September 23 - Class Thoughts

SCHEMA THEORY & MENTAL MODELS

Learning theory

Schema theory – how we connect information and experiences together; information is connected in a node-like manner.

Mental Model – the way we organize and connect our schemas together

**When we learn something we try to connect it to a previous experience and form our schema from that knowledge. If we were to experience something new or out of the ordinary we then reorganize our mental model (reconnecting different schemas together or adding new schemas) to fit what we now know.

OPERANT CONDITIONING

Learning Behavior

Associating stimuli with responses.

People associate certain behaviors with certain rewards or punishments.

** As a teacher we can utilize operant conditioning as students learn to continue to raise their expectations. When they do well we reinforce their good behavior (their behavior = stimuli; our praise = response) and they learn through operant conditions to keep doing the good behavior.

Skinner Box

Animals learned how to get food by pressing a lever. He also tried this with his daughter. Possible outcomes of an action can either enforce or discourage the continuance of the action.

STIMULUS(a) > RESPONSE(b)> STIMULUS(c)

A – tells the organism it’s time to respond

B – they respond

C – enforces or discourages the response

RECIPROCAL TEACHING

Instructional theory

1 – Questioning

2 – Summarizing

3 – Clarifying

4 – Predicting

**Good for reading comprehension.

Students and teachers take turns reading and then following the 4 steps.

Students are assigned a particular kind of question they will ask and then help answer. The questions will be specifically designed for reading comprehension – this creates an almost visible model of how reading comprehension happens.

--Takes some time for the students to catch on, but when they do they begin to learn how to comprehend reading for themselves.

COGNITIVE FLEXIBILITY THEORY

How do we learn in ‘ill-structured domains’ (very complex domains like medicine).

Domains with high variability and very complex issues (lots of things involve, multiple factors, no single-right-answer).

Give the students a high # of “mini-cases”

They learn to recognize the subtle differences

They see that there are multiple perspectives and multiple “right answers”

**Teach in the context of cases – customizing a singular answer for each case

-Individuals construct their own version of knowledge from different sources and then come together and discuss each view/piece of information.

** Need this to be a effective facilitator. You take so many people, with so many different circumstances and viewpoints, and you need to combine them all to help find the truth. Think of the application to being a Gospel Doctrine Teacher.

It's all about using knowledge in a variety of ways - how can we learn knowledge in highly-complex and ill-structured domains (i.e. REAL LIFE).