Ch. 6 Cognitive psychology

WHAT
In class today we talked about cognitive process which works similarly to a computer. Sensory Register has unlimited storage capacity and the information stored in it can be lost within 2-3 seconds. In order to have students come out of the sensory register you have to have their attention. This brings them into their working memory which is short duration and it has a limited storage unit. In order for students to store information into their long term memory the process encoding has to come into play. Encoding is the process of fixing or modifying the knowledge. The long-term memory is where we want our students to store the information we are teaching them. Long-term memory has unlimited capacity and unlimited duration. There are three types of long term memory. The first is Declarative/semantic: Factual knowledge, the second is Procedural: "How to" knowledge, and last is Episodic: Event/picture memories knowledge. Some strategies for Encoding information is: Rehearsal, Meaningful learning, organization, elaboration, visual imagery, and mnemonics. Effects: Primacy- 1st thing you learn sticks. Recency- Last thing you learn sticks. A positive transfer facilitates new knowledge. A negative transfer inhibits new knowledge. Some test reviewing strategies are: Identifying important information, taking notes, retrieving relevant prior knowledge, organizing, elaborating, and summarizing.


SO WHAT
Learning about cognitive process now tells us that we need to teach the students in a way so they can store the new information in their long term memory. Therefore, we need to catch their attention and keep it. Then we need to use the process of encoding to make it possible for our students to store the information in their long term memory. If we can learn to teach every single lesson that way our students would rarely forget the information we taught. How great would that be for assessments? We need to get the strategies down for encoding information. If we could use these strategies each time we do a lesson our students would benefit extremely from it. We need to make sure that we are making our lessons interesting for the student and meaningful for the student. We also need to make sure that we are teaching students all of the effective study/review skills.




NOW WHAT
Knowing this about cognitive process, I now can better help my students in my future classroom. I am going to memorize all of the strategies, meanings, and skills needed for each of them. Knowing all of these strategies will help me accomplish my goal, which is teaching the students to the best of my abilities. My number one goal is having students enjoy, love, and store anything they learn in my class. This is not an easy goal to accomplish but I am going to try my best to accomplish it. Students need to know the strategies for reviewing, studying. I wish I would have known them when I was growing up. I knew a few but not all. I am going to have my students practice these strategies daily in different ways to help them be able to study and review things effectively on their own.