Posted by Bruce Landon on Sunday, July 31, 2005 11:35pm
Subject: Last Discussion Assignment:
What are the 10 most important concepts/issues that you encountered in
this cognitive psychology classroom?
(Between the dashed lines are the answers from students Summer 05
Names and dates have been removed to preserve confidentiality of responses)
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
The ten most important concepts and issues I learnt in cognitive psychology:
1. The importance of effort and time on task for learning
2. Vygotsky/constructivism--the simple fact that I never saw before, but I see so clearly now that ALL knowledge involves transmission. You can't know how to do something without being taught.
3. Implicit beliefs--because I now realize that I had the implicit belief that you should just know how to do something automatically
4. Incremental Theory and Entitiy theory--aloud me to understand what was going on in my head and shift to approaching school with the expectancy that learning can be slow BUT can always be improved with effort.
5. Metacognition--I have always been a highly reflective thinker but learning the concept actually improved my ability. Like Vygotsky talks about in Thought and Language concepts allow and aid our cognitive development. As funny as it may sound learning the concept metacognition actually improved my metacognition.
6. Schema--just because it has sort of caught my interest and I know I will do some future work with the idea.
7. Schon's reflective practitioner model--I agree with her/him that reflective thinking is the key to TRULY learning. In school too much teaching emphasizes knowledge, if instruction focused on teaching students how to learn and how to be successful (including things like social skills) the population of this country would be on average a whole lot smarter and successful.
8. ACT-R--peaked my curiousity, so I will check it out agian in the future
9. LSA--also peaked my curiousity, and I will check it out agian.
10. Cognitive psychology in general--at first it seemed strange and frustrated me but after a coupple of week I really began to enjoy the course and the material. Before I thought I would specialize in social psychology, but after taking this class I really see my future involving cognitive psych. The material not only intersts me I find it incredibly relevant to my studies and understanding of myself, and what more can you ask from a subject?
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
1. The importance of learning in interactive environment. (Vygotsky)
2. Attention is often limited in the working memory and it may affect
many different kinds of learning.
3. Prior knowledge by itself has minimal contribution to students unless
it can be effectively integrated with new knowledge.
4. Sleeping can enhance your memory of complex motor-skills. (I
personally find this very fascinating!)
5. Good guiding questions and scaffolding could help children activate
their schemata in learning new topics.
6. Retrieval of memory is state-dependent. (I am actually using this
strategy to enhance my encoding and retrieval ability!)
7. Many academic areas should be viewed as "problem solving" challenges
for students (ie. science and math).
8. Metalinguistic skills are required in order to develop effective
language skills.
9. One could be an effective reader by developing different strategies
even when one has low IQ. (IQ is not a casual factor of being a good/
bad reader)
10. Divide things into CHUNKS (of seven) to facilitate our own encoding
and decoding process.
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
The ten most important concepts that I have encountered in this
cognitive psychology class are:
1. The importance of instructional and study designs and their
impact on the learning processes due to limited capacity of the
working memory (cognitive load theory).
2. Meta-cognition-: Learning this concept has made me reflect
upon the learning and thinking processes that I have while I am
constructing knowledge. Thinking about my thinking has allowed me
to monitor my actual learning processes. (Vygotsky)
3. Constructivism: Knowing that knowledge is built from other
or prior knowledge and from being taught makes you think about
other related knowledge you have when first encountering a new
subject area (Vygotsky)
4. Schema activation: Giving others cues about related
material to spark thought of new material
5. ACT-R…..NOT!
6. Implicit memory- The fact that our unconscious memory
has control over decisions and experiences we have in the future is
interesting.
7. Incremental Theory- knowing that ones intellectual ability is
changeable.
8. Self regulated learning: knowing that we have control and
exlicit understanding of our own learning.
9. Information procesing model: because this model portrays
the human mind as similar to a computer in terms of aqcuiring,
storing and retreiving information.
10. Overall, the entire class was intersting because most
psychology classes that I have taken cover a specific topic
(childhood for example0 whereas this course lookda t a wide
varierty of tpoics that fall under the cognitive psychology umbrella.
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
1) The importance of REM sleep and its effect on memory or
how it could affect the ability to remember if it was interrupted.
2) Vygotsky’s cognitive approach and the importance of pre-
existing knowledge (constructivism) and social interaction in learning.
3) The importance of effort rather than ability in achieving
tasks, and that a person could improve his low ability by choosing
strategies that are appropriate with solving his tasks.
4) The ACT-R model, challenging but an interesting model.
5) The information processing theory as it portrays the
beauty of human mind of how it processes information by encoding
storing and retrieval.
6) Metacognition allows me to become more aware of how a
person can have knowledge of his own thoughts and the different
types of knowledge of cognition from declarative to procedural to
conditional.
7) The WebCt program, at first I was confused with it and
thought it wasn’t a good idea for a psych course; but after I got
used to it I now find it really helpful in terms of sharing ideas and
giving the option of saving permanently all the important ideas and
websites.
8) Reading readiness or the presence of a critical period where
a child must have a certain level of mental maturity in order to be
able to read.
9) Bandura’s concept of reciprocal determinism, I find this
concept to be important as it emphasizes the importance of the
interaction between the most significant variables in our life
(personal, behavioral, and environmental factors) in learning.
10) Generally, all the topics in cognitive psychology are
interesting and the classroom book is very appealing as it describes
the topics and their applications for teachers which makes cognitive
psych a very practical subject that we can employ in our daily life.
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
The 10 most important concepts/issues I encountered in this class are...
1. Zone of proximal development
2. Vygotski's social learning theory.
3. metacognition
4. strategy usage
5. self efficacy
6. student efficacy
7. working memory
8. increasing memory storage amount
9. asking meaningful questions
10. mnemonics
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
The most important concepts that I have learned is:
1.ACT-R model: I found this very intersting. I never heard of this ACT-R model before I started this class. I found the cognitive modelling tutor part of it very interesting.
2.metacognitive knowledge: I found the definition of this term to be true. It's not just what you know, but it's knowing what to do with what you know.
3,4.Working Memory and Short-term Memory: how short-term is not just a temporary
place for storage but it has many ongoing functions that transfer short-term memories to long-term storage.
5. Declarative Knowledge: I found the study on nonsense syllables by Ebbinghaus
interesting. He showed how implicit memory worked.
6.Procedural Knowledge: Although, the defition is simple. It's nice to increase vocabulary with psychology defintions of words.
7.Conditional Knowlege: I found this to be very important. Knowing when to perform and action and why can apply to school,relationships, and work.
8,9. Semantic and Episodic Memory is very important because it's the main concepts in long-term memory structures. I also learned that semantic and episodic memory is declarative knowledge.
10. I also found 4C/ID Model very interesting. I liked how it enforces practice and not just learning by informing.
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
1. mnemonics
2. scaffholding
3. zone of proximal development
4. divergent thinking
5. exogenous constructivism
6. endogenous constructivism
7. dialectical constructivism
8. cognitive load theory
9. algorithms
10. prototype
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
The ten most important concepts that I have encountered in the Cognitive Psychology class are:
1. Short term memory
2. Long term memory
3. Working memory
4. Act-R model
5. Procedural knowledge
6. Declarative knowledge
7. Elaborative Interrogation
8. Implicit memory
9. Explicit memory
10. Zone of Proximal Development
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
1. The Builiding Blocks of Cognition (concepts, propositions, schemata, etc..)
2. Encoding Simple Information (Mediation, Imagery, Mnemonics)
3. Encoding Complex Information (Schema Activation, Levels of processing, Encoding
processes, Guided Questioning)
4. Recognition and Recall
5. Bandura's Social Cognitive Learning Theory (Self-Efficacy, Self-Regulated Learning Theory, Modeling)
6. Beliefs about Knowledge (Reflective Judgment and Education, Stages in Reflective Judgment)
7. Expert Knowledge in Problem Solving (Domain knowledge, General knowledge, Role of Deliberate Practice, Problem-Solving Transfer)
8. Constructivism (Vygotsky's Dialectical Constructivism, Types of constructivism)
9. Transition to Reading (Pre-readers, Visual-Cue Reading, Phnetic-Cue Reading)
10. A Cognitive Model of Writing (The task environment, Long-Term Memory, Working Memory)
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
The 10 most important concepts in the cognitive psychology classroom:
1. The Modal Model
2. The building blocks of cognition (concepts, propositions, schemata, productions and scripts)
3. Metacognition: thinking about thinking
4. Attribution theory
5. Bandura's social cognitive learning theory (self-efficacy, modeling)
6. Cognitive Load theory
7. A cognitive model of writing
8. Encoding Simple Information (mediation, imagery, mnemonics)
9. Retrieval Processes (encoding specificity, recognition, recall, reconstruction, relearning)
10. Short term and working memory (capacity, duration and accessing information)
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
1. Mnemonics. long before knowing this technique I was fascinated with human brain and how it utilizes its ability to memorize complicated material.
2. Automaticity; this section of the book was so interesting that it made me remember the functions that I do not usually pay atention.
3.Declarative and procedural knowledge and their functions
4.Vygotsky's Zone of proximal development
5.learning to Read; I can certainly say that any student would difinitely use this section of the cognition in order to succeed in the their student life and beyond
6.Self efficacy. After learning this section I was no longer confused about degree of my knowledge about material I know and how to describe them.
7.Retrieval and working memory;learning about these two topics was helpful to know how utilize my memory in order to achieve better goals
8.writing; I really learned essential information about writing that can help me in the future.
9. Cognitive behaiour. generally this was th most interesting section because related closely to what I expected from this course.
10. ACT-R Model; this part of the course was very challenging and hopefully I can fully master at it some day.
* The webct based learning was very helpful and educational I really Enjoyed it.
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
There were so many concepts and issues that limiting them to 10 is hard.:
1. ACT-R
2.chunk
3.connectionist
4.encoding-specificity principle
5.fan effect
6.flashbulb memory
7.metacognition
8.metamemory
9.proceduralization
10.proposition
11.schema
12.script
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
The most important concepts/issues that I feel I have encountered
in this class are:
1. I am leaving this class feeling more confident in myself and better
prepared for University. I have been pushed to the limit by having to
face things that I have never faced before, reading articles that I had
no clue what it was I was reading and taking tests on what I should
know but don't know. This has forced me to have persistence when
I feel stupid...I am much better prepared to meet new challenges in
psychology, knowing what it is that I don't know and will have to
face versus thinking of only what it is I that I know.
2. How our memory works and the stories we tell
3. The effect that self-efficacy has on our performance
4. Elaborative processing and the types of strategies we can use
5. Peer support while going through school versus thinking one can
do it alone
6. Different problem solving techniques
7. Semantic sentence processing
8. Counterfactual thinking
9. Naive beliefs
10. Cognitive load theory
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
The 10 most important issues or concepts that I encountered:
1. automaticity
2. Bandura's reciprocal determinism
3. Vygotsky's zone of proximal development
4. dual coding theory
5. mnemonics (link method, first word method, peg method etc)
6. IRE pattern
7. dichotic listening task
8. REM sleeping
9. parallel processing
10. metacognition
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
The ten most important concepts that I have learned throughout this course would be:
1) Reconstructive memory: I am interested in studying posttraumatic stress disorder and how and why someone may block memories from their consciousness versus how they reconstruct their memories.
2) Methods of teaching reading: I have found the teaching methods described in this section to be quite helpful as I am currently working with my 10 year-old niece who is having a difficult time with her reading
3) Dialectical constructivism: Realizing the importance of interacting with my peers, as well as those considered to be experts in a particular field, in order to enhance my learning.
4) Regulation of cognition: Being aware of how I learn, and consciously knowing how and when to use a strategy that will be effective in learning will definitely help me through university as well as other areas of my life.
5) Mnemonics
6) Retrieval processes
7) Latent Semantic Analysis: A very interesting model
8) Monitoring comprehension of my reading: When reading detailed textbooks for my courses, I often find that I cannot absorb what is actually being read. Having a few techniques to use in order to test my knowledge is very useful.
9) Cohesive ties
10) The differences between experts and novices when problem solving
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
The ten most important concepts/issues that I have encountered in this class are the concept of
ACT-R theory,
Latent semantic analysis,
metacognition,
schema theory,
constructivism,
Vygotskys scaffolding,
classroom discourse,
REM Sleep,
chunking,
implicit/explicit beliefs.
These were the concepts/theories that I spent a little more time
on and read more thouroughly because I believed them to be important. I also, however, found them interesting.
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
1. Time and effort for study-it not the matter of being smart, how you devote to the course decide the final grads. However, the methods used for study is also important. Otherwise you will be overloaded with the class materials
2. Reflective Thinking – this is a very important skill if students want to do well on their study.
3. Sleep- this concept let me knows that in order to do well on study, sleep well, so that you can enhance the new materials you have learned.
4. Zone of proximal development- form this concept I learned that interaction
between you and other people who have lilt more knowledge about the problem you are working on is the best way to improve yourselves
5. cognitive load theory- it is very useful because it point out where our limit is – working memory capacity is limited
6. ACT-R theory. – It is an interesting theory I have never seen before, even
though it takes some time form me to fully understand it.
7. LSA theory- I found it together with ACT-R theory is worth to study more in depth
8. difference between expert and novice problem solving – I am not good at
problem solving, now I found out where to improve
9. Peer torturing- it is am very useful approach for study.
10. self-efficacy- this is also am important factors for people being success
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
1.Learned Helplessness: Helped me understand how helplessness is a learned behavior in the face of new challenges.
2.Knowing Inaction: This concept reveals the importance of gaining experiences by doing a particular task and applying different strategies.
3.Semantic Memory: A fascinating concept that explains how memory helps to generate new concepts and relationships among different principles.
4.Trial and Error: A method of learning when attempts are made to find solutions to problems randomly.
5.Story: Intriguing because it appeals to the emotions of the listener helps the listener to remember facts better that are narrated in story.
6.Well Defined Problem: If a problem is defined well, it helps us to find effective solutions.
7.Self Efficacy: A quality that makes an individual to work persistently and with confidence.
8.Elaborative Interrogation: This concept attracts me because it stimulates me to ask “why” and look for answers.
9.Attention: Taught me how important it is to be attentive and showed me the role attention plays in any learning experiences.
10.Dialectical Constructivism: Fascinating because portrays the role the environment plays in enhancing my knowledge.
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
1. ACT-R theory: considering this has been the one most important thing in this class this semester, it seems only right to name ACT-R one of the most important concepts, and it is interesting as well.
2. Vygotsky (constructivism): social interaction in learning, zone of proximal development
3. Declarative memory: simple basic concept but it is the core part of cognitive
psychology
4. Procedural memory: J. Anderson agrees this and declarative memory are necessary to comprehend the human cognition
5. Metacognition: "thinking about thinking"
6. Mnemonics: I've been using some of these memory strategies for long time now, but some are new to me and it's practical.
7. Schema activation: this concept is probably known to most people but it's nice to add this one to my vocabulary
8. Long-term memory: memories are permanent in LTM
9. Spreading activation
10. Overall learning strategy : I learned to plan my studying and all this strategies are overwhelming but I'm slowly adopting in my cognitive system.
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
1. Metacognition
2. Cognitve load theory
3. Automaticity
4. Memory
5. Act-R
6. Encoding Processes
7. Schemata
8. Domain Knowledge
9. Vyogtsky's Dialectical Contructivism
10. Metalingustic awareness
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
It was difficult to choose just ten concepts because there were so many covered in this course. I narrowed it down to ten topics that I think are interesting, important, and some that I think will appear on the final:
1) Mnemonics
2) Heuristics
3) Techniques used to enhance the encoding of information (schema activation, guided questioning, generation effect)
4) The usefulness of group discussions and group studying
5) The differences between distributed and mass practice
6) The importance of self efficacy on performance
7) The problems functional fixedness can cause
8) The use of technology in learning/ teaching (designing multimedia instruction, cognitive load theory)
9) The complexity of language structures
10) The role of and limitations of working memory
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
1-the use of technology: this class structure put great emphasis on the use of
technology which can be useful in future courses that have a similar structure.
2- Selfregulation: it is a major aspect in this class ,which somehow thought me to be more self regulated
3-Act-R: something I never heard before ,and provided a new window to look at things from a different perspective
4-learning mathematics: I have always had problems with math . knowing about showed me some of the common mistakes I use to make.
5-matacognition: it was useful knowing how to understand and regulate my thought process
6- Naïve beliefs : it expanded my understanding of how some beliefs implicitly interface with learning.
7- Attributions: broaden my understanding of how people and students react to certain situations predictably and to what they attribute their reaction.
8- effort: there is a lot of effort required in this class. Nevertheless, it help motivate students since it is within their limits.
9- instructional suggestions: this help to adopt new strategies which can have some benefits.
10-the overall picture: this course help me develop a brad and applicable picture of cognitive psychology and its application. specially the broad field of ACT-R.
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
1. All aspects of constructivism because it argues that what individuals learn and understand is constructed through mental processes and social interactions which holds an enormous amount of importance to me because I am studying to become a teacher.
2. Metacognition - the ability to regulate thinking and learning is fascinating to me and it is, in my opinion, what sets humans apart
3. Knowledge - all of the different types of knowledge and how they are applied to learning and understanding can be applied to life in various forms
4. ACT-R cognitive model - I found the architecture very fascinating although I did have difficulties understanding how it worked (I believe it is because I had never come across anything like it before) and I am interested in researching more about the newest version(ACT-R 6.0).
5. All aspects of information processing - learning more about how information is processed through each phase in memory was very interesting.
6. Reciprocal determinism - I think that Bandura was right on and this idea will definitely be of some importance to me in my further studies.
7. Memory - learning more about how stimuli is perceived, encoded, stored and retrieved has influenced the way i view memory and I have altered my study habits as a result
8. The importance of strategy selection and use were of particular interest to me because I had the opportunity to do further research on the topic for my term paper.
9. Mnemonics - I had always used mnemonics in studying or remembering things but
until this course i had never really understood how they worked in regards to information processing and memory
10. One of the most significant concepts I came across in this course was the implications for instruction. I was genuinely amazed at how each concept within this course could be applied to instructional design and I will definitely be taking that information with me when I become a teacher.
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Subject: Re: Last Discussion Assignment:
I wouldn't say they're the most important, but they're most intersting. All of them focuses from chapter 2 to chapter 5 for me.
1.)Network models
2.)ACT-R model
3.)Connectionist Models
All three of these cognitive models have their own pros and cons. Though I do agree that ACT-R and Connectionist models has a stronger point than Network models.
4.) Encoding Specificity (and how implicit memory might relate to it.)
5.) Working memory (I think it is must more workable than Short-term memory)
6.) Constructivism
7.) Zone of proximal development
8.) Instructional scaffolding
They allowed me to percieve learning at a totally different perspective
9.) The importance of working in a group environment
10.) Time management
Working on them extensively.