Education Psychology Additional Notes

Authentic learning says that...we should learn what happens in the "real world", and become "cognitive apprentices" to the experts.  When we learn about math, we learn to think like mathematicians.  When we learn about the weather, we learn to use tools that a meteorologist would use.  When we learn to draw, we are taught techniques that real artists use.  But how is this possible?  How can everyone have access to experts at all times? 

Instructional scaffolding is a learning process designed to promote a deeper learning. Scaffolding is the support given during the learning process which is tailored to the needs of the student with the intention of helping the student achieve his/her learning goals (Sawyer, 2006).The support includes

  resources

  a compelling task

  templates and guides

  guidance on the development

The notion of scaffolding is increasingly being used to describe the support provided for students to learn successfully in classrooms, especially the use of project- or design-based activities to teach math and science

Reciprocal teaching refers to an instructional activity in which students become the teacher in small group reading sessions. Teachers model, then help students learn to guide group discussions using four strategies: summarizing, question generating, clarifying, and predicting. Once students have learned the strategies, they take turns assuming the role of teacher in leading a dialogue about what has been read.

A stimulus or combination of stimuli that is followed by a particular response will, upon its reoccurrence tend to be followed by the same response again. Thus, S-R connections gain its full strength on one-trail (Ormrod, 1999) or on the first pairing of the S-R connection: “contiguity, and not frequency!

It typically consists of self-teaching with the aid of a specialized textbook or teaching machine that presents material structured in a logical and empirically developed sequence or sequences. Programmed instruction may be presented by a teacher as well, and it has been argued that the principles of programmed instruction can improve classic lectures and textbooks.^[Programmed instruction allows students to progress through a unit of study at their own rate, checking their own answers and advancing only after answering correctly. In one simplified form of PI, after each step, they are presented with a question to test their comprehension, then are immediately shown the correct answer or given additional information. However the objective of the instructional programming is to present the material in very small increments. The more sophisticated forms of programmed instruction may have the questions or tasks programmed well enough that the presentation and test model—an extrapolation from traditional and classical instruction—is not necessarily utilized.

computer-assisted instruction (CAI), a program of instructional material presented by means of a computer or computer systems.

The use of computers in education started in the 1960s. With the advent of convenient microcomputers in the 1970s, computer use in schools has become widespread from primary education through the university level and even in some preschool programs. Instructional computers are basically used in one of two ways: either they provide a straightforward presentation of data or they fill a tutorial role in which the student is tested on comprehension.

There is a school of thought that presumes all children can learn if they are provided with the appropriate learning conditions. Learning for mastery or mastery learning, are terms coined by Benjamin Bloom in 1968 and 1971 respectively. Bloom hypothesized that a classroom with a mastery learning focus as opposed to the traditional form of instruction would reduce the achievement gaps between varying groups of students (Guskey 2007). In Mastery learning, "the students are helped to master each learning unit before proceeding to a more advanced learning task"  in contrast to "conventional instruction".

Precision teaching is a precise and systematic method of evaluating instructional tactics and curricula. It is one of the few quantitative analyses of behavior forms of applied behavior analysis. It comes from a very strong quantitative scientific basis and was pioneered by Ogden Lindsley in the 1960s based largely on Skinner's operant conditioning. Precision teaching is a type of programmed instruction that focuses heavily on frequency as its main datum. By focusing on fluency, the teacher can then adjust the curricula for each learner to maximize the learning based on the learner's personal fluency measurements. The instruction can be by any method or approach. For example, the most effective applications of Precision Teaching have been when it is combined with Direct Instruction. Children as young as five have charted their fluency measurements and utilized precision teaching to increase their learning. According to Owen White,Precision Teaching "has been used successfully to teach the progress of learners ranging from the severely handicapped to university graduate students, from the very young to the very old."

Applied behavior analysis (ABA), previously known as behavior modification, is a type of behavior analysis based on the traditional theory of behaviorism to modify human behaviors as part of a learning or treatment process. Behavior analysts focus on the observable relationship of behavior to the environment to the exclusion of what they call "hypothetical constructs". By functionally assessing the relationship between a targeted behavior and the environment, the methods of ABA can be used to change that behavior.