are going to remember or recall the information that we give them in class will help me as a teacher know how to help students retain or recall that information. I know that most of the information that students learn in my class is lost shortly after the class is over; however, I believe that if we help them use different memorization skills and do activities that will help students store that information in different parts of the brain, it is more likely that they will be able to use it in the future. Memory is a process and not something that just happens, so I believe it is important to help steer the information in the direction that I want it to go.

Now What?

I have found the Educational Psychology class to be really helpful and informative for me. I loved learning about all the different ways in which students learn because that will be a key component to how I structure my lesson plans. I would like to better understand the aspects of Erikson's Psycholsocial stages of development. I know the eight stages, but I want to be able to work with students in these stages to better understand the impacts of actually dealing with issues in those stages. Some students will be in different stages in my class such as industry lv. inferiorityl, initiative v guilt, identity v. role confusion. Erikson says that my students will only be in Identity v. role confusion, but I think that they may fall into a couple different categories at once and it will be interesting to learn more about that and see if my theory is correct!