Tag Archives: cognition/learning/understanding

Term of Art: Semantic Knowledge

Posted on October 25, 2024 | Leave a comment

“semantic knowledge: Data stored in long-term memory regarding general information and concepts.”

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: Semantic Cueing

Posted on August 23, 2024 | Leave a comment

“semantic cueing: A strategy used to help an individual retrieve or read a word by giving hints with words of similar meaning. For example, it an individual is trying to remember the word compliment, giving the semantic cue praise may help make a meaningful connection to the word in question.

Similarly, cueing can be used to help an individual read an individual word. For example, if a reader stumbles on the word psychologist, an instructor may give the semantic cue a therapist or a doctor for your mind rather than providing a phonetic or decoding cue, such as ‘psych is pronounced sike.’”

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: Story Seeds

Posted on July 26, 2024 | Leave a comment

“story seeds: Ideas around which a student might build a story. Every story, for example, involves a conflict, so a teacher should provide a student with a conflict as a story seed and have the student create the setting, the characters, the incident that starts the conflict, and so on.”

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

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The Weekly Text, 26 July 2024: A Lesson Plan on Motion Picture Genres from The Order of Things

Posted on July 25, 2024 | Leave a comment

Once again, from Barbara Ann Kipfer’s sublime reference book The Order of Things, here is a lesson plan on motion picture genres. To deliver this lesson (and bear in mind that any lesson under the heading of The Order of Things on this blog was designed for emergent and struggling readers as well as students of English as a new language) you will need this worksheet with reading and comprehension questions.

If you find typos in these documents, 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.

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Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Lesson Plans, The Weekly Text, Worksheets

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Term of Art: Social Skills Training

Posted on July 19, 2024 | Leave a comment

“social skills training: A type of behavioral therapy in which a therapist describes and models appropriate behaviors (such as waiting for a turn, sharing toys, asking for help, or responding to teasing). Through role-playing, a child has the opportunity to practice these skills in a therapeutic setting.”

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: Social Skills Problem

Posted on June 21, 2024 | Leave a comment

“social skills problems: Children with a learning disability (especially nonverbal disabilities) may have trouble with social skills as a result of problems with perception. Children in this situation tend to be isolated, with few close friends, and only rarely participate in school activities. They are often rejected by children their own age because of odd behavior or poor school performance.

Teachers tend to rate these children as being easily led and with poor social adjustment. These problems may be caused by poor social comprehension, the inability to understand another’s point of view, poor language skills, or misinterpretation of body language.”

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: Stem

Posted on June 7, 2024 | Leave a comment

“stem” A question or statement on a multiple-choice test that poses a choice for the test taker. See also distracter; foils; multiple-choice item.”

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

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Term of Art: Social Maladjustment

Posted on April 16, 2024 | Leave a comment

“social maladjustment: A vague term for a child’s chronic misconduct in the absence of emotional disturbance. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act specifically prohibits the classification of children as handicapped because of social maladjustment, although social maladjustment may occur together with legally defined handicaps.

In the past, it was a common practice for schools to place children into special education classes based on their misconduct rather than in the presence of a handicap. Many alleged that public school special education classes became ‘dumping grounds’ for the children whom no one wanted to teach, such as juvenile delinquents and those who defied authority.”

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

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Poverty and Cognition Redux

Posted on April 5, 2024 | Leave a comment

“But we cannot fully choose when our minds will be riveted. We think about that impending project not only when we sit down to work on it, but also when we are at home trying to help our child with her homework. The same automatic capture that helps us focus becomes a burden in the rest of life. Because we are preoccupied by scarcity, because our minds constantly return to it, we have less mind to give to the rest of life. This is more than a metaphor. We can directly measure mental capacity or, as we call it, bandwidth. We can measure fluid intelligence, a key resource that affects how we process information and make decisions. We can measure executive control, a key resource that affects how impulsively we behave. And we find the scarcity reduces all these components of bandwidth—it makes us less insightful, less forward-thinking, less controlled. And the effects are large. Being poor, for example, reduces a person’s cognitive capacity more than going one full night without sleep. It is not the that the poor have less bandwidth as individuals. Rather, it is that the experience of poverty reduces one’s bandwidth.”

Excerpted from: Mullainathan, Sendhil and Eldar Shafir. Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives. New York: Picador, 2013.

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Some Prescient Words from 1930 on Educational and Curricular Fads

Posted on April 5, 2024 | Leave a comment

“In a 1930 symposium on ‘The New Education, Ten Years After,’ in The New Republic, Boyd H. Bode of Ohio State University remarked querulously that ‘To the casual observer, American education is a confusing and not altogether edifying spectacle. It is productive of endless fads and panaceas; it is pretentiously scientific and at the same time pathetically conventional; it is scornful of the past, yet painfully inarticulate when it speaks of the future.'”

Ravitch, Diane. Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform. New York: Touchstone, 2000.

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