Tag Archives: cognition/learning/understanding

Term of Art: Visual Perception Disabilities

“visual perception disabilities: Students with visual perception disabilities have trouble making sense out of what they see, not because they have poor eyesight but because their brains process visual information differently.

Children with this problem have trouble organizing, recognizing, interpreting, or remembering visual images. This means that they will have trouble understanding the written and picture symbols they need in school—letters, words, numbers, math symbols, diagrams, maps, charts, and graphs.

Because this type of visual problem is subtle, it is often undiscovered until the child starts having problems in school. Visual perception problems include the ability to recognize images a person has seen before and attach meaning to them; to discriminate among similar images or words, and to separate significant features from background details; and to recognize the same symbol in different forms (understanding, for example, that the letter ‘D’ is the letter ‘D’ whether it is uppercase or lowercase, in different colors or fonts). Sequences are another important visual perception skill; a child with a visual sequencing problem may not understand the difference between the words ‘saw’ and ‘was.’

Students with visual perception problems are usually slow to learn letters and numbers, and often make mistakes, omissions, and reversals. They often have trouble with visual memory and visualization and may be extremely slow readers.”

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

Term of Art: Thematic Unit

“thematic unit: A unit of study whose lessons are focused on a specific theme, sometimes covering a variety of subject areas. For example, the theme of inequality may be explored by studying the caste system in India and slavery in the American South. These units may be used as an alternative approach to teaching history, but history educators are critical of the tendency to teach such content without regard to a chronological framework. Themes that lack historical context, the critics say, are superficial and confusing.”

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

Term of Art: Specific Language Disability

“specific language disability (SLD): A severe problem with some aspect of listening, speaking, reading, writing, or spelling, while skills in the other areas are age-appropriate. It is also called specific language learning disability.

The problems vary in focus and intensity, ranging from mild to severe. Some have severe problems with listening and reading (or receptive language) while others struggle with writing (expressive language); Other problems that often appear together with a specific learning disability include mild to severe organization problems and difficulty with directions.

Specific language disability may be a disorder of the left hemisphere of the brain, or a dominant right hemisphere.

Treatment Options and Outlook While there is no cure, the disability can be managed using educational methods and unconventional learning techniques. A multisensory approach is extremely important in teaching these students, making sure the person must hear, say, see, write, and use movement and feeling. For the reader with a specific language disability, this varied approach ensure that information will move from short- to long-term memory. This approach is called the VAKT (Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, and Tactile) method.”

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

Noam Chomsky, Famously, on Grammar and Meaning

“The notion ‘grammatical’ cannot be identified with ‘meaningful’ or ‘significant’ in any semantic sense. Sentences (1) and (2) are equally nonsensical, but…only the former is grammatical.

(1) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

(2) Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.

Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures ch. 2 (1957)

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

Cultural Literacy: Freudian Slip

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of the Freudian Slip. This is a half-page worksheet with a single-sentence reading and three comprehension questions. I cannot, for the life of me, remember why I wrote this. Usually, that means I put some together in response to student interest; that is all but certainly the case here.

This might be too abstract or advanced an idea for some students–and, depending on one’s thoughts about such things, it might also be a bit risque. I don’t know. I do know that it’s worth mentioning that there is a more clinical term for the Freudian Slip, to wit, parapraxis. This worksheet, as it is in Microsoft Word, could easily be recast to call upon students to understand the concept of parapraxis.

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: Thinking Skills

“thinking skills: The way in which an individual acquires, interprets, organizes, stores, retrieves, and applies information, also known as cognitive skills.”

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

Term of Art: Thematic Initiative

“thematic initiative: A program that is organized around a common idea or theme.”

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

Term of Art: Task Analysis

“task analysis: A teaching strategy in which a learning activity is broken down into small sequential tasks. It is an effective strategy used to teach students with a learning disability because it takes a large learning activity and breaks it down into smaller, more easily accomplished tasks. Task analysis is also used as an assessment tool to see precisely at what stage a skill breakdown is occurring. For example, if a student is given an assignment to define 10 vocabulary words, a task analysis might include the following steps:

  1. understand, record, and remember the assignment
  2. read/decode the vocabulary words
  3. use a dictionary/textbook
  4. paraphrase the definition
  5. write the definition

Breaking an assignment into the five steps can make a difficult and overwhelming project become more manageable.

Similarly, task analysis can be used for instruction where larger skills are broken down into subskills and each subskill taught until mastery.”

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

Alfred Adler on Neurosis

“Every neurotic is partly in the right.”

Alfred Adler

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

Term of Art: Text-to-Text Connection

“text-to-text connection: The act of comparing one reading passage with another.”

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