Learning how to think and learn

1. Learning how to think and learn Week 7 Psychology NJ Kang

2. Attending, concentrating and remembering

3. Concentration • Better learning related to better concentration span • Concentration span parallel to age • Why?

4. Learning to remember: rehearsal and organization • 5 yrs: overestimate their own capacities • 11 yrs: remember more than the younger ones, realistic assessments of one’s own mental abilities. • Memory is not the product of natural ability but involve learned activity

5. A) Rehearsal • Is a powerful aid to deliberate memorization and that the imposition of some structure or meaning on what we seek to memorize also determines the likelihood of successful recall. • Is continuous repetition, out loud or under the breath, of what one is trying to hold in mind. • And younger ones have to learn how to do it (say out loud) and it leads them to success.

6. Same to adult • Fast rehearsal seems to work well in their long term memory • Learning rehearsal strategies would not be maintained without being used.

7. B) Categorical organization in memory as a strategy • 11 yr. know how to use this skill in memory strategy • 5 yrs. Do not seemingly know how to use this skill in their memorizing after even they rehearsed how to categorize the objects.

8. Memorizing : one activity or many? • We are dealing with changes in the child’s cognitive skills and not simply with linguistic development. • Learn how to remember needs to have a purpose and own strategy • Preschooler will keep touching the appropriate cup from time to time. The child uses his digits to ‘keep hold’ of the information he has to remember, literally ‘re-mind-ing ‘ himself of it by physical means

9. Pre-schoolers’ natural history of memory development • A camera is lost at the third post when they were told that they will take a picture later. • They went to the third post to find the lost camera. • They are making intelligent use of past experience to formulate a plan of action – evidence of both memory and reasoning. Piaget, physical action  thought formation

10. Why? Are they so good? • Multiplicity of intellectual activities that we commonly (and mistakenly) lump together under headings like memory. • Not a deliberate memorization but natural and often incidental consequence of their activities.

11. literally ‘re-mind-ing ‘ himself of it by physical means • How do we use this in the teaching children English? • Think about teaching parts of an Elephant.

12. Memory and Schooling

13. Asking vs interactions • They do not achieve when we simply ask them to memorize. • They achieve more when they are led to activities or interactions with the material destined to be remembered. • The child’s active involvement with the material and his concentration on the task at hand helped him to encode or become consciously aware of the objects handled. How can we use of this capacity to teaching children English phonics? How can we link this understanding to Piagetian experiments or theory?

14. Memory and schooling • Powers of concentration and memory are fostered in social interaction? Then it should be different from cultures to culture. • Rehearsal is not a feature of deliberate attempts at memorization by people in non-technological societies. • These cultures are childlike; non rational or in some other way less developed than in our own. • It is due to schooling. • So children’s lack of memorization is due to learning meaningfully by active involvement not by taught.

15. Paying attention

16. Paying attention • Children under eight are impulsive in organizing and interrogating and even analizing the unfamiliar and purposeless tasks. • Paying more attention and complete more complicated tasks when these are more relevant to their own lives and interests and meaningful to them (identifying identical and different pictures vs making puzzles and model making by looking at the pictures)

17. Wholes and parts

18. Wholes and parts: theories of perception and understanding • Relationship between perception and knowledge. • Child aged below five see the parts not the whole. Lack in synthesizing ability. • Under seven tend to centre upon either the overall configuration or its parts. Not the both. • This age group seem not to see these both even though these are meaningful to them .

19. Parallel to Piaget • Only simple can be traced (shape tracing in the shape embedded shape in a simpler version only) but not the complicated one. • Once the child perceives something in a particular way, he seems unable to review it from a different perspective • Pre-operational children cannot entertain the idea that an element of any task or situation, whatever its nature, can belong at the same time to two or more categories or classes.

20. Are young children illogical, or limited processors of information?

21. Are young children illogical, or limited processors of information? • If the pre-operational children fail more than the older ones due to lack of experiences not of lack of logicalities. Then it could be possible to help them to learn how to think logically.

22. Seriation task (put things into order from small to large) • This demands intellectual co-ordination of perceptual judgments which, as we have seen, pre-operational children cannot achieve. (understand put sticks in length and compare A>B B>C, so A>C) • Piaget lack of co-ordination

23. Bryant (1974) not due to the pre-logical • Rather, their failure is due to the fact that these sorts of problems overload their mental capacities. • Incapable of memorizing the relations between the five sticks.  is due to lack of concentration time needed to solve the problem. • His experiment, used coloured sticks and let them memorize the length of each stick compared to others. Then they were able to infer the order of length of the sticks.

24. Children do not pass pre-operational stage • In which they were unable to learn or be taught how to reason logically. • Rather, the argument proceeds, the tasks used are so unfamiliar to children and make such unusual demands that failure is attributable to a lack of relevant experience, not to intellectual incompetence.

25. What is effective instruction?

26. Question How can we conceptualize and analyse the process of instruction in order to determine whether or not what is being taught is also being learned? It demands sufficient prior knowledge to memorize and recall what is shown and may prove too difficult to assimilate.

27. ZPD Gaps between unassisted and assisted competence. How can we determine whether or not instruction is sensitive to a child’s zone of development When does it make demands beyond his potential level of comprehension? How can we sure that instruction does not underestimate his ability?

28. Answers (Wood, Wood and Middleton, 1978) What does it mean to be taught well to complete the task on his own? What should be said or done first?

29. Levels used to classify teaching in the pyramid task. General verbal encouragement (why don’t you try to put some blocks together?) Specific verbal instruction (can you find the four biggest blocks?) Assists in choice of material (let’s try to put these big ones together) Prepares material for assembly (selecting the blocks and lining them up) Demonstrates an operation (how a set of four blocks fit together, doing several operations herself while the child looks on)

30. Too much specific instruction increases child’s successful completion of the task, but decreases child’s development and responsibility for completing the task. Too less specific instruction would not help child to complete the task but increases child’s responsibility for competing the task.

31. Teach children contingently Making any help given conditional upon the child’s understanding of previous levels of instruction No left the child alone when he was overwhelmed by the task, and also guaranteed him greater scope for initiative when he showed signs of success.

32. Verbal instruction only Failure

33. Demonstration Failure Not understanding what they had been shown.

34. Contingent teaching = Scaffolding Showing + verbal instruction Get the four next ones’ because previous instruction involved an element of showing which made such verbal instructions contextually meaningful. by highlighting things they need to take account of in each process. Breaks the task down into a sequence of smaller tasks which children can manage to construct the completed assembly.

35. Piaget theory? 4 yrs cannot do the tasks (seriation, conservation) alone maybe 7 yrs can do the task alone Without being helped ? Then yes.

36. Contingent teaching Pacing the amount of help children are given on the basis of their moment to moment understanding. Child understand  teacher step back. Child don’t understand  teacher give more help. Nor is he left alone or too directive.

37. In the school classroom DIFFICULT BUT POSSIBLE

38. four – year olds Can be taught to do tasks that alone they will not master until around age seven or eight. For them, instruction must be geared to their level of competence. When this condition can be and is achieved, young children can be taught and do learn.

39. Learning and generalization: first thoughts on a thorny issue

40. Questions How and why children develop the intelligence to achieve understanding. What knowledge and experience are they drawing on and generalizing from in order to understand? For Piaget, the schemes of knowing that make possible the understanding and generalization of experience are rooted in actions on the world. For Vygotsky and Bruner: social interaction and largely informal teaching.

41. Language of information processing The mental activities that are believed to underlie learning and thinking, and in the experiences that lead to their acquisition and perfection Vygotsky (can do task by being taught contingently properly) and Piaget (cannot do the task no matter what type of teaching is given) differ Vygotsky not only learn to complete the task but also learn the instructional process itself.

42. Why do some children learn while others don’t. Piagetians: many failures to remember and generalize --- premature teaching serves only to inculcate empty procedures or learned tricks. Preoperational children can be taught to complete the task but not to generalize the knowledge.

43. Is more complex issue Another concept ? Another concept Understanding One concept Another concept Learn one concept can be generalized to all the other concepts? But if we don’t subscribe this issue then we don’t have to expect them to do this.

44. Piaget: Horizontal decalage Gradual extension of competence from task to task  moving from one to another stages development can be done not by once but by gradual development  this makes clear-cut predictions about when and how children will display logical understanding of different tasks difficult.  it does not fit the developmental facts of Piaget

45. Class inclusion Piaget: do class inclusion  understanding number concept 4<6<8 and then, understand the grasp of number concepts. Lunzer, 1973: knowledge of number helps him to understand class inclusion problems

46. Bruner’s thought Teaching of procedures, facts, dates, formulae and so for the will not engender understanding or facilitate generalization unless the child understands the intentions and purposes that motivate both the discipline and the people who practise and teach it.

47. The centrality of purposive activity in learning and development The roles they (V, B and P) portray for social interaction and instruction are quite different. P: cultural universals revealed by common stages of development. V & B: find different ways of thinking and construing the world that arise out of cultural knowledge and different ways of socializing and educating children.

48. Task Listen to the story and try to teach the sequencing the story to the 4 and 7 yrs olds using the theories of both Piaget and Vygotsky. And also contingent teaching.

49. Midterm Option 1 Compare theories of Piaget and Vygotsky in terms of how young learners develop their cognitive skills. Develop a curriculum for teaching English to two particular age groups (1 & 2, 3 & 4, 5, 6 & 7 of young learners) reflecting each theoriest’s views on learning.

50. Midterm Option 2 Select 3 Piaget’s experiments and redo the research explaining underpinning theories. Develop a curriculum and activities that reflect those experiments in teaching English to two particular age groups (1 & 2, 3 & 4, 5, 6 & 7 of young learners)