11.20.06
Posted in Socio-historic perspectives, Annotated References - Class readings at 1:11 am by youngsah
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in Society. Intro, Ch 1-3
Introduction. – Historical background on Vygotsky including state of psychology at the time, influence of Russian revolution, and incorporating Marxism into psychology.
Ch. 1 Tool and Symbol in Child Development – Some talk on what others think and then an argument that humans are different from animals not in tool use but in language and the subsequent organization that it brings.
Ch. 2 The Development of Perception and Attention – One difference between children/humans and animals is that humans can think about things that aren’t there. There is also a discussion of the system of signs.
Ch. 3 Mastery of Memory and Thinking. This chapter talks about how sign manipulation becomes more and more sophisticated. Also, talk of interfunctional relations and how memory of different aged children is not only different in itself, it’s used differently.
In these chapters Vygotsky asserted that the use of language, specifically signs, is the basis and organization for thinking, planning, and especially higher level thinking. There also seems to be a push here both to distance man/child from animals as well as distancing Vygotsky’s ideas from what has gone before.
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Posted in Situative perspectives, Annotated References - Class readings, Miscellaneous at 1:06 am by youngsah
Resnick, L. B. (1987). Learning in and out of school. 1987 AERA Presidential Address. Educational Research, 13-20.
This paper asserted that school was a different, special, and separate place from daily life. The paper goes on to compare school learning and outside learning on many different fronts including individual cognition v. shared cognition and pure mental exercises v. tool use. The article also goes on to look at the purpose of education.
I preferred the organization of this paper to the Brown piece. As someone who was dissatisfied with some of their schooling (and who isn’t) the Situative perspective is nice in that it wants knowledge to have a point when so many school activities are too far removed from actual meaningfulness. However, should school be different than outside learning, is there a need for teaching things that aren’t directly applicable or used out in the world? I’m sure some philosophers and theorist might think so. Me, I’m not sure.
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Posted in Situative perspectives, Annotated References - Class readings at 12:52 am by youngsah
Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 32-40.
These authors believe knowledge is situated and it should be taught in an authentic way like a “cognitive apprenticeship”. In this paper, they talk a lot about authentic activities and how school often presents learners with inauthentic activities. They also compare how just plain folks, students, and practitioners approach things to strengthen their argument.
I generally agree with the idea that there should be more authentic activities in schools but I don’t want to go as far as these authors did. Also, in some disciplines there would be disagreement about what kinds of activities would be most useful or most practitioner-like.
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Posted in Annotated References - Class readings at 12:17 am by youngsah
Adamson, L. B., Moster, M. A., Roark, M. L., & Reed, D. B. (1998). Doing a science project: Gender differences during childhood. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 35(8), 845-857.
In the article, the authors looked at two years of a elementary school science fair focusing on gender differences in areas of science, participation, awards given, as well as whether the parents and science fair judges had any obvious gender biases. They did this through observing science fair results and participants, a parent survey, and asking the judges to give their best guess as to the gender of the science projects they had judged. The authors found little difference in participation, but found females doing more projects in the biological/social sciences than males. No obvious gender biases were seen in either the parents or judges.
I could say loads about this article since we did a critique on it but I’ll be brief. As a social science major with many natural science/engineering friends in college I feel they needed to explain their categorization of the sciences a bit more. I would have been more comfortable if they had split natural and social sciences and then talked about biology as on odd case than the way the authors classified it in the paper. For more on this paper, see my critique.
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Posted in Socio-historic perspectives, Annotated References - Class readings at 12:16 am by youngsah
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in Society. Ch 4-6
Ch. 4 Internalization of Higher Psychological Functions – Vygotsky clarifies somewhat the relation between tool and sign as well as talks about how simple reactions become more complex processes and are then internalized.
Ch. 5 Problems of Method - Vygotsky makes the claim that though their perspectives may differ psychologist study things in strikingly similar ways. He then goes in to contrast his approach, which focuses on analyzing processes and explanation. Later there is a discussion of choice research.
Ch. 6 Educational Implications – Talks about three different perspectives in thinking about learning and development, then contrasts these with ZPD. I probably didn’t get as much out of chapter 4 as I should have, some more focused reading might be warranted. I also added on Chapter 6 because I’m a fan of ZPD. I liked Vygotsky’s approach to criticizing the scientific approach of other psychologists in chapter 5. I’m sure they all weren’t studying things in the same way, but to be able to say that most were does make one think.
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10.30.06
Posted in Cognitive, Annotated References - Class readings at 4:10 pm by youngsah
Phillips, D. C., & Soltis, J. F. (1991). Problem solving, insight, and activity. AND Phillips, D. C., & Soltis, J. F. (1991). Piagetian structures and psychological constructivism.
Chapter 4 Problem Solving, Insight and Activity, focused on Gestalt theory and Köhler but brought in Dewey as well.
Chapter 5 Piagetian Structures and Psychological Constructivism focused mainly on Piaget going over his stages, cognitive structures, and criticism of Piaget.
I liked the criticism of Piaget in part because the way that I’ve read of him before has either been through textbooks, which generally support his approach, or through the books he wrote, which of course support his theories though the books themselves are rather dense in them he is very often not very clear. As far as brining Gestalt and Dewey together, I liked that too. Since I have a psychological background (with little educational experience or knowledge to speak of) it’s nice when authors bring the two disciplines together. It helps me put things in better perspective.
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10.22.06
Posted in Cognitive, Annotated References - Class readings at 11:52 pm by youngsah
Phillips, D. C. (1995). The good, the bad, and the ugly: The many faces of constructivism. Educational Researcher, 24(7), 5-12.
This article focuses on the diversity of perspectives in the constructivism perspective. Phillips attempts to organize the perspective of constructivism along three axes. These axes were “individual psychology versus public discipline”, “humans the creators versus nature the instructor”, and “individual cognition” vs. “social and political processes”. The author gives examples from different disciplines of different theorists/researchers and their ideas and how they fit into these categories.
A good overview. Helpful not only in untangling the constructivism perspective but also in placing persons from diverse disciplines into the constructivist framework. I don’t know that there aren’t better categories for parsing these things out but it’s a helpful start. It was odd that the author bifurcated the second axis. It seems that would be reason enough to rethink an axis when it’s different than another axis. Putting together these three axes and mapping people on a three dimensional plane would be fine and dandy if the author hadn’t split the second axis. It just doesn’t make sense to me. Though I didn’t’ know all of the people Phillips talked about I knew some and that I think was helpful enough.
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Posted in Cognitive, Annotated References - Class readings at 11:51 pm by youngsah
Bruner, J. (1960). The Process of Education. Chapters 1 and 2.
The first chapter introduced Bruner’s theory on how education should be reformed and the things we should focus on in educating students. He had four themes he wished to explore: “structure, readiness, intuition, and interest”. The second chapter focused on the idea of structure. He anchored the section with four points. These were: students must understand fundamentals to understand a subject well, details are better remembered when they are put in a preexisting structure, understanding fundamentals in a subject can lead to transfer of knowledge or skills to another subject, ideas should be taught and built on to get students from “elementary” knowledge to “advanced” knowledge. Interesting. My first official exposure to Bruner. My first impression is that these chapters generally made sense. He also acknowledged that pragmatically this approach requires a balance between new discovery-based techniques and the old techniques where students are told something and then forced to test it. Knowing what I know about the memory system (in an information processing way) focusing on structure makes absolute sense. It’s difficult if not impossible to connect ideas to anything if there isn’t an underlying structure to ground them.
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10.01.06
Posted in Annotated References - Class readings at 10:21 pm by youngsah
Beal, C. R., Garrod, A. C., & Bonitatibus, G. J. (1990). Fostering children’s revision skills through training in comprehension monitoring. Journal of Educational Psychology, 82(2), 275-280.
This article talked about two studies. The first compared sixth and third grade children. A group of children from each grade was taught a “self-questioning method” while a group from each grade (the control group) was not. Children were exposed to stories in two sessions. In the first session experimental group, children were exposed to problematic stories while controls were exposed to non-problematic stories. Children were usually able to solve problems in the text of the stories if they found them regardless of group or age (though older children did better). Children who were taught the “self-questioning method” did better than controls at finding errors in the text.
The second study was more complicated. In the first session one group of third graders was trained in the “self-questioning method” and presented with problematic stories, one group was trained in the “self-questioning method” and presented with clear stories, one group was presented with problematic stories without training, one group was presented with clear stories without training. Six problematic stories and one clear story were used for the second session for all participants. The instruction had a significant effect effect, participants were more likely to fix missing-sentence problems than contradictions, and participants in the “self-questioning method” problematic story condition did the best of all.
At first glance, this article seems straightforward though I’m sure we’re going to pick it apart in class. I would have liked to have seen a condition where the experimenters did not remind the children to use the method (or that the method existed) in the second session to see whether they would employ this tool naturally. In a classroom context, this would be more useful than having to review and reteach a procedure that may be very artificial for a young age group. I had poor experiences with a few facets of English teaching (non-educational grammatical busywork, etc) so the article made me think of that too. Though I think, there is the assumption at least in some parts of school (especially elementary) that you give kids things that are comprehensible to read. I think they tend to expect this in writing because children are often put in situations in and out of school that are nonsensical at first to them until they parse out the meaning from the elements of the situation.
Reading is something different.
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09.25.06
Posted in Tutoring, Cooperative Learning, independent readings, Annotated References - RDP readings at 1:11 pm by youngsah
Merrett, F. and Mottram, S. (1997) Do boys or girls make better reading tutors? An empirical study to examine children’s effectiveness as tutors using the pause, prompt and praise procedures. Educational Psychology 17(4):419-433.
This study looked at peer tutoring using the “pause, prompt, and praise” procedures. This is presented as an alternative to putting poorer readers in a separate class or giving them separate instruction from the teacher. Reading level was measured before and after tutoring to determine if tutoring had any effect. There were 24 tutor-tutee pairings. The sex of the tutor and the sex of the tutee were also examined to determine if one sex was a more effective tutor, better tutee, or whether there was some kind of interaction between tutor and tutee sex. Previous studies suggested that same sex tutoring would be most effective because members of the same sex are more likely to open up to one another. All tutees except 2 improved reading skills over the course of the study but those that studied with a tutor that was of their preferred sex (students were asked whom them preferred to learn from) improved more than those that didn’t have a tutor of their preferred sex. There was no significant effect of same-sex or different-sex tutoring nor was either sex a better tutor or tutee.
A couple factors collided to create my interest in this article. First, I was a tutor in high school and college (though mostly math and science) and the hardest thing was to find the best way to help a student. Reading was something that I was never particularly good at tutoring possibly because I didn’t really understand where my students were coming from. Also, recent popular news articles have been talking about the small budget allotments for special education and this is an approach that might help that situation. Studies have shown (though I don’t remember which ones) that sometimes peers are better at teaching some things because they remember how they learned it whereas an expert just knows the information and doesn’t have as good a handle on what might be problematic for a new learner and why.
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