Chapter 6 Final Notes

HOW DO METACOGNITIVE SKILLS HELP STUDENTS LEARN

Metacognition is Knowledge about one's own learning or about how to learn (thinking about thinking) Thinking skills and study skills are examples of metacognitive skills. Ss can be taught assessing their own understanding, figuring out how much time they will need to study something. Self-questioning strategies are learning strategies that call on students to ask themselves who, what, where, and how questions as they read material. 

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WHAT STUDY STRATEGIES HELP STUDENTS LEARN?

Research on effective study strategies is confusing at best. Few forms of studying are found to be always effective, and fewer still are never effective.

·         Note-taking: A study strategy that requires decisions about what to write.

·         Underlining

·         Summarizing: Writing brief statements that represent the main idea of the information being read.

·         Writing to learn: Ss writing the content they are learning.

·         Outlining and Mapping: Outlining is representing the main points of material in hierarchical format. Mapping Diagramming main ideas and the connections between them.

·         PQ4R Method: A study strategy that has students preview, question, read, reflect, recite, and review material.

HOW DO COGNITIVE TEACHING STRATEGIES HELP STUDENTS LEARN?

Making Learning Relevant and Activating Prior Knowledge (propose a  strategy for stimulating the prior knowledge of students described in a particular)

Advance Organizers: David Ausubel (1963) developed a method called advance organizers to orient students to material they were about to learn and to help them recall related information that could assist them in incorporating the new information. An advance organizer is an initial statement about a subject to be learned that provides a structure for the new information and relates it to information students already possess.

Analogies: Images, concepts, or narratives that compare new information to information students already understand.

Elaboration: Cognitive psychologists use the term elaboration to refer to the process of thinking about material to be learned in a way that connects the material to information or ideas that are already in the learner’s mind. The process of connecting new material to information or ideas already in the learner's mind

Organizing Information

Using Questioning Techniques: One strategy that helps students learn from written texts, lectures, and other sources of information is the insertion of questions requiring students to stop from time to time to assess their own understanding of what the text or teacher is saying.

Using conceptual Models: Another means that teachers can use to help students complex topics is the introduction of conceptual models, or diagrams showing how elements of a process relate to one another. Graphs, charts, tables, matrices, and other means of organizing information into a comprehensible, visual form, have all been found to aid comprehension, memory, and transfer.

Summary

What Is an Information-Processing Model?

The three major components of memory are the sensory register, short-term or working memory, and long-term memory. The sensory registers are very short-term memories linked to the senses. Information that is received by the senses but not attended to will be quickly forgotten. Once information is received, it is processed by the mind in accord with our experiences and mental states. This activity is called perception.

Short-term or working memory is a storage system that holds five to line bits of information at any one time. Information enters working memory from both the sensory register and the long-term memory. Rehearsal is the process of repeating information in order to hold it in working memory.

Long-term memory is the part of the memory system in which a large amount of information is stored for an indefinite time period. Cognitive theories of learning stress the importance of helping students relate information being learned to existing information in long- term memory.

The three parts of long-term memory are episodic memory, which stores our memories of personal experiences; semantic memory, which stores facts and generalized knowledge in the form of schemata; and procedural memory, which stores knowledge; of how to do things. Schemata are networks of related ideas that guide our understanding and action. Information that fits into a well-developed schema is easier to learn than information that cannot be so accommodated. Levels-of-processing theory suggests that learners will remember only the things that they process. Students are processing information when they manipulate it, look at it from different perspectives, and analyze it. Dual code theory further suggests the importance of using both visual and verbal coding to learn bits of information. Other elaborations of the information-processing model are parallel distributed processing, and connectionist models.

Technology that enables scientists to observe the brain in action has led to rapid advances in brain science. Findings have shown how specific parts of the brain process specific types of information in concert with other specific brain sites. As individuals gain expertise, their brain function becomes more efficient. Early brain development is a process of adding neural connections and then sloughing off those that are not used.

What Causes People to Remember or Forget?

Interference theory helps explain why people forget. It suggests that students can forget information when it gets mixed up with, or pushed aside by, other information. Interference theory states that two situations cause forgetting: retroactive inhibition, when learning a second task makes a person forget something that was learned previously, and proactive inhibition, when learning one thing interferes with the retention  of things learned later. The primacy and recency effects state that people best remember information that is presented first and last in a series. Automaticity is gained by practicing information or skills far beyond the amount needed to establish them in t long-term memory so that using such skills requires little or no mental effort. Practice strengthens associations of newly learned information in memory. Distributed practice, I which involves practicing parts of a task over a period of time, is usually more effective than massed practice. Enactment also helps students to remember information.

How Can Memory Strategies Be Taught?

Teachers can help students remember facts by presenting lessons in an organized way and by teaching students to use memory strategies called mnemonics. Three types of verbal learning are paired-associate learning, serial learning, and free-recall learning. Paired-associate learning is learning to respond with one member of a pair when given the other member. Students can improve their learning of paired associates by using imagery techniques such as the keyword method. Serial learning involves recalling a list of items in a specified order. Free-recall learning involves recalling the list in any order. Helpful strategies are the loci method, the pegword method, rhyming, and initial-letter strategies.

What Makes information Meaningful?

Information that makes sense and has significance to students is more meaningful ma1 inert knowledge and information learned by rote. According to schema theory, individuals’ meaningful knowledge is constructed of networks and hierarchies of schemata.

How Do Metacognitive Skills Help Students Learn?

Metacognition helps students learn by thinking about, controlling, and effectively using their own thinking processes.

What Study Strategies Help Students Learn?

Note-taking, selective directed underlining, summarizing, writing to learn, outlining, and mapping call effectively promote learning. The PQ4R method is an example of a strategy that focuses on the meaningful organization of information.

How Do Cognitive Teaching Strategies Help Students Learn?

Advance organizers help students process new information by activating background knowledge.  Analogies, information elaboration, organizational schemes, questioning techniques, and conceptual models are other examples of teaching strategies that are based on cognitive learning theories.