09.13.06
Posted in independent readings, Behaviorism, Annotated References - Class readings at 10:10 pm by youngsah
A Tale of Two Cities: Time Magazine May 15, 2006
This article compares approaches in teaching children with autism. One, Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is based on behavorial theory. It focuses on repetitive drilling and rewards for completed tasks. Though early research on it’s effectiveness were promising recent research is inconclusive. An alternative approach DIR (developmental, individual-difference, relationship based) is also covered as a reporter visits schools using each approach. DIR, also called Floor time, focuses more on social skills. In practice, parents and educators are asked to get down on the child’s level and turn everyday tasks into social interactions for teaching.
Autism’s a funny thing. Psychologists don’t know what exactly causes it and they don’t know what the problem exactly is. There are lots of theories fo course but no definites. There’s also such a spectrum of disorder that one approach may be better for one type than another and we simply don’t recognize it because we lack the categories. A combination approach also might be more effective than either extreme approach with ABA being used for procedural skills and DIR being used for social skills
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Posted in Behaviorism, Annotated References - Class readings at 10:08 pm by youngsah
Educational Psychology on Wikipedia
The article gives a definition of Educational Psychology and how it may differ from School Psychology. The article gives a brief history of Educational Psychology as well as a list of “big names” in the field. It also talks about various topics (individual differences and disabilities, learning and cognition, and motivation) in the discipline and addresses the different theoretical perspectives. The article describes various qualitative and quantitative methods used within the field and also ways that knowledge gained through research can be applied to teaching and curriculum (“instructional design and technology”).
I found this article much more streamlined/sparse than the Greeno article for this week. In some ways that was good but it also made the article much less comprehensive. I found the history very sparse (probably because I’m taking the “Intellectual History of Educational Inquiry”). I thought the article focused on psychometrics, testing, and technologies a little more than it probably should have but that may be because the author is interested in educational technologies.
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Posted in Behaviorism, Annotated References - Class readings at 10:07 pm by youngsah
Skinner, B.F.: Why I am not a Cognitive Psychologist?
Skinner attacks many of the bases of Cognitive Psychology in this article. Some main points he includes are: that even if these concepts were real we could not measure them therefore it’s debatable whether it’s valuable to study them, that introspection is not a way to gain insight on the inner workings of the mind, that Cognitivists feel a need to use physical examples to explain their mental concepts, and his main point that things that cognitive psychologists think of as mental processes are in fact behaviors or can be explain as a combination or sequence of behaviors. He ends by saying that the cognitive perspective is a diversion from real scientific study and practice of psychology. Metacognition won’t change the work but thinking about and studying molding behaviors could.
I found the grammar/rule example quite funny/applicable because of my experiences in learning grammar and watching other’s attempts to learn it. So much of grammar is unconscious unless they are taught to make it conscious through things like explicitly learning grammar in English or a second language. So just because we don’t know that we know something does it mean that we don’t know it? I’m not surprised that Skinner acknowledged the existence of inner mental processes nor that he thinks they shouldn’t be studied. I’ve never really been one much for behaviorism. I understand the merit to studying things which are completely testable. However, it always seemed to deaden the human element for me. There is intuitively more to learning than stimulus response and though intuition/common sense is nothing to base science or conclusions on it can be a starting off point.
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