Tag Archives: cognition/learning/understanding

Cultural Literacy: Anal Personality

Do you hear kids bandying about the word “anal” to describe their more fastidious or compulsive classmates? I think I have heard it at least once a year since I became a teacher. It’s mostly used properly, but when it isn’t, this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the anal personality might help to clarify things. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two compound sentences and three comprehension questions.

There’s no mention of Sigmund Freud here, which is an interesting omission considering that the anal stage is the second part of his theory of psychosexual development. This worksheet, again, just explains the basics of the anal personality’s characteristics as (from the text) “…excessive orderliness, extreme meticulousness, and often suspicion and reserve.”

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Term of Art: Survival Skills

“survival skills: The term can mean more than one thing depending on the context in which it is used. Survival skills may refer to daily self-help skills necessary to survive in life, such as feeding, dressing, and communicating. In higher education, survival skills often refer to the study skills necessary to be a successful learner.”

Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.

Term of Art: Teaching to the Test

“teaching to the test: The practice of devoting extra time and attention in the classroom to the skills and knowledge that will be assessed on the state or district test. Critics claim that it reduced education to a limited range of skills, ignores the importance of comprehension, and neglects subjects that are not tested, such as history, civics, geography, and the arts.”

Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.

John Locke on Common and Uncommon Knowledge

“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.”

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding “Dedicatory Epistle” (1690)

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Term of Art: Visual Motor Skills

“visual motor skills: A subcategory of perceptual motor skills involving the ability to translate information received by sight into a physical response. In education, visual motor skills are often used when copying information from a blackboard or reproducing letters or numbers. Individuals with problems in this area often have poor handwriting, and may also have more subtle and pervasive difficulties in school performance.”

Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.

Term of Art: Teaching for Understanding

“teaching for understanding: A pedagogical method that focuses on teaching students to understand new concepts rather than memorize discrete facts. Although this term has been used to refer specifically to deep, meaningful learning, it’s really the goal of all instruction: all teachers want their students to understand, not just recall and recite, whatever was taught.”

Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.

Ben Franklin on Wise Investments

“If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

Term of Art: Visual Motor/Perception Test

“visual motor/perceptual test: A type of test that measures a child’s fine motor skills and perceptual ability in sensory areas. These tests include:

  • Beery Developmental Test of Visual Motor Integration
  • Bender Visual Motor Gestalt Test
  • Detroit Test of Learning Ability-2
  • Comprehensive Test of Visual Functioning
  • Test of Auditory Perceptual Skills
  • Learning Efficiency Test II
  • Quick Neurological Screening Test
  • Motor Free Visual Perception Test”

Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.

Term of Art: Touchstone Text

“touchstone text: A book or article that serves as a model for writing assignments.”

Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.

Problem of Induction

“problem of induction: Problem of justifying the inference from the characteristics of observed instances of a general concept to unobserved instances of the same concept. For example, if all emeralds I have ever seen have been green, what entitles me to draw the inference that all emeralds are green, given that my past observations do not strictly entail (or deductively imply) that are emeralds are green? May we infer that the characteristics of a sample taken from a population are characteristics of the entire population? A quality-control engineer who looks at a sample of 100 lightbulbs produced by a particular manufacturing process and finds that five are defective may conclude that 5% of all bulbs that  have been and will be produced by the process are defective. For the engineers inference to be justified, two criteria that must be met are (1) that the sample be random (i.e. every subset of 100 bulbs has an equal chance of being selected for the examination), and (2) that the sample be sufficiently large (in a mathematically precise sense). See also statistics.”

Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.