Tag Archives: cognition/learning/understanding

Bob Shepherd at Praxis

Posted on April 2, 2019 | Leave a comment

As I have repeated ad nauseam in these pages, Mark’s Text Terminal is not a political or educational policy blog. Any number of reasons suffice to explain this, but I always return to the most salient of them: there are quite a few smart and well-informed people, many of whose websites can be found in the right margin of this site under the heading Blogs Followed at Mark’s Text Terminal, covering those topics. That said, I intend in the coming months to highlight several of these blogs.

The assault on public education has now reached a stage where I can no long remain completely silent. Fortunately, as I say, there are plenty of people speaking and perceptively, and buttressing their arguments with evidence, something that happens less and less in public discourse, about educational policy.

Starting out, I want to highlight the work of Bob Shepherd, who blogs under the heading Praxis. Bob is, as Diane Ravitch noted recently, a polymath. I originally made his acquaintance in the comments forum of Dr. Ravitch’s blog, where I occasionally presume to comment on topics of the day. Bob is an acutely perspicacious and wide-ranging commentator on educational policy, particularly where privatization of public schools and the scandals that often ensue are concerned.

That said, Bob covers a lot of other ground in Praxis. He recently posted a lengthy discourse on the physical and philosophical nature of time, a topic I find abstruse (I dropped Lester Mazor’s “Perspectives on Time” seminar at Hampshire College in the fall of 1994 because I didn’t have the intellectual stamina to keep up with it and plan my honors thesis) and fascinating at the same time. I guess I like to imagine that in another life, Bob and I would be an Intellectual History department of two at some small, lively, and innovative liberal arts college.

If you’re at all interested in issues and problems in educational policy—or to quote briefly from his “About” page, “curriculum design…,linguistics…, hermeneutics…, philosophy…, classical and jazz guitar…, history of ideas…, heuristics for innovation,” (and I’ve enumerated only about one-quarter of this list), then you should by all means point your browser at Praxis.

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Term of Art: Executive Functions

Posted on January 30, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Mental activities associated with self-control, attention, focus, or concentration that allow an individual to achieve specific goals. Problems in executive function are associated with dysfunction at the frontal part of the brain. Mild or nonspecific deficits of executive functions are common in the general population. Executive functions also may be impaired by injury to the brain, fatigue, depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, and various psychological disorders, including learning disability, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Problems with attention, self-regulation, planning, and impulse control may be connected to differences in the processing of neurotransmitters, especially dopamine, in the brain.

Executive functions control four kinds of mental activities. Working memory is essential to the problem-solving process. Information must be held in mind and internalized while a task is being completed. Internalized or private speech allows people to use complex sets of rules in problem solving. These include rules for using sets of rules. Third is the control of emotions and impulses, which allows and individual to remain focused and to continually return to a path of progress toward a desired goal. This allows an individual to set aside the attraction of immediate gratification. The achievement of deferred greater gratification is the product of this kind of self-regulation. Fourth is reconstitution, a process of observing behaviors and then synthesizing components into new combinations. This function is essential to problem solving and survival in a complicated world.

Individuals with ADHD and learning disabilities may have problems in reading long assignments or completing writing projects, since these tasks require executive functions. These difficulties may be connected to differences in the way certain brain chemicals are processed in the prefrontal lobes.

Some individuals with executive function difficulties are also very impulsive, having a hard time considering alternatives and consequences before they act. In solving problems, they are likely to select the first alternative without weighing other possibilities. They often speak without thinking of the consequences of their statements. Some students with these problems get so fidgety that it is hard for them to sit through a 50- or 90-minute class session.

Many individuals with executive function difficulties experience problems with time. Understanding the passage of time and planning for the future or the completion of a task by a particular point in time can be challenge. These individuals may frequently arrive late to appointments or classes. Long-term academic projects are among the greatest challenges for students who have executive function difficulties.”

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

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Term of Art: Extrinsic Phonics

Posted on January 29, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Phonics taught as a supplemental learning aid rather than as an integral part of the program of reading instruction, often in separate workshops during special time periods.”

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

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Term of Art: Discovery Learning

Posted on January 23, 2019 | Leave a comment

“An approach to learning based on the principle of ‘learning by doing’ in which new ideas develop. Discovery learning activities are designed so that students discover facts and principles themselves, through personal experience, rather than having them authoritatively explained by a textbook or a teacher. Discovery learning in prized by progressive and constructivist educators. Some of the principles of discovery learning have long been part of the repertoire of traditional teachers as well, especially in science classes, where, for example, students can directly observe the results of experiments. Critics claim that discovery learning is extremely time-consuming, difficult to manage, and inefficient because so much time is wasted waiting for students to ‘discover’ what is already known by their teachers.”

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

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Cultural Difference and Learning

Posted on January 19, 2019 | Leave a comment

“It bears mentioning that cultural differences have nothing to do with intelligence and aptitude. It is hoped that the cognitively savvy educator will appreciate the unique perspectives—literally—that students from various backgrounds may have and exploit those differences to optimize and expand the learning opportunities for all students in a classroom.”

Excerpted from: Rekart, Jerome L. The Cognitive Classroom: Using Brain and Cognitive Science to Optimize Student Success. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2013.

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Term of Art: Graphophonemic Knowledge

Posted on January 17, 2019 | Leave a comment

“The understanding that words are made of sounds and sounds are written with letters in the right order. Students who understand this can blend sounds associated with letters into words and can separate words into component sounds for spelling and writing.

Students should be assessed to determine if they can hear sounds in spoken language prior to letter-sound instruction.”

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

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Why Read?

Posted on January 11, 2019 | Leave a comment

“…What is reading for? We read in order to understand thoughts: either someone else’s thought, or our own thoughts from the past. That characterization of the function of reading highlights that another mental act had to precede it: the mental act of writing. So perhaps we should begin by thinking about the function of writing. I think I need milk, I write that thought on a note to myself, and later I read what I’ve written and I recover the thought again: I need milk. Writing is an extension of memory.”

Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.

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What Is Awe and How Is It Evoked?

Posted on January 5, 2019 | Leave a comment

“In a classroom setting, many students can feel stressed about exams or class projects because they feel as though they may not have enough time. Perhaps by inducing a sense of awe in these students, the successful teacher can allay some of the perceptions of time ‘crunch.’ Though this particular connection is admittedly one without further empirical support, it is intriguing to consider. Furthermore, because awe is a positive emotion, even if it doesn’t help assuage undue test anxiety, it will at least brighten a student’s day for a moment,

How does one evoke awe? Images of natural splendor or beauty, moving musical passages, or brief anecdotes about the successful exploits of famous individuals may all achieve this goal.

Effort actually influences our sense of how soon or far off something feels. Tasks and events that are believed to require effort and be taxing actually feel as though they are temporally closer than easier tasks. This only holds true if there is an actual deadline for completion. With a deadline or due date/time in place, it feels as though there is more time to complete the easy task and less time to complete the challenging one (Jiga-Boy, Clark, & Semin, 2010). Without a deadline, more effortful tasks seem farther away in time than they actually are.

These findings suggest that ambiguous or vague deadlines may actually result in greater levels of procrastination because to the student it feels as though there is more time to complete the project than perhaps is actually warranted. Thus it is recommended that firm deadlines be implemented and adhered to whenever possible.

Finally, time does indeed appear to fly when people are having fun (Gable & Poole, 2012). This fact provides yet another reason (as though any were needed) to introduce as much fun and frivolity as possible into classroom sessions because if hard-to-reach students feel as though the day is speeding by, there is less of a chance of them associated associating the school with tedium and toil. After all, a happy student is likely and engaged one.”

Excerpted from: Rekart, Jerome L. The Cognitive Classroom: Using Brain and Cognitive Science to Optimize Student Success. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2013.

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Term of Art: Readability

Posted on January 3, 2019 | Leave a comment

“A measure of how easy it is to comprehend a text depending on a number of variables. These include vocabulary, sentence complexity, format, writing style, and topic, plus the reading comprehension level, interest, background information, and decoding skills of the reader.

Some methods of predicting the readability of a text are used to gauge whether an individual can successfully read and comprehend a passage. One such method is to read a section of a passage and count the number of words that are unfamiliar to the reader. If, for example, the reader encounters more than three unfamiliar words, the readability may be too difficult.

In educational settings, a text’s readability is often measured in grade level. For example, a history textbook with a readability of 9.3 means an average ninth grade, third month student should be able to read and comprehend it.”

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

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Term of Art: Learning

Posted on December 23, 2018 | Leave a comment

“Process of acquiring modifications in existing knowledge, habits, or tendencies through experience, practice, or exercise. Learning includes associative processes, discrimination of sense-data, psychomotor and perceptual learning, imitation, concept formation, problem solving, and insight learning. Animal learning has been studied by ethologists and comparative psychologists, the latter often drawing explicit parallels to human learning. The first experiments concerning associative learning were conducted by Ivan Pavlov in Russia and Edward Thorndike in the U.S. Critics of the early stimulus-response (S-R) theories, such as Edward C. Tolman claimed they were overly reductive and ignored a subject’s inner activities. Gestalt-psychology researchers drew attention to the importance of pattern and form in perception and learning, while structural linguists argued that language learning was grounded in genetically inherited ‘grammar.’ Developmental psychologists, such as Jean Piaget, highlighted stages of growth in learning. More recently, cognitive psychologists have explored learning as a form of information processing, while some brain researchers, such as Gerald Edelman, have proposed that thinking and learning involve an ongoing process of cerebral pathway building. Related topics of research include attention, comprehension, motivation, and transfer of training.”

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

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