Ch. 5 Cognitive Learning Processes

As I was reading the section under metacognition and learning I could not help myself but to think that we as teachers have taught our students to think or apply a certain strategy in reading or writing taks that goes along with metacognition. One strategy that we ask our students to follow is to read each question and find out what the question is trying to ask the student. We then have students classify each question whether it is an inference, or word meaning etc.. In writing we teach students strategies like Mr. sneaky, and looking for key words in the sentence that make it wrong. My question to you all is have you all used any of these strategies to help your students pass the TAKs test and our these forms of metacognition or am I totally wrong?

Ch. 4 Cognitive information Processing Theory

As I was reading this chapter many thoughts came to mind. First I was wondering how can we make our students remember what we taught in the the beginning of the year. Luckily I am in a science lab and students remember things by doing hands on experiments. But sometimes they forget what they did in the beginning of the year. How do we make what they learn in the beginning of the year stick in their long term memory? Right now I know of a teacher who is struggling with his students in math and he feels frustrated because his students took a bench mark and did very poorly. I tutor some of his students and when I am going over the questions they seem to know the answer but when they get a test and have to do it on their own they seem to fail. What can we do as teachers to help them grasp the information and make it go from their short term memory or working memory to their long term memory?

Conditioning Theries Ch. 2

Hi Classmates, as I was reading through this chapter I found that I have either done this in my classroom or seen teachers do this in their classrooms. For example praising students when they complete an assignment or answer a question in class. I also have rewarded students for positive behavior. Students will perform better if they are rewarded by praise or other positive stimuli. As I was reading about behavioral objectives I saw something that our school district is implementing right now. We have to state what the students are learning in student friendly language and have it written somewhere in our classroom for everyone to read. I find that if the students are told and shown what they are being taught then they will strive to master that objective. It gives the students a goal to aim at. Are any other districts doing this as well?