It is amazing to me how much of what James said, in his talks to teachers back in 1899, can been seen throughout this module. As I read and watched the videos this week I found it interesting that we still know very little about how the brain works and still have much to discover about memory and how we process information. James says, “to remember one must think and connect.”
James states, “The teacher ought always to impress the class through as many sensible channels as he can. Talk and write and draw on blackboard, permit the pupils to talk, and make them write and draw, exhibit pictures, plans, and curves, have your diagrams colored differently in the different parts, etc.; and out of the whole variety of impressions the individual child will find the most lasting ones for himself” (James, 1899, p. 68). In the article Brain-Friendly Techniques for Improving Memory, King-Friedrish discusses exactly what James is talking about. She says, “New learning must be connected to what students already know”(King-Friedrish, 2001, p. 76). Throughout the article she discusses how teachers need to help students develop personal relevance, make sure it makes sense, elaborate on key concepts, and give students several retrieval cues. King-Friedrish uses Ms. Fuglie as an example because she developed a variety of learning experiences to help students deepen their understanding of latitude and longitude. In King-Friedrish statement, “Classroom teachers face the challenge of making the encoding of the information and skills that we are attempting to teach students as elaborate and deep as possible” (King-Friedrish, 2001, p. 77). She is right; with all of the information teachers are required to get through in a single year, how can they possibly make everything as elaborate and deep as Ms Fuglie did on just latitude and longitude? I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be better for our schools to require less in a single year. I know for me I would rather have a deep understanding of one thing instead of a shallow understand of many different things. It is like the old saying “A jack of all trades, master of none.”
Marsh and Bulter described three cognitive theories, which are: desirable difficulties, meaning extraction, and transfer-appropriate processing. They used those theories to evaluate the following strategies: that guide the initial learning of material, that guide post-studying processing, the use of adjunct questions during reading, summarization exercises, and the use of imagery. Throughout this article you can find similarities to Vygotsky’s, Piaget’s, and James’ theories. I found this article interesting but the most interesting part was about highlighting. Marsh and Bulter state, “highlighting (or underlining) as typically implemented is not a strong study strategy, even though it is a popular one…In addition, highlighting in this way represents a desirable difficulty because of the effort required to identify the key sentences in a given paragraph” (Marsh & Butler, in press, p. 14). I have highlighted for years but like they say it is very difficult to find that one key sentence in a paragraph. I have often found myself wanting to highlight the whole paragraph because all of it seemed important.
In the article Secrets of a Mind-Gamer by Joshua Foer it talks about how mental athletes are able to retain large amounts of unrelated information rapidly through creating lavish mental images and storing them in elaborate imaginary structures. Throughout the article Foer is also telling about his journey in becoming the U.S. record holder in speed cards. “There can be no improvement of the general or elementary faculty of memory; there can only be improvement of our memory for special systems of associated things; and this latter improvement is due to the way in which the things in question are woven into association with each other in the mind. Intricately or profoundly woven, they are held: disconnected, they tend to drop out just in proportion as the native brain retentiveness is poor” (James, 1899, p. 61). This statement by James is similar to Foer’s discussion about Rhetorica ad Herennium and how it advises creating memorable images for your palaces: the funnier, lewder and more bizarre, the better. “When we see in everyday life things that are petty, ordinary and banal, we generally fail to remember them. . . . But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonorable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable or laughable, that we are likely to remember for a long time.” (Foer, 2011). Even though I found this article interesting and plan on trying some of these methods I felt it was similar to cramming.
Kirschner, Sweller and Clark discussed how there doesn’t seem to be any research that supports minimal guidance during instruction. They go on to say that not only is unguided instruction normally less effective but in some cases it has a negative effect. They discuss how the advantage of guidance begins to recede only when learners have sufficiently high prior knowledge to provide internal guidance. However, like I have said many times before I think that every learner is different and I believe that teachers should have more that just one approach to teaching student.
In my skimming what we had to do under video 3 I didn’t catch we only had to watch one from the list of videos. However, I am really glad I did watch all the videos because they were really interesting. I can’t pick a favorite but I will say the ones I enjoyed the most were: "Daniel Tammet: Different Ways of Knowing," "How Does Your Memory Work?” and "The Mind's Storehouse." It just amazes me how much we know about the brain and how it work but also amazes me how little we truly know. I don’t believe we will ever truly know everything about the brain. I think we may come close one day. On the other hand, I believe there will always be the people like Daniel Tammet, Jill Price, and Steven Wiltshire that will boggle the mind.
James states, “The teacher ought always to impress the class through as many sensible channels as he can. Talk and write and draw on blackboard, permit the pupils to talk, and make them write and draw, exhibit pictures, plans, and curves, have your diagrams colored differently in the different parts, etc.; and out of the whole variety of impressions the individual child will find the most lasting ones for himself” (James, 1899, p. 68). In the article Brain-Friendly Techniques for Improving Memory, King-Friedrish discusses exactly what James is talking about. She says, “New learning must be connected to what students already know”(King-Friedrish, 2001, p. 76). Throughout the article she discusses how teachers need to help students develop personal relevance, make sure it makes sense, elaborate on key concepts, and give students several retrieval cues. King-Friedrish uses Ms. Fuglie as an example because she developed a variety of learning experiences to help students deepen their understanding of latitude and longitude. In King-Friedrish statement, “Classroom teachers face the challenge of making the encoding of the information and skills that we are attempting to teach students as elaborate and deep as possible” (King-Friedrish, 2001, p. 77). She is right; with all of the information teachers are required to get through in a single year, how can they possibly make everything as elaborate and deep as Ms Fuglie did on just latitude and longitude? I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be better for our schools to require less in a single year. I know for me I would rather have a deep understanding of one thing instead of a shallow understand of many different things. It is like the old saying “A jack of all trades, master of none.”
Marsh and Bulter described three cognitive theories, which are: desirable difficulties, meaning extraction, and transfer-appropriate processing. They used those theories to evaluate the following strategies: that guide the initial learning of material, that guide post-studying processing, the use of adjunct questions during reading, summarization exercises, and the use of imagery. Throughout this article you can find similarities to Vygotsky’s, Piaget’s, and James’ theories. I found this article interesting but the most interesting part was about highlighting. Marsh and Bulter state, “highlighting (or underlining) as typically implemented is not a strong study strategy, even though it is a popular one…In addition, highlighting in this way represents a desirable difficulty because of the effort required to identify the key sentences in a given paragraph” (Marsh & Butler, in press, p. 14). I have highlighted for years but like they say it is very difficult to find that one key sentence in a paragraph. I have often found myself wanting to highlight the whole paragraph because all of it seemed important.
In the article Secrets of a Mind-Gamer by Joshua Foer it talks about how mental athletes are able to retain large amounts of unrelated information rapidly through creating lavish mental images and storing them in elaborate imaginary structures. Throughout the article Foer is also telling about his journey in becoming the U.S. record holder in speed cards. “There can be no improvement of the general or elementary faculty of memory; there can only be improvement of our memory for special systems of associated things; and this latter improvement is due to the way in which the things in question are woven into association with each other in the mind. Intricately or profoundly woven, they are held: disconnected, they tend to drop out just in proportion as the native brain retentiveness is poor” (James, 1899, p. 61). This statement by James is similar to Foer’s discussion about Rhetorica ad Herennium and how it advises creating memorable images for your palaces: the funnier, lewder and more bizarre, the better. “When we see in everyday life things that are petty, ordinary and banal, we generally fail to remember them. . . . But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonorable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable or laughable, that we are likely to remember for a long time.” (Foer, 2011). Even though I found this article interesting and plan on trying some of these methods I felt it was similar to cramming.
Kirschner, Sweller and Clark discussed how there doesn’t seem to be any research that supports minimal guidance during instruction. They go on to say that not only is unguided instruction normally less effective but in some cases it has a negative effect. They discuss how the advantage of guidance begins to recede only when learners have sufficiently high prior knowledge to provide internal guidance. However, like I have said many times before I think that every learner is different and I believe that teachers should have more that just one approach to teaching student.
In my skimming what we had to do under video 3 I didn’t catch we only had to watch one from the list of videos. However, I am really glad I did watch all the videos because they were really interesting. I can’t pick a favorite but I will say the ones I enjoyed the most were: "Daniel Tammet: Different Ways of Knowing," "How Does Your Memory Work?” and "The Mind's Storehouse." It just amazes me how much we know about the brain and how it work but also amazes me how little we truly know. I don’t believe we will ever truly know everything about the brain. I think we may come close one day. On the other hand, I believe there will always be the people like Daniel Tammet, Jill Price, and Steven Wiltshire that will boggle the mind.
Reference:
Foer, J. (2011, February). Secrets of a mind-gamer: How I trained my brain and became a world-class memory athlete. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/02/20/magazine/mind-secrets.html?hp.
King-Friedrichs, J. (2001). Brain-friendly techniques for improving memory. Educational Leadership, 59(3), 76-69.
Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41, 75-86.
Marsh, E. J., & Butler, A. C. (in press). Memory in educational settings. In D. Reisberg (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of cognitive psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
You have made some great connections to James here, Alison.
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