Principles of Psychology Child and Adolescent Development for Educators

Elementary grade years cognitive development

Concrete operational. Except for the most intellectually advanced students, most will need to generalize from concrete experiences.

One way to structure students' learning efforts is to follow the suggestions offered by

Raymond Wlodkowski for drawing up a personal contract.

2.0 Set. Being ready to perform a particular action.

3.0 Guided response. Performing under the guidance of a model.

A few states have eliminated their bilingual education programs in favor of

one-year English immersion programs.

To emphasize students' memory abilities when you teach and test, use prompts such as:

-"Who said ... ?" -"Summarize the ideas of ..." -"Who did ... ?" -"When did ... ?" -"How did ... ?" -"Describe ..."

To emphasize students' analytical abilities, use prompts such as:

-"Why in your judgment ... ?" -"Explain why ..." -"Explain what caused ..." -"Critique ..."

Self esteem

(or self-worth, as it is sometimes called) refers to the overall or global evaluation people make of themselves.

The remaining students were taught a questioning technique called reciprocal questioning

(parts of which were incorporated into Palincsar and Brown's reciprocal teaching strategy).

Erikson psychological development stages

*2-3 *4-5 *6-11 *12-18 years

To emphasize creative abilities, use prompts such as:

-"Imagine ..." -"Design ..." -"Suppose that ..." -"What would happen if ... ?"

To emphasize practical thinking, ask students to:

-"Show how you can use ..." -"Implement ..." -"Demonstrate how in the real world ..."

Formal operational

-11+ -Able to deal with abstractions form hypotheses solve problems systematically engage in mental manipulations.

Interpersonal influences on development

-Attachment -Parenting styles -Social networks

Multicultural Education Programs important terms

-Cooperative learning -Mastery learning

Students who believe that the knowledge and skills they are learning are useful to them now (using history as a tool for thinking about the present, for example), who know what constitutes good-quality work and believe themselves capable of producing it, and who know how to set goals and meet them are more likely than other students to believe they are in control of their learning.

-Create challenging tasks for students.

Students with Emotional Disturbance Important terms

-Emotional disturbance

Biological influences on development

-Gender -General health -Mental health -Health practices

Gender differences and gender bias important terms

-Gender bias -Loss of voice

Another caution is to avoid selecting issues that provoke more than they instruct. You may be tempted to present a highly controversial topic and then congratulate yourself at the end of the period if most students engaged in heated discussion. But if they simply argued enthusiastically about something that had nothing to do with the subject you are assigned to teach, you cannot honestly claim to have arranged an instructive exchange of ideas.

-In a middle school science class, ask students to list arguments for and against attempting to alter the genetic code of human beings. -In a high school political science class, ask students to list arguments for and against democratic forms of government.

Universal ethical principle orientation

-Moral decisions should be made in terms of self chosen ethical principles -Once principles are chosen they should be applied in consistent ways.

Conventional

-Stage 3 and 4 -Typical of 9 to 20 year olds -Conform to the conventions of society because they are the rules of society

Erikson psychological development important terms

-Role confusion -Identity -Identity status

Linguistic

-Sensitivity to the sounds, rhythms, and meanings of words; sensitivity to the different functions of language -Poet and journalist

1.0 Knowledge. Remembering previously learned information, such as facts, terms, procedures, and principles.

2.0 Comprehension. Grasping the meaning of information by putting it into one's own words, drawing conclusions, or stating implications.

Moral character

A disposition to do both what is good and what is right.

If abundant time is available and if a controversial or subdivided topic is to be discussed, divide the class into groups of about five.

A major limitation of any kind of discussion is that only one person can talk at a time. You can reduce this difficulty by dividing the class into smaller groups before asking them to exchange ideas. A group of about five seems to work best. If only two or three students are interacting with one another, the exchange of ideas may be limited. If there are more than five, not all members will be able to contribute at frequent intervals.

The first two, rehearsal and mnemonic devices, are memory-directed tactics.

A mnemonic device is a memory-directed tactic that helps a learner transform or organize information to enhance its retrievability.

Because the purpose of such assessment is to facilitate, or form, learning and not to assign a grade, it is usually called formative assessment.

A number of scholars have referred to assessment that leads to summative judgments as "assessment of learning" and assessment that is used to make formative judgments as "assessment for learning".

Reciprocal teaching: students learn comprehension skills by demonstrating them to peers

A particularly effective strategy-training program is the reciprocal teaching (RT) program of Annemarie Palincsar and Ann Brown.

Belongingness and love

Acceptance affection

Identity status

Adolescents exhibit a particular process called as for establishing an identity

Generativity vs. Stagnation age group

Adults

Vygotsky cognitive development psychological tools

Aid and change thought process

Both vicarious reinforcement and direct reinforcement can raise an individual's sense of self-efficacy for a particular task, which, in turn, leads to higher levels of motivation.

An individual's sense of self-efficacy can affect motivation to learn through its influence on the learning goal one chooses, the outcome one expects, and the reasons (or attributions) one gives to explain successes and failures.

Using technology to promote cognitive development technology can act

As and provide expert collaborative partners

Factors that lead to successful or unsuccessful discussions are often idiosyncratic, but there are certain procedures you might follow to increase the likelihood of success.

Ask questions that stimulate students to apply, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate.

Robust learning generally requires robust teaching, and both diagnostic and formative assessments, or assessments for learning, are catalysts for better teaching.

Assessment for Learning (Formative Assessment)

Bandura portrays these relationships in a triangular arrangement with bidirectional arrows

Bandura uses the term personal agency to refer to the potential control we have over our own behavior, and he believes that our capacity for personal agency grows out of our skills of self-control and self-regulation.

Although slight differences in Piaget kohlberg and gilligan moral development do exist

Both males and females use both caring and justice orientations to resolve real life moral dilemmas

Maintain an orderly and well-run classroom in which disruptions are kept to a minimum. (You will find more detailed information on how to create such an environment in Chapter 12, "Classroom Management.")

Break tasks down into small, easy-to-manage pieces, and arrange the pieces in a logical sequence.

Macromoral issues

Broad social issues such as civil rights free speech the women's movement and wilderness preservation.

They are there to learn what the teacher tells them.

But as with their siblings at home, they may be quite active in small-group discussions composed entirely of peers (García, 2002).

Foreclosure

Close minded, authoritarian, low in anxiety; has difficulty solving problems under stress; feels superior to peers; more dependent on parents and other authority figures for guidance and approval than in other statuses.

Erikson psychological development psychosocial moratorium delays

Commitment

Direct instruction involves structured, guided, and independent practice

Communicate Clear Goals and Objectives

Other health impairments

Conditions such as asthma, hemophilia, sickle cell anemia, epilepsy, heart disease, and diabetes that so limit the strength, vitality, or alertness of a child that educational performance is significantly affected.

Self-control

Controlling one's behaviors in a particular setting in the absence of reinforcement or punishment

Adaptation

Tendency to adjust to environment.

Reflection phase

Data are shared and implications for improving teaching and learning are examined.

Children's memory skills develop gradually over the school years both as a result of dealing with tasks that require increased memory demands and explicit instruction.

Define metacognition, and explain how it affects the learning process.

Misconception: Every child should be taught every subject in eight different ways to develop all of the intelligences.

Educators have used MI theory in a variety of ways to help students understand that they could be smart in different ways and that, in varying degrees, they possessed all eight intelligences.

And you can safely assume that the interpersonal skills most students possess are probably not highly developed.

Equal Opportunities for Success

Explain how social interactions influence the development of one's personality, especially with regard to one's personal sense of industry and identity.

Erikson's theory of psychosocial development is notable because it covers the life span, describes people as playing an active role in their own psychological development as opposed to passively responding to external forces, and emphasizes the role of cultural norms and goals.

Emulation

Exhibit the general form of the modeled behavior.

For example, a technology-enhanced summer program designed to help low-achieving inner-city middle school children improve their reading and writing skills produced noticeable improvements in motivation.

Explain the effects of reinforcement on both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.

Physiological

Food, water, oxygen

As most proponents use the term, inclusion means keeping special education students in regular classrooms and bringing support services to the children rather than the other way around.

Full inclusion refers to the practice of eliminating all pullout programs and special education teachers and of providing regular classroom teachers with training in teaching special-needs students so that they can teach these students in the regular classroom.

Seriation

The arrangement of items in a particular order.

Vygotsky cognitive development

How we think influenced by current social forces and historical cultural forces

Procedural knowledge involves knowing how to use various cognitive processes.

Hypermedia technology exists when multimedia information can be nonsequentially accessed, examined, and constructed by users, thereby enabling them to move from one information resource to another while controlling which options to take.

12-18 years adolescents

Identity vs role confusion age range

High school years psychosocial development

Identity vs. role confusion. Concerns arise about gender roles and occupational choice. Different identity statuses become apparent.

Conventional morality

Impress others respect authority

6-11 years elementary

Industry vs inferiority age range

Trust vs mistrust age range

Infants

4-5 years or preschoolers

Initiative vs guilt age range

Vygotsky cognitive development promoted by

Instruction in zone of proximal development

Multiple intelligence theory

Intelligence is composed of 8 distinct forms of intelligence.

It appears that giving students rewards may indeed decrease their intrinsic motivation for a task but only under certain conditions.

Intrinsic motivation is enhanced when reward provides positive feedback, is available to all who qualify

But as we point out later in this chapter, when we discuss transfer of learning, some have argued that too strong an emphasis on situated cognition can make it difficult for students to see how to apply prior knowledge.

It does a better job than even high-quality lecture/discussion of motivating students, stimulating them to activate relevant prior knowledge, and prompting them to meaningfully elaborate and store the lesson's content for later use.

Performance assessments present such challenges to teachers as increasing time needed for assessment, explaining to parents how performance assessment scores translate to letter grades, spending more time helping students prepare for and pass tests, and not letting the summative evaluation purpose of standardized tests crowd out the formative evaluation purpose of performance assessments.

It has not yet been completely demonstrated that student performances and products can be measured reliably (consistently) and validly (accurately).

Finally, there is the decision-making and social action approach.

It incorporates all of the components of the previous approaches and adds the requirement that students make decisions and take actions concerning a concept, issue, or problem being studied.

The last step of the presentation phase is to evaluate students' understanding.

Joyce and Weil refer to these three phases as structured practice, guided practice, and independent practice.

Our last explanation concerns the availability of retrieval cues.

Lack of retrieval cues

Maintenance rehearsal (also called rote rehearsal or repetition) has a mechanical quality.

Mature learners don't often employ maintenance rehearsal by itself.

Postconventional morality

Mutual agreements consistent principles

Assimilation

New experience is fitted into existing scheme

Norm-referenced grading can be used to evaluate advanced levels of learning

Norm-referenced grading systems should rarely, if ever, be used in classrooms because few circumstances warrant their use and because they are likely to depress the motivation of all but the highest-scoring students.

As you may recall from Chapter 10, situated learning, or situated cognition, is the concept that knowledge is closely linked to the environment in which it is acquired.

One project that embodied the concept of situated learning was conducted with elementary grade students in a Northern Ireland school and a Republic of Ireland school.

Schemes

Organized generalizable patterns of behavior or thought.

Few opportunities for retrieval

Our third reason is one you probably don't want to hear: you don't take enough tests as you are learning new material!

Erikson psychological development individuals in foreclosure unquestioningly endorse

Parents goals and values

On average, students who received peer tutoring scored at the 63rd percentile on a measure of achievement, whereas students who did not receive peer tutoring scored at the 50th percentile.

Peer tutoring also has positive effects on nonachievement outcomes.

Esteem

Respect

It is often used with a token economy.

Response cost

Autism

Significant difficulty in verbal and nonverbal communication and social interaction that adversely affects educational performance.

Self description

Simply the way in which people describe themselves to others.

Middle school grades America history Spatial

Students draw murals that tell the story of a historical period.

Organization

Tendency to systematize processes

Classroom assessments can provide both summative and formative information.

That is where formative assessment comes into play.

Minorities are underrepresented in gifted and talented classes because standardized test scores are emphasized at the expense of other indexes.

The academic needs of students who are gifted and talented are usually met through accelerated instruction, placement in classes or schools for the gifted and talented, or classroom enrichment activities. Special classes and schools can result in the big-fish-little pond effect and, in some cases, cause declines in academic self-concept.

Motivation is the willingness to expend a certain amount of effort to achieve a particular goal under a particular set of circumstances.

The behavioral (operant conditioning) view of motivation is based on the desire of students to obtain a positive reinforcer for exhibiting a particular behavior or behavior pattern.

Self-regulation is important because students are expected to become increasingly independent learners as they progress through school

The characteristic that is most strongly related to and best explains differences in self-regulation is perceived self-efficacy.

Because a constructivist approach to teaching emphasizes problem solving, it has much in common with a practice known as flipping the classroom.

The classroom discussion is an instructional technique that teachers can use to support a constructivist view of meaningful learning because it allows students to share different perspectives of realistic problems.

Thus, there are two kinds of evaluative judgments: summative and formative.

The distinction between summative and formative evaluation originated in the work of Michael Scriven.

Define intelligence, explain what intelligence tests are designed to measure, and point out how contemporary theories of intelligence differ from the traditional view.

The extent to which students differ from one another can be substantial, even in the primary grades. By fourth grade, the range of achievement can vary by four or more grade levels.

Explain why and how standardized tests are being used for accountability purposes in education, and analyze research findings on the effects of high-stakes testing.

The federal government became involved in high-stakes testing in 2001 when Congress passed the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. The goal of NCLB is to have all students score at least at the proficient level in math and reading/language arts on state-administered tests by 2014.

Because students attribute success or failure to the factors just listed, research of this type contributes to what is referred to as attribution theory.

The four most commonly given reasons stress ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck.

Adaptations

The tendency to adjust to the environment.

This brief description of meaningfulness and its role in learning contains a strong implication for teaching in culturally diverse classrooms.

The theory that these findings support is Allan Paivio's dual coding theory.

Gender differences in Gilligan's view of identity and moral development

They care less about separation and independence and more about remaining loyal to others through expressions of caring, understanding, and sharing of experiences.

Low-road and high-road transfer produced by varied practice at applying skills, rules, memory retrieval cues.

This use of computer-based technology supports a constructivist approach to learning and is often called learning with computers.

Law and order orientation

To maintain the social order fixed rules must be established and obeyed. It is essential to respect authority.

Find out what your students' interests are and design as many in-class and out-of-class assignments as possible around those interests.

Try to associate subjects and assignments with pleasurable rather than painful experiences by using such techniques as cooperative learning and constructivist approaches to teaching, as well as providing students with the information-processing tools they need to master your objectives.

Not surprisingly, Spearman's explanation is called the

Two factor theory of intelligence

Describe how students' ethnicity and social class affect classroom learning and teacher expectancy.

Two important factors that distinguish one culture from another are ethnicity and social class.

Table 4-3 can serve as a guide for varying your instructional tasks and, consequently, expanding your students' repertoires.

Using a variety of instructional techniques and assessments makes sense for several reasons.

Mainstream American culture is very time oriented, and people who know how to organize their time and work efficiently are praised and rewarded.

We teach our children to value such statements as "Time is money" and "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today."

Making students compete against each other for limited rewards (the "grading on the curve" practice we first mentioned in our discussion of Erik Erikson's psychosocial theory of development) is particularly damaging to intrinsic motivation because of its impact on self-worth.

When we artificially limit opportunities to attain the highest level of accomplishment, intrinsic motivation declines in an effort to protect one's sense of worth.

Before your students take a standardized test, give them specific suggestions for taking such tests.

You may be able partly to reduce the anxiety and tension that are almost inevitable under formal testing conditions by giving some test-taking hints in advance. Robert Linn and M. David Miller note the following tips that might be stressed (depending on the type of test and the grade level of the student):

Intimacy vs isolation age group

Young adults

Because of immigration patterns and high birth rates in some ethnic groups, the United States is becoming

an increasingly diverse country.

Character education programs are often based on

assumptions that are not supported by research on learning.

Learning strategy training, particularly in the form of reciprocal teaching, raises the reading comprehension scores of

both average and below-average readers.

Self-regulation

consistently using self-control skills in new situations

The third variation on the constructivist theme is referred to as

critical constructivism.

To get a better grasp of metacognitive knowledge, think of it as being made up of

declarative, conditional, and procedural components.

Recall from our discussion of Piaget earlier in the book that cognitive growth depends on the presence of a

disequilibrating stimulus that the learner is motivated to eliminate.

If you notice that such a student appears to be getting more and more bothered by an inability to complete a task, you might try to

divert attention to a less demanding form of activity or allow the student to take a short break by straightening materials or going for a drink of water.

He recommends that such a contract should contain

four elements.

Even if a student poor in problem solving recognizes the value of searching long-term memory for relevant information, he may still be

handicapped because of inadequate encoding and retrieval skills.

-Provide students with feedback about their progress rather than feedback about

how they scored relative to the rest of the class.

These are fundamental learning processes that are almost never

made explicit to students.

To avoid committing the same error, you might do one or more of the following:

make it clear that you will allow plenty of time for all students to come up with an answer to a question, repeat the question and give a clue before asking a different question, remind yourself to give frequent personal attention to students with intellectual disability, or try to convey to these students the expectation that they can learn.

A teacher who

modifies a particular day's lesson plan to capitalize on students' interest in a major news story, monitors students' reaction to the new lesson, compares her students' and her own performance against an internal standard, and rewards herself if she feels that standard has been met is illustrating the essence of self-regulation.

One study found that small groups of Black fifth-grade students who were told that they had to help one another learn a reading passage recalled

more of the text than did similar students who worked either in pairs or individually.

Each learning outcome should begin with an action verb (such as explain or describe) that

names the particular action the student is expected to take.

Music lessons and practices are typically done in private, and public performances are

not given until a piece or program is mastered.

Make every effort to contact and work with the

parents of ethnic minority students.

For students who are easily distracted, instruct them to

place only the materials being used on top of the desk or within sight.

Variable interval schedule

reinforce after random time intervals

Effective comprehension tactics are

self-questioning, peer questioning, note taking, and concept mapping.

Factors that seem to play a strong role in producing a teacher expectancy effect are a student's

social class, ethnic background, gender, achievement, and attractiveness and teachers' conception of the nature of intelligence.

Students with ADHD may be treated with

stimulant medication, psychological/educational programs, or a combination of the two.

Loss of voice

students suppress true beliefs about various topics in the presence of parents, teachers, and classmates of the opposite sex

FI schedules of reinforcement occur in education when

teachers schedule exams or projects at regular intervals.

The students were given five hours to write an essay of approximately 750 words on how

the behavior of Dutch youths changed during the 1950s and 1960s.

Using the new views of intelligence to guide instruction

• Triarchic view suggests that instruction and assessment should emphasize all types of ability • Various technology tools may strengthen different intelligences

The rise of multiculturalism

• Cultural pluralism assumes that societies should maintain different cultures, that every culture within a society should be respected, that individuals have the right to participate in society without giving up cultural identity • The U.S. is becoming more culturally diverse because of changes in immigration, birth rates

And when students, colleagues, or parents make broad-based, stereotypical statements such as "Girls aren't interested in technology" or "Boys don't like to display their emotions," respond by saying,

"Oh, which girl [or boy]?" to get across the point that any given individual can deviate from whatever average trends might exist.

Building on their interest in architecture, the students completed a project on several of the major memorial buildings in Washington, D.C.

(such as those honoring Presidents Washington and Jefferson, as well as the Vietnam War Memorial).

-Stressing practical applications and relationships to other subjects

(you may recall from a previous chapter that this tactic is used to help adolescent girls remain interested in science)

Preoperational

*2-7 years *Gradually acquires ability to conserve and decenter but not capable of operations and unable to mentally reverse actions.

Concrete operational

*7-11 years *Capable of but solves problems by generalizing from experiences. *Not able to manipulate conditions mentally unless they have been experienced.

Sensorimotor age range

*Birth-2 years *Develops schemes primarily through sense and motor activities. *Recognizes permanence of objects not seen.

Technology can be applied to Vygotsky's theories

- Roy Pea (1985, 2004) and Gavriel Salomon (1988) were among the first to suggest that technology might play the same role as more capable tutors with such tasks as writing an essay and reading a book. -Technology connects people to people, and it can do so in a variety of contexts that allow learners to gain knowledge and the psychological tools that help them to grow intellectually.

To help students suggest appropriate objectives, you may want to use the techniques recommended by Robert Mager. You might assist your students in stating objectives in terms of a time limit, a minimum number of correct responses, a proportion of correct responses, or a sample of actions.

-"How many minutes do you think you will need to outline this chapter? When you finish, we'll see that film I told you about." -"George, you got six out of ten on this spelling quiz. How many do you want to try for on the retest?"

Ask students to discuss familiar topics or those that are matters of opinion examples

-"What are some of the techniques that advertising agencies use in television commercials to persuade us to buy certain products?" -"What do you think is the best book you have ever read, and why do you think so?"

When you first structure a discussion session, but also while it is under way, take care to ask questions likely to elicit different points of view. If you ask students to supply information (for example, "When did Charles Dickens write Great Expectations?"), the first correct response will lead to closure. You may end up asking a series of questions leading to brief answers—the equivalent of a fill-in exam. When you seek to encourage students to construct personally meaningful interpretations of the issues or to develop skills as deductive thinkers, it is preferable to ask questions that are likely to tap higher levels of thinking.

-"You just learned how to calculate the area of a circle. Think of as many different ways as you can of how you might be able to use that bit of knowledge if you were a do-it-yourself homeowner." (Application) -"Last month we read a novel by Dickens; this month we read a play by Shakespeare. What are some similarities in the way each author developed the plot of his story?" (Synthesis)

Industry vs inferiority

-A child entering school is at a point in development when behavior is dominated by intellectual curiosity and performance. -"He now learns to win recognition by producing things...He develops a sense of." -If children at this stage are encouraged to make and do things well, helped to persevere, allowed to finish tasks, and praised for trying, results. -If the children's efforts are unsuccessful or if they are derided or treated as bothersome, feelings of result. -Children who feel inferior may never learn to enjoy intellectual work and take pride in doing at least one kind of thing really well. -At worst, they may believe they will never excel at anything.

Equilibration

-A form of self regulation that all individuals use to bring coherence and stability to their conception of the world. -Tendency to organize schemes to allow better understanding of experiences

The IEP must include the following elements:

-A statement of the child's existing levels of educational performance -A statement of annual goals, including short term instructional objectives -A statement of the specific special education and related services to be provided to the child and the extent to which the child will be able to participate in regular educational programs -The projected dates for initiation of services and the anticipated duration of the services -Appropriate objective criteria and evaluation procedures and schedules for determining on at least an annual basis whether short term objectives are being achieved

Bodily-kinesthetic

-Abilities to control one's body movements and handle objects skillfully -Dancer and athlete

Musical

-Abilities to produce and appreciate rhythm, pitch, and timbre; appreciation of the forms of musical expression -Violinist and composer

Naturalist

-Ability to recognize and classify the numerous plants and animals of one's environment and their relationships on a logical, justifiable basis; talent of caring for, taming, and interacting with various living creatures -Botanist and entomologist

Intrapersonal

-Access to one's own feelings and the ability to discriminate among them and draw on them to guide behavior; knowledge of one's own strengths, weaknesses, desires, and intelligences -Person with detailed, accurate self-knowledge

Adolescent egocentrism

-Adolescents preoccupied with their own view of the world and how they appear to others. -Are preoccupied with themselves and how they appear to others, they assume that peers and adults are equally interested in what they think and do.

Provide necessary background information by asking all students to read all or part of a book, take notes on a lecture, view a film, conduct library research, or conduct research on the Internet examples

-After the class has read Great Expectations, ask, "What do you think Dickens was trying to convey when he wrote this novel? Was he just trying to tell a good story, or was he also trying to get us to think about certain kinds of relationships between people?" -"After I explain some of the principles of electrical currents, I'm going to ask you to suggest rules for connecting batteries in series and in parallel. Then we'll see how well your rules work."

-Create a sense of purpose for the material students are required to learn. As we point out in Chapter 13, "Approaches to Instruction," students rarely ask "Why do I have to learn this?" (although it is uppermost in their minds), and teachers rarely offer an explanation without being prompted. One way to create purpose for a reading lesson is to engage the students in a discussion of an issue they are interested in that is at the heart of a story or novel they are about to read.

-Allow students to develop a sense of power about their learning.

General guidelines continued

-Although information (facts, concepts, procedures) can be efficiently transmitted from teacher to student through direct instruction, knowledge (rules and hypotheses) is best created by each student through the mental and physical manipulation of information. -Because students' schemes at any given time are an outgrowth of earlier schemes, point out to them how new ideas relate to their old ideas and extend their understanding. Memorization of information for its own sake should be avoided. -Begin lessons with concrete objects or ideas, and gradually shift explanations to a more abstract and general level.

Instrumental relativist orientation

-An action is judged to be right if it is instrumental in satisfying one's own needs or involves an even exchange. -Obeying rules should bring some sort of benefit in return.

Object permanence

-An important cognitive development milestone occurs between the fourth and eighth months. -Prior to this point, the phrase "out of sight, out of mind" is literally true. Infants treat that leave their field of vision as if they no longer exist. -When they drop an from their hands or when an at which they are looking is covered, for example, they do not search for it. -As develops, children's intentional search behaviors become increasingly apparent.

In addition to verbal praise, you can make use of such other forms of positive reinforcement as modeling, symbolic reinforcers, and contingency contracts.

-Arrange for students to observe that classmates who persevere and complete a task receive a reinforcer of some kind. (But let this occur more or less naturally. Also, don't permit students who have finished an assignment to engage in attention-getting or obviously enjoyable self-chosen activities; those who are still working on the assignment may become a bit resentful and therefore less inclined to work on the task at hand.) -Draw happy faces on primary grade students' papers, give check marks as students complete assignments, write personal comments acknowledging good work, and assign bonus points.

Think about the times when you've been praised for a job well done, particularly when you weren't sure about the quality of your work. In all likelihood, it had a strong, maybe even dramatic, effect on your motivation. That being the case, you might think that effective positive reinforcement in the form of verbal praise is a common occurrence in the classroom. But you would be wrong. Observation of classrooms and surveys of students reveal that verbal praise is given infrequently and is often given in ways that limit its effectiveness. Praise and other forms of reinforcement are likely to work best when they are used to strengthen behaviors that students believe they can control (such as reading a book or completing a writing assignment) as opposed to something more general and distant, such as earning a grade of A for an entire semester's worth of work. Jere Brophy and others who have followed him recommend that teachers use praise in the following ways:

-As a spontaneous expression of surprise or admiration. ("Why, Juan! This report is really excellent!") -As compensation for criticism or as vindication of a prediction. ("After your last report, Lily, I said I knew you could do better. Well, you have done better. This is really excellent.") -As an attempt to impress all members of a class. ("I like the way Nguyen just put his books away so promptly.") -As a transition ritual to verify that an assignment has been completed. ("Yes, Maya, that's very good. You can work on your project now.") -As a consolation prize or as encouragement to students who are less capable than others. ("Well, Josh, you kept at it, and you got it finished. Good for you!")

Suggestions for Teaching Instructing Students with Intellectual Disability

-As much as possible, try to avoid placing students with intellectual disability in situations that are likely to lead to their frustration. When, despite your efforts, such students indicate that they are close to their limit of frustration tolerance, encourage them to engage in relaxing change-of-pace pursuits or in physical activities. -Do everything possible to encourage a sense of self-esteem. -Present learning tasks that contain a small number of elements, at least some of them familiar to students, and that can be completed in a short period of time. -Try to arrange what is to be learned into a series of small steps, each of which leads to immediate feedback.

Self-regulation is a critically important capability for students to acquire for the following reasons:

-As students get older, and especially when they get into the middle and high school grades, they are expected to assume greater responsibility for their learning than was the case in earlier grades; thus, they receive less prompting and guidance from teachers and parents.

Students from Latino cultures place a high value on the concept of collectivism, or the interdependence of family members. From an early age, children are taught to think first about fostering the success of any group to which they belong by seeking to work cooperatively with others. To capitalize on this value, consider doing some or all of the following:

-Assign two or three children rather than just one to a classroom task, such as cleaning up after an art period, and allow them to help one another if necessary. -Increase the use of choral reading with students whose English proficiency is limited so they can practice their decoding and pronunciation skills without being the center of attention. -After distributing a homework assignment, allow students to discuss the questions but not to write down the answers. Those who are more proficient in English and have better-developed intellectual skills can help their less-skilled classmates better understand the task. One third-grade teacher who used this technique was surprised to find that every student completed the assignment.

Egocentrism

-Assumption that others see things the same way. -Youngsters find it difficult if not impossible to take another person's point of view.

In the forethought phase, young children are likely to be more limited than older children in their ability to do the following:

-Attend to a model, such as a teacher, for long periods of time -Distinguish relevant model behaviors and verbalizations from less relevant ones -Encode a model's behavior as generalized verbal guidelines -Formulate and maintain well-defined long-term goals

Other studies have found high levels of achievement among low-SES students to be associated with the following attitudes and approaches among teachers (Burris & Welner, 2005; Denbo, 2002; Gardner, 2007; Hamre & Pianta, 2005; Mathis, 2005; Pogrow, 2009b):

-Awareness of child's needs, moods, interests, and capabilities -Classroom atmosphere characterized by pleasant conversations, spontaneous laughter, and exclamations of excitement -Teachers' high but realistic expectations for their students -Mastery goals -Never accepting low-quality work -The use of scaffolded instruction -Teaching thinking skills -Aligning instruction with standards -Using formative evaluation

Criticism of Erikson psychological development theory

-Based largely on personal experience -Not applicable to many cultures -Gender biased

Middle school cognitive characteristics

-Because of the psychological demands of early adolescence, middle school students need a classroom environment that is open, supportive, and intellectually stimulating. -Self-efficacy becomes an important influence on intellectual and social behavior.

Preschool elementary and middle school grades

-Become thoroughly familiar with Piaget's theory so that you will be aware of how your students organize and synthesize ideas. -If possible, assess the level and the type of thinking of each child in your class. Ask individual children to perform some of Piaget's experiments, and spend most of your time listening to each child explain her reactions. -Remember that learning through activity and direct experience is essential. Provide plenty of materials and opportunities for children to learn on their own. -Arrange situations to permit social interaction, so that children can learn from one another. -Plan learning experiences to take into account the level of thinking attained by an individual or group.

Solutions to well-structured problems are usually evaluated through the application of an estimating or checking routine. Such procedures can be found in any good mathematics text. The evaluation of solutions to ill-structured problems and analyses of issues, however, is more complex and is less frequently taught. Ruggiero (1988, 2012) discusses the following 10 habits and skills as contributing to the ability to evaluate complex solutions and positions:

-Being open-minded about opposing points of view. -Selecting proper criteria of evaluation. Violations of this skill abound.

Elementary school physical characteristics

-Both boys and girls become leaner and stronger. -Obesity can become a problem for some children of this age group. -Although small in magnitude, gender differences in motor skill performance are apparent. -This is a period of relative calm and predictability in physical development.

Preschool and kindergarten cognitive characteristics

-By age four, many children begin to develop a theory of mind. -Kindergartners are quite skillful with language. Most of them like to talk, especially in front of a group. -Many preschool and kindergarten children do not accurately assess their competence for particular tasks. -Competence is encouraged by interaction, interest, opportunities, urging, limits, admiration, and signs of affection.

Interpersonal

-Capacities to discern and respond appropriately to the moods, temperaments, motivations, and desires of other people -Therapist and salesperson

Spatial

-Capacities to perceive the visual-spatial world accurately and to perform transformations on one's initial perceptions -Sculptor and navigator

Preschool and kindergarten physical characteristics

-Children are extremely active. They have good control of their bodies and enjoy activity for its own sake. -Because of an inclination toward bursts of activity, kindergartners need frequent rest periods. They themselves often don't recognize the need to slow down. -Preschoolers' large muscles are more developed than those that control fingers and hands. Therefore, preschoolers may be quite clumsy at, or physically incapable of, such skills as tying shoes and buttoning coats. -Young children find it difficult to focus their eyes on small objects. Therefore, their eye-hand coordination may be imperfect. -Although children's bodies are flexible and resilient, the bones that protect the brain are still soft. -Gender differences in physical development and motor skill proficiency are usually not noticeable until kindergarten and are fairly small.

Primary grades social characteristics

-Children become somewhat more selective in their choice of friends and are likely to have a more or less permanent best friend. -Primary grade children often like organized games in small groups, but they may be overly concerned with rules or get carried away by team spirit. -Quarrels are still frequent. Words are used more often than physical aggression, but many boys (in particular) may indulge in punching, wrestling, and shoving.

Primary grades cognitive characteristics

-Children understand that there are different ways to know things and that some ways are better than others. -Primary grade children begin to understand that learning and recall are caused by particular cognitive processes that they can control. -Because of continuing neurological development and limited experience with formal learning tasks, primary grade children do not learn as efficiently as older children do. -Talking aloud to oneself reaches a peak between the ages of six and seven and then rapidly declines.

For the self-reflection phase, expect primary grade children to be limited in their ability to do the following:

-Compare themselves to peers as a basis for judging their own capabilities. Young children's beliefs about their capabilities are more likely to be influenced by teacher feedback than by comparisons to peers' performance. For older students, the reverse is true. -Make appropriate attributions for their successes and failures. In the primary grades, the concepts of effort and ability are not clearly distinguished, so effort is viewed as the primary cause of success and failure. Older students, however, are more likely to ascribe success primarily to ability and failure primarily to insufficient ability.

Here are some examples of the types of objectives Mager recommends:

-Correctly solve at least seven addition problems consisting of three two-digit numbers within a period of three minutes. -Given pictures of 10 trees, correctly identify at least 8 as either deciduous or evergreen. -Correctly spell at least 90 percent of the words on the list handed out last week. -Given a computer and word processing program, set it up to type a business letter (according to the specifications provided) within two minutes.

Ethnicity and social class important terms

-Culture -Teacher expectancy effect

Mager then offers these suggestions for writing specific objectives of instruction:

-Describe what you want learners to be doing when demonstrating achievement, and indicate how you will know they are doing it. -In your description, identify and name the behavioral act that indicates achievement, define the conditions under which the behavior is to occur, and state the criteria of acceptable performance. -Write a separate objective for each learning performance.

Suggestions for Teaching Instructing students with emotional disturbance

-Design the classroom environment and formulate lesson plans to encourage social interaction and cooperation. -Prompt and reinforce appropriate social interactions. -Train other students to initiate social interaction. -Design the classroom environment to reduce the probability of disruptive behavior. -Reinforce appropriate behavior, and, if necessary, punish inappropriate behavior. -Use group contingency-management techniques.

We concluded earlier that self-questioning could be an effective comprehension tactic if students were trained to write good comprehension questions and given opportunities to practice the technique. We suggest you try the following instructional sequence:

-Discuss the purpose of student-generated questions. -Point out the differences between knowledge-level questions and different types of comprehension-level questions (such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation). An excellent discussion of these types can be found in the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I: Cognitive Domain. -Explain and illustrate the kinds of responses that should be given to different types of comprehension-level questions.

To help students and their parents make a successful transition to a new country and school system, educators and multicultural education scholars suggest trying the following:

-During the first week of the school year, hold parent-teacher-child conferences. Be willing to hold these meetings in the parents' home and during the evening hours if necessary. -Recruit bilingual parent volunteers to help teachers and staff members talk with parents and students. -In discussing classroom tasks and student performance with parents, avoid technical terminology and acronyms. Not only does this result in fewer misunderstandings, but it also lessens the sense of inferiority that some parents feel. -Participate in the cultural events hosted by your students' community. -Recruit community members to help your students with culture-specific projects that you would like the students to carry out.

Elementary school emotional characteristics

-During this period, children develop a more global, integrated, and complex self-image. -Disruptive family relationships, social rejection, and school failure may lead to delinquent behavior.

Research from the 1970s (Brophy & Evertson, 1976) found that the classroom and standardized test performances of educationally disadvantaged students improves when teachers follow these seven guidelines:

-Eliminate distractions, and maximize the amount of time students actually spend working on a task. -Establish high expectations and a classroom climate that supports achievement. -Have students work on specific exercises in small groups. -Ask direct questions that have direct answers. -Provide frequent opportunities for practice and review. -Provide timely corrective feedback.

Erickson's psychological development theory

-Encompasses the life span -Highlights the role of the person and culture in development

-Estimate the item discriminating power by subtracting the number in the lower group who answered the item correctly from the number in the upper group, and divide by one-half of the total number of students included in the item analysis. For the preceding example, the discrimination index is . When the index is positive, as it is here, it indicates that more students in the upper group than in the lower group answered the item correctly. A negative value indicates just the opposite.

-Estimate the item difficulty by calculating the percentage of students who answered the item correctly. The difficulty index for the preceding item is 40 percent . Note that the smaller the percentage is, the more difficult the item is.

The Rise of Multiculturalism Important terms

-Ethnocentrism

Gronlund has developed a two-step procedure for writing a more general type of objective:

-Examine what is to be learned with reference to lists of objectives such as those included in the three taxonomies. Use such lists to formulate general objectives of instruction that describe types of behavior students should exhibit to demonstrate what they have learned. -Under each general instructional objective, list up to five specific learning outcomes that provide a representative sample of what students should be able to do when they have achieved the general objective.

Applying Piaget's theory of cognitive development general guidelines

-Focus on what children at each stage can do and avoid what they cannot meaningfully understand -Because individuals differ in their rates of intellectual growth gear instructional materials and activities to each student's developmental level. -Because intellectual growth occurs when individuals attempt to eliminate a disequilibrium instructional lessons and materials that introduce new concepts should provoke interest and curiosity and be moderately challenging to maximize assimilation and accommodation

The following examples are consistent with an instructional approach that is based on both direct instruction and strategy instruction.

-For students who have difficulty distinguishing between similar-looking or -sounding stimuli (such as letters, words, or phrases), point out and highlight their distinguishing characteristics. For example, highlight the circular part of the letters b, p, and d and place a directional arrow at the end of the straight segment to emphasize that they have the same shape but differ in their spatial orientation. Or highlight the letters t and r in the words though, thought, and through to emphasize that they differ from each other by the absence or presence of one letter.

-Provide students with a sample paragraph and a set of high-level question stems. Have students formulate questions and responses either individually or in pairs. -Provide corrective feedback.

-Give students short passages from which to practice. -Provide corrective feedback

-Point out how classroom tasks relate to students' out-of-school experiences. One example is to draw attention to the basic similarities between poetry and rap music. -Model for and explain to students the various thinking processes that are activated and used when one engages in a complex task.

-Gradually ease students into the process of dealing with complex and realistic tasks. There is no question that the approach described in this list carries with it more risk of failure than was the case for the structured, small-scale approach of the 1970s. But much of this risk can be minimized by scaffolding, which we described in Chapter 2. As you may recall, in scaffolding, the teacher initially provides a considerable amount of support through explanations, demonstrations, and prompts of various types. As students demonstrate their ability to carry out more of a task independently, the scaffolding is withdrawn.

Activities

-Have several students go to the board. Give a rapid-fire series of problems to be solved by those at the board, as well as by those at their desks. After five problems, have another group of students go to the board, and so on. -Think of ways to move out of the classroom legitimately every now and then. Teach geometry, for instance, by asking the class to take several balls of string and lay out a baseball diamond on the side lawn of the school.

High school cognitive characteristics

-High school students become increasingly capable of engaging in formal thought, but they may not use this capability. -Between the ages of twelve and sixteen, political thinking becomes more abstract, liberal, and knowledgeable.

Morality of constraint

-Holds single, absolute moral perspective (behavior is right or wrong). -Believes rules are unchangeable. -Determines extent of guilt by amount of damage. -Defines moral wrongness in terms of what is forbidden or punished. -Believes punishment should stress atonement and does not need to "fit the crime." -Believes peer aggression should be punished by an external authority. -Believes children should obey rules because they are established by those in authority.

Environmental influences on development

-Housing -Income -Employment -Education -Access to care and support systems -Political climate

Marcia's identity statuses

-Identity diffusion -Foreclosure -Moratorium -Identity achievement

For the performance phase, you can expect primary grade children to be limited in their ability to do the following:

-Ignore both external and internal distractions (such as self-doubts and thoughts of prior difficulties) -Perform the steps of a task more slowly and deliberately to avoid making mistakes -Provide themselves with verbal reminders of the steps needed to carry out a task -Select appropriate tactics for a particular task.

Investigations

-In elementary grade classrooms (and in some middle school and high school classrooms), set up a variety of learning centers with themes such as library, games, social science, cultural appreciation, and computer use, and organize these with intriguing displays and materials. For example, your social science center could be stocked with maps, charts, and documents. Your computer center might include educational software such as CD-ROMs and database programs; student-created publications made with desktop publishing or word processing programs; a computer with Internet access; and lists of appropriate and interesting online sites.

Suggestions for Teaching Applying Social Cognitive Theory in the Classroom

-Include the development of self-regulated learning skills in your objectives and lesson plans. -Teach students how to use both memory and comprehension tactics and to take notes. -Establish the foundation for self-regulated learning in kindergarten and the primary grades. -When teaching SRL skills, bear in mind the developmental limitations of younger students. -Embed instruction in SRL in interesting and challenging classroom tasks. -Use effective strategy-training programs such as reciprocal teaching, but be prepared to make adaptations to fit your particular circumstances.

Identity achievement

-Introspective; more planful, rational, and logical in decision making than in other identity statuses; high self esteem; works effectively under stress; likely to form close interpersonal relationships. -Usually the last identity status to emerge.

Morality of cooperation

-Is aware of different viewpoints regarding rules. -Believes rules are flexible. -Considers the wrongdoers' intentions when evaluating guilt. -Defines moral wrongness in terms of violation of spirit of cooperation. -Believes punishment should involve either restitution or suffering the same fate as one's victim. -Believes peer aggression should be punished by retaliatory behavior on the part of the victim. -Believes children should obey rules because of mutual concerns for rights of others.

Generativity vs. Stagnation

-Is primarily the concern of establishing and guiding the next generation. Erikson's use of the term is purposely broad. -It refers, of course, to having children and raising them. -In addition, it refers to the productive and creative efforts in which individuals take part (e.g., teaching) that have a positive effect on younger generations. -Those unable or unwilling to "establish" and "guide" the next generation become victims of stagnation and self-absorption.

Autonomy vs shame and doubt

-Just when children have learned to trust (or mistrust) their parents, they must exert a degree of independence. -If they are permitted and encouraged to do what they are capable of doing at their own pace and in their own way—and with judicious supervision by parents and teachers—they will develop a sense of (willingness and ability to direct one's behavior). -But if parents and teachers are impatient and do too many things for young children or shame young children for unacceptable behavior, these children will develop feelings of self-doubt.

If basic instruction in SRL skills is to begin as early as kindergarten, teachers need to acknowledge that, because young children are more limited cognitively than older children, they will require more support and guidance. Dale Schunk (2001) suggests that teachers of primary and early elementary grade children do the following:

-Keep demonstrations and explanations of various skills and behaviors relatively short. -As you or someone else models a skill, point out which aspects of the model's behaviors are more important than others. -Set a series of short-term goals, each of which can be accomplished after a limited amount of instruction. -Design your lessons to minimize interruptions and distractions and periodically tell students that you believe they are capable learners. -Periodically remind students to carry out a task more slowly and think about the skills needed to complete the task. -Provide verbal feedback about children's capabilities (e.g., "You're good at reading").

PreK-middle school continued

-Keep in mind the possibility that students may be influenced by egocentric speech and thought.

Physical milestones preschool

-Kick a ball; walk up and down stairs -Climbs and runs; pedals tricycle -Catches ball; uses scissors -Hops and swings; uses fork and spoon

Preschool and kindergarten emotional characteristics

-Kindergarten children tend to express their emotions freely and openly. Anger outbursts are frequent. -Jealousy among classmates is likely to be fairly common, as kindergarten children have much affection for the teacher and actively seek approval. When there are 30 individuals competing for the affection and attention of just one teacher, some jealousy is inevitable.

Declarative knowledge can be thought of as "knowing that" and is composed of

-Knowledge-of-person variables: for example, knowing that you are good at learning verbal material but poor at learning mathematical material, or knowing that information not rehearsed or encoded is quickly forgotten. -Knowledge-of-task variables: for instance, knowing that passages with long sentences and unfamiliar words are usually harder to understand than passages that are more simply written. -Knowledge-of-strategy variables: for example, knowing that mnemonic devices (we describe these in the next chapter) make it easier to store and retrieve information from LTM in verbatim form, but that concept maps (also described in the next chapter) aid comprehension of a reading passage.

Preschool and kindergarten (3-5 years)

-Large-muscle control is better established than small-muscle control and eye-hand coordination -Free play provides multiple benefits to young children -Gender differences in toy preferences and play activities are noticeable by kindergarten -By age four, children have a theory of mind: aware of their own mental processes and that others may think differently -Peer comparisons help four- and five-year-olds more accu- rately judge their capabilities

Self regulation

-Learn to adapt the behavior to changes in internal and external conditions (such as the reactions of others). -Self-efficacy beliefs; degree of intrinsic interest in the skill

Self control

-Learn to exhibit the modeled behavior automatically through self-directed practice (focus on the underlying rule or process that produces the behavior and compare the behavior with personal standards). -Self-satisfaction from matching the standards and behavior of the model

Students with Learning Disabilities Important terms

-Learning Disabilities

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Important terms

-Mainstreaming

-Group students by topic, interests, or their own choice rather than by ability. -Use a variety of assessment techniques (discussed in Chapter 14, "Assessment of Classroom Learning") rather than just one, and make the top grade potentially achievable by all students by evaluating performance according to a predetermined set of criteria.

-Make lessons relevant by emphasizing how the knowledge and skills they are acquiring can be used in their everyday lives outside of school.

To help ensure that assessments serve as a positive force for learning, teachers should take the following steps:

-Make sure that you are knowledgeable about, understand, and use the basic measurement concepts and practices described in this chapter. Don't fall into the trap that so many teachers have fallen into of treating classroom assessment as a necessary evil. -Recognize that the most accurate and useful assessments of learning are composed of multiple and varied measures. Use the full range of assessments (written tests, performance assessments, checklists, rating scales) available to you. -Align the content of your assessments with your objectives, and fully inform students about the content and demands of your assessments. -Finally, use the results to learn how to work even more productively with your students.

According to the responses of almost 400 low-income, inner-city middle school and high school students, good teachers do the following:

-Make themselves always available to provide a student with help in whatever form the student prefers. Some students, for example, want help after school, some during class, some individually, some by working with peers, and some through whole-class question-and-answer sessions. Some students may ask for help only if they are sure that no one besides the teacher knows they are receiving it. -Strive to have all students understand the material by not rushing through lessons and by offering explanations in a clear step-by-step fashion and in various ways. -Make an effort to understand students' behavior by trying to understand the personalities and after-school lives of students (Corbett & Wilson, 2002).

High school emotional characteristics

-Many psychiatric disorders either appear or become prominent during adolescence. Included among these are eating disorders, substance abuse, schizophrenia, depression, and suicide. -The most common type of emotional disorder during adolescence is depression. -If depression becomes severe, suicide may be contemplated.

Motivation researchers maintain that students care about learning when they are invited to learn. Teachers extend such invitations when they do the following:

-Meet Maslow's safety and belonging needs. Examples of meeting students' safety and belonging needs include never ridiculing a student for lack of knowledge or skills or letting other students do the same, praising students when they do well and inquiring about possible problems when they do not, relating lessons to students' interests, and learning students' names as quickly as possible. -Provide opportunities for students to make meaningful contributions to their classroom. Examples here include having students help classmates master instructional objectives through short-term tutoring or cooperative learning arrangements and inviting students to use personal experiences and background as a way to broaden a lesson or class discussion. One classroom teacher created overhead transparencies of students' work for use as an instructional tool; this gave students the sense that they were a contributing part of a community.

Criticisms of Piaget kohlberg and gilligan moral development

-Moral development difficult to accelerate -Moral dilemmas not relevant to daily life -Relies on macromoral issues -Ignores characteristics other than moral reasoning

Piaget Kohlberg and Gilligan Moral Development important terms

-Morality of constraint (moral realism) -Morality of cooperation (moral relativism) -Preventional morality -Conventional morality -Postconventional morality

Preschool and kindergarten social characteristics

-Most children have one or two best friends, but these friendships may change rapidly. Preschoolers tend to be quite flexible socially; they are usually willing and able to play with most of the other children in the class. Favorite friends tend to be of the same gender, but many friendships between boys and girls develop. -Play activities are an important part of young children's development and should be encouraged. -Preschool and kindergarten children show definite preferences for gender of play peers and for pair versus group play. -Awareness of gender roles and gender typing is evident.

High school physical characteristics

-Most students reach physical maturity, and virtually all attain puberty. -Many adolescents become sexually active, although the long-term trend is down. -Although the birthrate for unmarried adolescents has fallen in recent years, it remains unacceptably high, as is the rate of sexually transmitted diseases.

Self-regulation skills are best learned according to the following step model:

-Observe a model who exhibits a skill and verbalizes performance standards and motivational beliefs; -Emulate, or reproduce, the general form of the model's behavior; -Exhibit the modeled behavior under similar conditions but without the model present; and Adapt the modeled behavior to different tasks, settings, and conditions. In general terms, models exhibit inhibited behaviors, disinhibited behaviors, facilitated behaviors, and new behaviors.

Piaget cognitive development important terms

-Organization -Adaptation -Scheme -Assimilation -Accommodation -Equilibration -Sensorimotor stage -Preoperational stage -Egocentrism -Concrete operational stage -Formal operational stage -Perceptual centration, irreversibility, egocentrism

High school social characteristics

-Parents and other adults are likely to influence long-range plans; peers are likely to influence immediate status. -Girls seem to experience greater anxiety about friendships than boys do. -Many high school students are employed after school.

Middle school physical characteristics

-Physical growth tends to be both rapid and uneven. -Pubertal development is evident in practically all girls and in many boys. -Concern and curiosity about sex are almost universal, especially among girls.

Piaget role of instruction

-Piaget's beliefs about the ability of instruction to speed up cognitive development were decidedly cautious, if not negative. -One the one hand, he said that formal instruction by expert adults might hasten the development of a particular stage's schemes, but only if they were well on their way to being completed. -On the other hand, instruction was likely to be a waste of time if undertaken too soon, such as teaching children to count up to, say, 20 or 50 before they had a genuine understanding of the concept of number (Piaget, 1983).

Social milestones preschool

-Play alongside other children; copies adults -Point to objects when named; puts 2-4 words together in a sentence -Takes turns; expresses many emotions;dresses self -Names familiar things; uses pronouns -Prefers social play to solo play; knows likes and interests -Knows songs and rhymes by memory -Distinguishes real from pretend; likes to please friends -Speaks clearly; uses full sentences

Judicial

-Prefers to compare things and make evaluations about quality, worth, effectiveness. -Require students to compare literary characters, critique an article, or evaluate the effectiveness of a program.

Executive

-Prefers to follow rules and guidelines. -Present well-organized lectures, require students to prepare book reports, work out answers to problems.

Legislative

-Prefers to formulate rules and plans, imagine possibilities, and create ideas and products. -Require students to design science projects, write stories, imagine how historical figures might have done things differently, organize work groups.

Students whose emotional disturbance manifests itself as social withdrawal may stay away from others on purpose (perhaps because they find social contacts threatening), or they may find that others stay away from them (perhaps because they have poorly developed social skills). Regardless of the cause, the classroom environment and your instructional activities can be designed to foster appropriate interpersonal contact.

-Preschool and elementary school teachers can use toys and materials, as well as organized games and sports, that encourage cooperative play and have a reduced focus on individual performance. Activities might include dress-up games or puppet plays; games might include soccer, variations of It (such as tag), and kickball or softball modified such that everyone on the team gets a turn to kick or bat before the team plays in the field. -Elementary and middle school teachers can use one or more of several team-oriented learning activities. Cooperative Learning by Robert Slavin provides details on using such activities as student teams—achievement divisions, jigsaw, and team-accelerated instruction.

High-quality learning rarely occurs when students adopt a relatively passive orientation. As we pointed out in Chapter 9, many students do little more than read assigned material and record ideas in verbatim form. They spend little time thinking about how ideas within topics and between topics relate to one another or to concepts they have already learned. One reason is that many students simply do not know what else to do with information. Another reason is that teachers do little to support the kind of encoding that results in more meaningful forms of learning. Recall the study we mentioned that found that teachers in primary grades through middle school provided students with suggestions for processing information less than 10 percent of the time and with explanations for the suggestions they did give less than 1 percent of the time. To help your students encode information for more effective storage in and retrieval from long-term memory, incorporate the following techniques into your classroom instruction:

-Present information through such different media as pictures, videotape, audiotape, live models, and manipulation of physical objects. -Use lots of examples and analogies (to foster elaboration). -Prompt students to elaborate by asking them to put ideas in their own words, relate new ideas to personal experience, and create their own analogies.

Strategies to help students develop a sense of industry

-Presenting tasks that they can complete successfully in elementary and middle school ears -Limit feelings of inferiority by playing down comparisons and encourage cooperation and self competition -Help jealous children gain satisfaction from their own behavior

Primary grades physical characteristics

-Primary grade children are still extremely active. Because they are frequently required to participate in sedentary pursuits, energy is often released in the form of nervous habits—for example, pencil chewing, fingernail biting, and general fidgeting. -Children still need rest periods; they become fatigued easily as a result of physical and mental exertion. -Large-muscle control is still superior to fine coordination. Many children, especially boys, have difficulty manipulating a pencil. -Many students may have difficulty focusing on small print or objects. Quite a few children may be farsighted because of the shallow shape of the eye. -Children tend to be extreme in their physical activities. They have excellent control of their bodies and develop considerable confidence in their skills. As a result, they often underestimate the danger involved in their more daring exploits. The accident rate is at a peak in the third grade. -Bone growth is not yet complete. Therefore, bones and ligaments can't stand heavy pressure.

Establish the foundation for self-regulated learning in kindergarten and the primary grades examples

-Prior to an oral reading of the story The Three Little Pigs, students were allowed to decide whether to track the text with their fingers or their eyes. -When a student had trouble decoding a word during an oral story reading, the teacher asked the other children in the group to suggest a solution. They then tried each suggestion to see which one worked. -Students were asked to create an alternative story ending for The Three Little Pigs. To help them meet this challenge, the teacher allowed students to share their ideas with a classmate and, later, with the teacher. The teacher recorded each child's idea on chart paper so everyone in class could see everyone else's ideas. -Kindergarten and first-grade children who had trouble writing out their ideas for a writing assignment were encouraged to start with drawings as a way to plan and organize their ideas.

-Understanding the essence of an argument. To foster this skill, Ruggiero recommends that students be taught how to write a précis, which is a concise summary of an oral argument or a reading passage. -Evaluating the reliability of sources.

-Properly interpreting factual data (for example, recognizing that an increase in a state's income tax rate from 4 to 6 percent is an increase not of 2 percent but of 50 percent). -Testing the credibility of hypotheses. On the basis of existing data, hypotheses can range from highly improbable to highly probable.

To accomplish this two-pronged goal, a teacher should also do the following:

-Provide opportunities for students to apply ideas and skills to real-life or realistic situations to make the lesson more meaningful. For example, after collecting and analyzing information, students might write letters to the mayor or city council requesting more streetlights for increased safety at night or improvements to basketball courts and baseball fields. -Allow students the opportunity to discuss among themselves the meaning of ideas and their potential applications. -Letter-writing campaigns, for example, can be used to practice such basic English skills as vocabulary acquisition, spelling, punctuation, and grammar.

Despite the limitations of research on note taking mentioned earlier, these suggestions should lead to more effective note taking:

-Provide students with clear, detailed objectives for every reading assignment. The objectives should indicate what parts of the assignment to focus on and how that material should be processed (whether memorized verbatim, reorganized and paraphrased, or integrated with earlier reading assignments).

-Encourage students to be active learners, engaging in such behaviors as making observations, manipulating objects, and recording the results of their manipulations -Encourage students to reflect on their experiences and begin to construct mental models of the world

-Provide students with complex tasks that are situated in real-world settings and that will take several weeks to complete

The following guidelines should produce greater levels of both low-road and high-road transfer:

-Provide students with multiple opportunities for varied practice to help them develop a rich web of interrelated concepts. -Give students opportunities to solve problems that are similar to those they will eventually have to solve, and establish conditions similar to those they will eventually face. -Teach students how to formulate, for a variety of tasks, general rules, strategies, or schemes that they can use in the future with a variety of similar problems. -Give students cues that will allow them to retrieve from memory earlier-learned information that can be used to make current learning easier. -Teach students to focus on the beneficial effects of creating and using rules and strategies to solve particular kinds of problems.

Turning back to multiple-choice questions, you may also want to use simple versions of item-analysis techniques that measurement specialists use to analyze and improve this type of item. These techniques will allow you to estimate the difficulty level and discriminating power of each item. Discriminating power is the ability of a test item to distinguish students who have learned that piece of information from students who have not. To determine the discriminating power of a test item, try the following steps:

-Rank the test papers from highest score to lowest score. -If you have 50 or more, select approximately the top 30 percent, and call this the upper group. Select approximately the bottom 30 percent, and call this the lower group. Set the middle group of papers aside. If you have 30 to 50 students, split the scores in the middle and create upper and lower groups. If you have fewer than 30 students, you have too few to conduct an item analysis. -For each item, record the number of students in the upper group and in the lower group who selected the correct answer and each distracter as follows (the correct answer has an asterisk next to it):

Suggestions for teaching: Taking Account of Your Students' Cultural Differences

-Recognize that differences are not necessarily deficits. -Recognize that the groups we and others describe with a general label are frequently made up of subgroups with somewhat different characteristics. -Above all, remember that each student is a unique person. Although descriptions of various ethnic groups and subgroups may accurately portray some general tendencies of a large group of people, they may apply only partly or not at all to given individuals.

Suggestions for teaching Encouraging moral development

-Recognize that younger children respond to moral conflicts differently from older children. -Try to take the perspective of students and stimulate their perspective taking abilities -Develop an awareness of moral issues by discussing a variety of real and hypothetical moral dilemmas and by using daily opportunities in the classroom to heighten moral awareness. (Moral education should be an integral part of the curriculum; it should not take place during a "moral education period.")

-Making important distinctions (for instance, between preference and judgment, emotion and content, appearance and reality). -Recognizing unstated assumptions (for example, that because two events occur close together in time, one causes the other; that what is clear to us will be clear to others; that if the majority believes something, it must be true). -Evaluating the validity and truthfulness of one's arguments (by, for example, checking that conclusions logically follow from premises and that conclusions have not been influenced by such reasoning flaws as either or thinking, overgeneralizing, or oversimplifying).

-Recognizing when evidence is insufficient. -All of these 10 skills can be modeled and taught in your classroom.

Proponents of inclusion and full inclusion often raise arguments to support their position:

-Research suggests that special needs students who are segregated from regular students perform more poorly academically and socially than comparable students who are mainstreamed. -Given the substantial body of evidence demonstrating the propensity of children to observe and imitate more competent children in can be assumed that students with disabilities will learn more by interacting with nondisabled students than by attending homogeneous classes.

Social contract orientation

-Rules needed to maintain the social order should be based not on blind obedience to authority but on mutual agreement. -At the same time the rights of the individual should be protected.

If you are discussing achievement test scores, make sure you understand the differences among diagnostic tests, norm-referenced tests, and criterion-referenced tests:

-Scores from a diagnostic achievement test can be used to discuss a student's strengths and weaknesses in such skills as reading, math, and spelling. -Scores from a norm-referenced achievement test can be used to discuss general strengths and weaknesses in one or more content areas. For achievement tests that provide multiple sets of norms, start your interpretation at the most local level (school norms, ideally), because they are likely to be the most meaningful to parents, and then move to a more broad-based interpretation (district, state, or national norms). -Scores from a criterion-referenced achievement test can be used to discuss how well a student has mastered the objectives on which the test is based. If there is a close correspondence between the test's objectives and your own objectives as a teacher, the test score can be used as an indicator of how much the student has learned in class.

Logical-mathematical

-Sensitivity to, and capacity to discern, logical or numerical patterns; ability to handle long chains of reasoning. -Scientist and mathematician

David Gardner (2007), who taught for 33 years in schools that had high concentrations of low-income and ethnic minority students, was able to motivate his students and raise their achievement levels by doing the following:

-Setting high standards for students because he was convinced they were capable of meeting them. -Telling students every day, both explicitly and implicitly, that he believed they were capable of high levels of achievement. -Telling students that he would not accept poor-quality work and would return it to them to be redone. -Avoiding helping students figure out how to meet the demands of a task when he or she was convinced they were capable of figuring it out for themselves.

Cognitive milestones preschool

-Sorts shapes and colors; follows 2 step instructions -Plays make believe; works toys with parts (levers, handles) -Names colors and numbers;begins writing letters -Counts to 10 or higher; print; shapes

Psychologists who specialize in constructing standardized tests assess reliability in a variety of ways:

-Split-half reliability. Psychologists administer a single test to a group of students, create two scores by dividing the test in half, and measure the extent to which the rankings change from one half to the other. This method gauges the internal consistency of a test. -Test-retest reliability. Psychologists administer the same test to the same people on two occasions and measure the extent to which the rankings change over time. -Alternate-form reliability. Psychologists administer two equivalent forms of a test to the same group of students at the same time and compare the results.

Pre conventional

-Stage 1 and 2 -Typical of children up to the age of 9 -Young children do not really understand the conventions or rules of a society

Post conventional

-Stage 5 and 6 -Usually reached only after the age of 20 and only by a small proportion of adults. -The moral principles that underlie the conventions of a society are understood.

In the study, only three teachers implemented RT as it is described in the literature. The remaining 14 teachers felt compelled to implement a modified form of the technique because of the problems they encountered. Here are the main obstacles encountered by many of the teachers and their solutions:

-Strategy use problems -Dialogue problems -Scaffolding problems

Suggestions for Teaching Instructing Students with Learning disabilities and ADHD

-Structure learning tasks to help students with learning disabilities and ADHD compensate for weaknesses in psychological processes. -Capitalize on the resources in your classroom to help students with learning disabilities and ADHD improve academically, socially, and emotionally.

Primary grades emotional characteristics

-Students are sensitive to criticism and ridicule and may have difficulty adjusting to failure. -Most primary grade children are eager to please the teacher. -Children are becoming sensitive to the feelings of others.

Conditions need to be present for low-road transfer to occur:

-Students have to be given ample opportunities to practice using the target skill. -Practice has to occur with different materials and in different settings. The more varied the practice is, the greater is the range of tasks to which the skill can be applied.

Raymond Brown and Peter Renshaw (2000) describe an approach to small-group classroom discussion based on the following principles derived from Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of cognitive development:

-Students should present their ideas with sufficient clarity so that other students can distinguish relevant from irrelevant ideas. -Relevant ideas can be rejected by others only if their validity can be questioned on the basis of past experience or logical reasoning. -Ideas that contradict one another or that belong to mutually exclusive points of view must be resolved through group argument.

Technology can be applied to Piaget's theories

-Technology gives students access to experiences that contribute to disequilibrium. -Microworlds , for example, are simulated learning environments that provide opportunities for students to think about problems for which there are not obvious solutions or situations that do not immediately "make sense."

-Make sure the student has the ability to succeed on a task before telling the student to attribute failure to insufficient effort. Students who try hard but lack the cognitive skills necessary for success are likely to become convinced not only that they lack the ability but also that they will never become capable of success on that type of task.

-Tell students that having the ability for a subject is the same as knowing how to formulate and use a learning strategy for that subject. Thus, success is attributable to an appropriate strategy (which is controllable), whereas failure is attributable to insufficient effort at formulating the strategy (also controllable).

For a variety of reasons, misconceptions about the nature of standardized tests are common. As a result, many parents do not fully understand what their children's scores mean. Parent-teacher conferences are probably the best time to correct misconceptions and provide some basic information about the meaning of standardized test scores. In an unobtrusive place on your desk, you might keep a brief list of points to cover as you converse with each parent. In one way or another, you should mention that test scores should be treated as estimates of whatever was measured (achievement, for example). There are two reasons for representing test scores in this fashion:

-Tests do not (indeed, they cannot) assess everything that students know or that makes up a particular capability. Standardized achievement tests, for example, tend to cover a relatively broad range of knowledge but do not assess any one topic in great depth. Therefore, students may know more than their scores suggest. -All tests contain some degree of error because of such factors as vaguely worded items, confusing directions, and low motivation on the day the test is administered.

Initiative vs guilt

-The ability to participate in many physical activities and to use language sets the stage for, which "adds to autonomy the quality of undertaking, planning, and 'attacking' a task for the sake of being active and on the move." -If four- and five-year-olds are given freedom to explore and experiment and if parents and teachers take time to answer questions, tendencies toward will be encouraged. -Conversely, if children of this age are restricted and made to feel that their activities and questions have no point or are a nuisance to adults and older siblings, they will feel about acting on their own.

Trust vs mistrust

-The basic psychosocial attitude to learn is that they can their world. -The parents' "consistency, continuity, and sameness of experience" in satisfying the basic needs fosters truth. -Such an environment will permit children to think of their world as safe and dependable. -Conversely, children whose care is inadequate, inconsistent, or negative will approach the world with fear and suspicion.

Middle school social characteristics

-The development of interpersonal reasoning leads to greater understanding of the feelings of others. -The desire to conform reaches a peak during the middle school years.

Elementary school cognitive characteristics

-The elementary grade child can think logically, although such thinking is constrained and inconsistent. -On tasks that call for simple memory skills, elementary grade children often perform about as well as adolescents or adults. But on tasks that require more complex memory skills, their performance is more limited.

Identity vs role confusion

-The goal at this stage is development of the and skills that will prepare individuals to take a meaningful place in adult society. -The danger at this stage is: having no clear conception of appropriate types of behavior that others will react to favorably. -If individuals succeed (as reflected by the reactions of others) in integrating in different situations to the point of experiencing continuity in their perception of self, develops. -In common terms, they know who they are. -If they are unable to establish a sense of stability in various aspects of their lives, results.

-Occasionally, use techniques that make learning entertaining and adventurous. Such techniques might be particularly useful when you introduce a new topic. You might employ devices used by advertisers and the creators of Sesame Street, for instance. Use intensity, size, contrast, and movement to attract attention. Make use of color, humor, exaggeration, and drama to introduce a new unit. Take students by surprise by doing something totally unexpected.

-The night before you introduce a new unit, redecorate part of the room. Then ask the class to help you finish it.

Elementary school social characteristics

-The peer group becomes powerful and begins to replace adults as the major source of behavior standards and recognition of achievement. -Friendships become more selective and gender-based. -Play continues to make numerous contributions to children's development.

Punishment obedience orientation

-The physical consequences of an action determine goodness and badness. -Those in authority have superior power and should be obeyed. -Punishment should be avoided by staying out of trouble.

Middle school emotional characteristics

-The view of early adolescence as a period of "storm and stress" appears to be an exaggeration. -As a result of the continued influence of egocentric thought, middle school students are typically self-conscious and self-centered.

The teacher expectancy effect basically works as follows:

-They subtly communicate those expectancies to the students in a variety of ways. -Students come to behave in a way that is consistent with what the teacher expects.

Irreversibility

-This means that young children cannot mentally pour the water from the tall thin glass back into the short squat one (thereby proving to themselves that the glasses contain the same amount of water). -For the same reason these youngsters do not understand the logic behind simple math.

Intimacy vs isolation

-To experience satisfying development at this stage, the individual needs to establish close and committed relationships and partnerships with other people. -The hallmark of is the "ethical strength to abide by such commitments, even though they may call for significant sacrifices and compromises." -Failure to do so will lead to a sense of.

Myrna Gantner (1997), an eighth-grade teacher in an inner-city middle school near the Mexican border, learned the following lessons about treating her Latino students as individuals:

-Treat Latino students the same as you would treat any other student. When teachers believe that inner-city Latino students are less capable than other students, they tend to give them less time and attention. Students quickly notice these differences and may respond with lower-quality work and more disruptive behavior. -Don't prejudge students. If you believe that most Latino children use drugs, belong to gangs, or have limited academic ability, students will eventually become aware of your prejudice and act accordingly. Gantner's students said they were most appreciative of teachers who were interested in them as individuals, had high expectations for them, and showed them how to achieve their goals.

The nature and measurement of intelligence important terms

-Triarchic view -Multiple intelligence theory

-Treat mistakes as a part of learning, encourage students to take academic risks, and allow students to redo work that does not meet some minimum satisfactory standard. -Provide students with complex and challenging tasks that require comprehension and problem solving rather than tasks that require little more than rote learning and verbatim recall.

-Use cross-age tutoring, peer tutoring, and enrichment activities rather than grade retention with students who are falling behind. -Use cooperative-learning methods rather than competition.

Suggestions for Teaching Promoting Multicultural Understanding and Classroom Achievement

-Use culturally relevant teaching methods. -Help make students aware of the contributions that specific ethnic groups have made to the development of the United States and the rest of the world. -Use instructional techniques and classroom activities that are consistent with the value system of students who share a particular cultural background and that encourage students to learn from and about one another's cultures. -At the secondary level, involve students in activities that explore cultural differences in perceptions, beliefs, and values. -Involve students, especially at the secondary level, in community service activities.

Suggestions for Teaching Promoting Classroom Achievement for All Students

-Use every possible means for motivating educationally disadvantaged students to do well in school. -Be alert to the potential dangers of the teacher expectancy effect. Concentrate on individuals while guarding against the impact of stereotyping. -Remember that, in addition to being a skilled teacher, you are also a human being who may at times react subjectively to students.

As we pointed out in Chapters 8 and 9, meaningful learning results in richer and more stable memory representations and occurs more readily when information can be related to familiar ideas and experiences. Several techniques are known to facilitate meaningful learning:

-Using some form of overview or introduction that provides a meaningful context for new material -Using concrete examples and analogies to illustrate otherwise abstract ideas -Using visually based methods of representing information, such as maps, graphs, and three-dimensional models

Christine Bennett (2011) identifies aspects of ethnicity that are potential sources of student-student and student-teacher misunderstanding:

-Verbal communication patterns -Nonverbal communication -Time orientation -Social values, and -Instructional formats and learning processes.

Vygotsky's role of social interaction

-Vygotsky, however, believed that just the opposite was true. -He saw social interaction as the primary cause of cognitive development. -Unlike Piaget, Vygotsky believed that children gain significantly from the knowledge and conceptual tools handed down to them by those who are more intellectually advanced, whether they are same-age peers, older children, or adults.

Problem: What day follows the day before yesterday if two days from now will be Sunday?

-What is today if two days from now will be Sunday? (Friday) -If today is Friday, what is the day before yesterday? (Wednesday) -What day follows Wednesday? (Thursday)

Piaget role of social interaction

-When it comes to social experiences, Piaget clearly believed that peer interactions do more to spur cognitive development than do interactions with adults. -The reason is that children are more likely to discuss, analyze, and debate the merits of another child's view of some issue (such as who should have which toy or what the rules of a game should be) than they are to take serious issue with an adult. -The balance of power between children and adults is simply too unequal. -Not only are most children quickly taught that adults know more and use superior reasoning, but also the adult always gets to have the last word: argue too long, and it's off to bed with no dessert. -But when children interact with one another, the outcome is more dependent on how well each child uses her wits (Light & Littleton, 1999).

-Develop an individual reward menu, or contract, with each student based on the Premack principle (Grandma's rule), which we discussed earlier in the book. After passing a spelling test at a particular level, for example, each student might be given class time to work on a self-selected project.

-When making use of such motivational techniques, you might do your best to play down overtones of manipulation and materialism. Point out that rewards are used in almost all forms of endeavor to induce people to work toward a goal. Just because someone does something to earn a reward does not mean that the activity should never be indulged in for intrinsic reasons. For example, athletes often compete to earn the reward of being members of the best team, but they still enjoy the game.

The best way to deal with aggressive or antisocial behavior is to nip it in the bud. This strategy has at least three related benefits. One benefit of fewer disruptions is that you can better accomplish what you had planned for the day. A second benefit is that you are likely to be in a more positive frame of mind than if you spend half the day acting as a referee. A third benefit is that, because of fewer disruptions and a more positive attitude, you may be less inclined to resort to permissible or even impermissible forms of physical punishment (which often produces undesirable side effects).

-With student input, formulate rules for classroom behavior and penalties for infractions of rules. Remind all students of the penalties, particularly when a disruptive incident seems about to occur, and consistently apply the penalties when the rules are broken. -Place valued objects and materials out of reach when they are not needed or in use. -Minimize the aggressive student's frustration with learning by using some of the same techniques you would use for a child with intellectual disability: break tasks down into small, easy-to-manage pieces; provide clear directions; and reinforce correct responses.

With the publication of a provocative and unorthodox little treatise titled Preparing Instructional Objectives, Mager sparked considerable interest in the use of objectives. Mager emphasizes the importance of objectives by pointing out that "[i]f you don't know where you're going, the best-made maps won't help you get there. . . . [W]ithout a way to communicate your instructional objectives to others:

-You wouldn't be able to decide which instructional content and procedures would help you to accomplish your objectives. -You wouldn't be able to create measuring instruments (tests) that tell you whether your students had become competent enough to move on. -And your students wouldn't be able to decide for themselves when to stop practicing."

The third frequently recommended instructional tactic, mastery learning, is an approach to teaching and learning that assumes that most students can master the curriculum if the following conditions are established: that students

-have sufficient aptitude to learn a particular task, -have sufficient ability to understand instruction, -are willing to persevere until they attain a certain level of mastery, -are allowed whatever time is necessary to attain mastery, and -are provided with good-quality instruction.

Benefits result from breaking a problem into parts:

-it reduces the amount of information you have to keep in short-term memory to a manageable level, and -the method used to solve one part of the problem can often be used to solve another part. Bransford and Stein (1993) use the following example to illustrate how this approach works.

The concept of cultural pluralism is based on three beliefs:

-societies should strive to maintain different cultures, -each culture within a society should be respected by others, and -individuals within a society have the right to participate in all aspects of that society without having to give up their cultural identity.

To familiarize students with the process of self-monitoring, you can require them to keep a log or journal in which they

-state goals, -note how they prepare for and address the demands of projects, homework, and other tasks, and -assess the extent to which they have achieved one or more goals. Students could record, for example, how much time they spent on a task, the types of tactics they used, the number of problems they worked, and the extent to which they felt they understood the material.

People have several misconceptions about standardized tests, including the following:

-tests measure what their titles say they measure; -tests that have the same or similar titles measure the same thing; -test scores are highly accurate reflectors of what people know and can do; -two tests that claim to measure the same thing can be used interchangeably; -all tests are scored by simply adding up the number of items answered correctly; -percent-correct scores from different tests can automatically be equated to the same letter grade (such as 80 percent correct equals a grade of B); -multiple-choice questions are useful only for measuring the lowest level of Bloom's taxonomy; and -test items can be judged as good or bad just by inspecting the item and making a subjective judgment.

Among the "points of appeal that emerge from studies of specific interests," she lists the following

-the opportunity for overt bodily activity, for manipulation, for construction, even for observing the movement of animals and vehicles of various sorts; -the opportunity for investigation, for using mental ingenuity in solving puzzles, for working problems through, for creating designs, and the like; -the opportunity for adventure, for vicarious experiences in make believe, in books, and in the mass media; -the opportunity for social assimilation, for contacts with others suitable to the maturity level of the child (ranging from parallel play to discussion and argument), for social events and working together, for human interest and humanitarianism, and for conformity and display; and -the opportunity for use of the new in real life, making the new continuous with past experience and projecting it in terms of future action.

Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Psychomotor Domain

1.0 Perception. Using sense organs to obtain cues needed to guide motor activity.

Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Affective Domain

1.0 Receiving (attending). Willingness to receive or attend.

2.0 Responding. Active participation indicating positive response or acceptance of an idea or policy.

3.0 Valuing. Expressing a belief or attitude about the value or worth of something.

3.0 Application. Applying knowledge to actual situations, as in taking principles learned in math and applying them to laying out a baseball diamond or applying principles of civil liberties to current events.

4.0 Analysis. Breaking down objects or ideas into simpler parts and seeing how the parts relate and are organized. For example, discussing how the public and the private sectors differ or detecting logical fallacies in an argument.

4.0 Organization. Organizing various values into an internalized system.

5.0 Characterization by a value or value complex. The value system becomes a way of life.

4.0 Mechanism. Being able to perform a task habitually with some degree of confidence and proficiency. For example, demonstrating the ability to get the first serve in the service area 70 percent of the time.

5.0 Complex or overt response. Performing a task with a high degree of proficiency and skill. For example, typing all kinds of business letters and forms quickly with no errors.

5.0 Synthesis. Rearranging component ideas into a new whole. For example, planning a panel discussion or writing a comprehensive term paper.

6.0 Evaluation. Making judgments based on internal evidence or external criteria. For example, evaluating a work of art, editing a term paper, or detecting inconsistencies in the speech of a politician.

6.0 Adaptation. Using previously learned skills to perform new but related tasks. For example, using skills developed while using a word processor to do desktop publishing.

7.0 Origination. Creating new performances after having developed skills. For example, creating a new form of modern dance.

The Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008 (ADAAA), which became effective on January 1, 2009, broadens the interpretation of disability as it is applied in Section 504.

A 504 plan for the student with diabetes may include a "private space" in the school or classroom for testing.

Traumatic brain injury

A brain injury due to an accident that causes cognitive or psychosocial impairments that adversely affect educational performance.

Speech or language impairment

A communication disorder such as stuttering, impaired articulation, or a language or voice impairment that adversely affects educational performance.

Near transfer occurs when the knowledge and skills that are acquired for a particular task are used relatively soon after for a highly similar task. Far transfer occurs when the knowledge and skills that are acquired for a particular task are used much later for another task that is dissimilar in appearance and represents a different knowledge domain.

A current view of specific transfer is called low-road transfer. This kind of transfer is produced by giving students many opportunities to practice a skill in different settings and with different materials.

Although most states have such programs, some experts in special education feel that school systems are not given the resources they need to meet the needs of all gifted and talented students adequately.

A definition of the term gifted and talented was part of a bill passed by Congress in 1988: The term gifted and talented children and youth means children and youth who give evidence of high performance capability in areas such as intellectual, creative, artistic, or leadership capacity, or in specific academic fields, and who require services or activities not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop such capabilities.

Tests that have criterion-referenced scoring systems tend to cover less ground than norm-referenced tests but contain more items for the objectives they do assess.

A different approach to reporting achievement test scores is used by criterion-referenced tests.

Specific learning disability

A disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or using language that leads to learning problems not traceable to physical disabilities, mental retardation, emotional disturbance, or cultural-economic disadvantage.

The types of problems that students most often come into contact with are well-structured problems, ill-structured problems, and issues. Well-structured problems are clearly stated and can be solved by applying previously learned procedures, and their solutions can be accurately evaluated. Ill-structured problems are often vaguely stated, they cannot always be solved by applying previously learned procedures, and their solutions cannot always be evaluated against clear and widely accepted criteria. Issues are like ill-structured problems, but with two differences: they arouse strong emotions that tend to divide people into opposing camps, and they require that one determine the most reasonable position to take before working out a solution.

A general problem-solving model is composed of five steps: realize that a problem exists, understand the nature of the problem, compile relevant information, formulate and carry out a solution, and evaluate the solution.

Middle school years general factors to keep in mind

A growth spurt and puberty influence many aspects of behavior. An abrupt switch occurs (for sixth graders) from being the oldest, biggest, most sophisticated students in elementary school to being the youngest, smallest, least knowledgeable students in middle school. Acceptance by peers is extremely important. Students who do poor schoolwork begin to feel bitter, resentful, and restless. Awareness grows of a need to make personal value decisions regarding dress, premarital sex, and code of ethics.

Describe the humanistic approach to teaching, and defend its usefulness as an approach to instruction.

A humanistic approach to teaching assumes that all students will be motivated to learn if the classroom environment satisfies their basic needs, strengthens their self-concept, provides assistance in learning new ideas and skills, and allows them to direct their learning experiences.

Most teachers provide little or no direct instruction to students in the formulation and use of strategies and tactics and make strategy formulation difficult by not aligning course goals, instruction, test content, and test demands.

A learning strategy is a general plan that specifies the resources one will use, when they will be used, and how one will use them to achieve a learning goal.

Describe the learning styles of reflectivity/impulsivity, field-dependence/field-independence, and mental self-government.

A learning style is a consistent preference students have for perceiving, thinking about, and organizing information.

A problem with need-for-achievement theory is the lack of instruments with which to measure that need and the unreliability of short-term observations.

A limitation of attribution theory and beliefs about ability is the difficulty of changing students' faulty attribution patterns and beliefs about the nature of cognitive ability.

Selected-response tests are typically used when the primary goal is to assess what might be called foundational knowledge.

A major advantage of selected-response tests is efficiency: a teacher can ask many questions in a short period of time.

Bear in mind, however, that a particular test may not report all three forms of reliability and that reliabilities for subtests and for younger age groups (kindergarten through second grade) are likely to be lower than these overall figures.

A major problem with the use of tests for the making of admission and retention decisions in the early grades is their low reliability.

In a criterion-referenced grading system, each student's level of performance is compared with a predetermined standard.

A mastery approach to criterion-referenced measurement and evaluation, which is based on the concept of mastery learning, allows students multiple opportunities to pass tests.

Research studies have repeatedly found that students learn and recall more information when it is presented in an organized format and a meaningful context. Information is organized when the components that make it up are linked together in some rational way. If you teach high school physics, you can organize material according to major theories or basic principles or key discoveries, depending on your purpose. For history, you can identify main ideas and their supporting details or describe events as a chain of causes and effects. Just about any form of organization would be better than having students memorize names, dates, places, and other facts as isolated fragments of information.

A popular method for organizing and spatially representing the relationships among a set of ideas is concept mapping (as we noted earlier in Chapter 9, "Social Cognitive Theory"). This technique involves specifying the ideas that make up a topic and indicating with lines how they relate to one another. Figure 13-2 is a particularly interesting example of both organized knowledge and a constructivist view of learning. (We will take a further look at this latter angle when we discuss constructivist approaches.)

Information-processing theory attempts to explain how individuals acquire, store, recall, and use information.

A popular model of information processing is composed of three memory stores and a set of control processes that determine the flow of information from one memory store to another. The memory stores are the sensory register, short-term/working memory, and long-term memory. The control processes are recognition, attention, maintenance rehearsal, elaborative rehearsal, and retrieval.

Using the common types of problems, provide examples of how the five-step approach to problem solving might be used.

A problem exists when a learner has a goal but no means of reaching the goal. Problem solving involves identifying and using knowledge and skills that result in achieving one's goal.

Understanding the nature of a problem, also known as problem representation or problem framing, requires a high level of knowledge about the subject matter surrounding the problem and familiarity with the particular type of problem.

A problem solver can compile relevant information by searching long-term memory, retrieving solution-relevant information, and representing that information as lists, tables, pictures, graphs, diagrams, and so on. In addition, friends, colleagues, and experts can be tapped for information.

A problem solver can formulate solutions by studying worked examples, working on a simpler version of the problem, breaking the problem into parts, working backward, backward fading, solving an analogous problem, or creating an external representation of the problem.

A problem solver can evaluate solutions for well-structured problems by estimating or checking. To evaluate solutions for ill-structured problems, the problem solver can answer a set of basic questions that deal with who, what, where, when, why, and how; identify imperfections and complications; anticipate possible negative reactions; and devise improvements.

In this approach, ethnic historical figures whose values and behaviors are consistent with American mainstream culture (e.g., Booker T. Washington, Sacajawea) are studied, whereas individuals who have challenged the dominant view (such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Geronimo) are ignored.

A second approach, which incorporates the first, is called the ethnic additive approach.

The benefits are that students spend more time on-task, success tends to be more consistent, and more students reach a higher level of mastery of content knowledge and skills.

A second cost is that students have few opportunities to interact with one another.

Nonmeaningful learning

A second reason why forgetting occurs is that the information is so different from anything we already know that we can't connect it to existing knowledge schemes in a meaningful way.

Self-efficacy is influenced by past performance, verbal persuasion, emotions, observing models.

A second source of influence mentioned by Bandura—verbal persuasion—is also fairly obvious.

This technique is sometimes called the Premack principle after psychologist David Premack (1959), who first proposed it.

A second technique used to strengthen behavior in the classroom, the token economy, was introduced first with people who had been hospitalized for emotional disturbances and then with students in special education classes.

Self-efficacy affects choice of goals, expectations of success, attributions for success and failure

A second way in which self-efficacy can affect motivation is in terms of the outcomes that students expect.

Short-term memory is more than just a place to temporarily store whatever we are currently thinking about (ideally this page of the textbook).

A severe limitation of short-term memory is how quickly information disappears or is forgotten in the absence of further processing.

Note the elements that make up the social learning approach to teaching (also known as cooperative learning), and explain why it works.

A social approach to learning focuses on teaching students how to learn from one another in a cooperative environment. For students to be able to work together successfully, the following conditions are necessary: heterogeneous groups, achievement of group goals by having students help one another to achieve individual goals, holding each student responsible for making a significant contribution to the group goal, development of interpersonal skills, giving each student an opportunity to succeed, and allowing for competition among teams.

A cognitive constructivist view, such as that of Piaget, focuses on how individuals' cognitive processes influence the view of the world they construct.

A social constructivist view, such as that of Vygotsky, focuses on how social processes influence the view of reality that students construct.

A T score is a standard score based on a scale of 1 to 100, with a mean of 50.

A stanine score indicates in which of nine normal-curve segments a person's performance falls.

Misconception: A person who has a strength in a particular intelligence will excel on all tasks within that domain.

A student with a high level of linguistic intelligence may be quite good at writing insightful essays on various topics but be unable to produce a good poem.

The social cognitive view of motivation is based largely on giving students the opportunity to observe and imitate the behavior of models they admire and enhancing students' self-efficacy for particular tasks.

A student's level of self-efficacy—how capable one believes one is to perform a particular task—affects motivation by affecting the learning goals that are chosen, the outcome the student expects, and the attributions the student makes for success and failure.

Moreover, there is some evidence that selected-response tests, when well written, can measure higher-level cognitive skills as effectively as constructed-response tests.

A third disadvantage is that heavy or exclusive use of selected-response tests leads students to believe that learning is merely the accumulation of universally agreed-upon facts.

Another important characteristic of standardized tests is validity. A valid test accurately measures what its users intend it to measure and allows us to draw appropriate inferences about how much of some characteristic the test taker possesses. Three types of evidence that contribute to accurate inferences are content validity evidence, predictive validity evidence, and construct validity evidence.

A third important characteristic of a standardized test is its norm group—a sample of students specially chosen and tested so as to reflect the population of students for whom the test is intended. The norm group's performance becomes the standard against which scores are compared.

Emotional arousal

A third source of influence is more subtle. It is the emotions we feel as we prepare to engage in a task. Individuals with low self-efficacy for science may become anxious, fearful, or restless prior to attending chemistry class or to taking an exam in physics. Those with high self-efficacy may feel assured, comfortable, and eager to display what they have learned. Some individuals are acutely aware of these emotional states, and their emotions become a cause as well as a result of their high or low self-efficacy.

A criterion-referenced grading system permits students to benefit from mistakes and improve their level of understanding and performance.

A traditional approach to criterion-referenced grading has been to assign letter grades on the basis of the percentage of test items answered correctly (e.g. 90-100% = A etc.).

However, people display intelligent behavior in other settings (at work, home, and play, for example), and other characteristics contribute to intelligent behavior (such as persistence, realistic goal setting, the productive use of corrective feedback, creativity, and moral and aesthetic values).

A true assessment of intelligence would take into account behavior related to these other settings and characteristics.

Explain how the universal design for learning (UDL) approach and the use of assistive technology support learners.

A variety of adaptive technologies exist to help students with special needs. These include closed captioning, speech synthesis, voice recognition, screen magnifiers, special keyboards, writing tools, and distance education.

Visual impairment including blindness

A visual impairment so severe that even with corrective lenses a child's educational performance is adversely affected.

At the secondary level, involve students in activities that explore cultural differences in perceptions, beliefs, and values.

A well-conceived multicultural education program cannot, and should not, avoid or minimize the issue of cultural conflict. There are at least two reasons for helping students examine this issue. One is that conflict has been a constant and salient aspect of relationships among cultural groups. Another is that cultural conflicts often produce changes that benefit all members of a society (a prime example is the civil rights movement of the 1960s, with its boycotts, marches, and demonstrations).

Percentile rank indicates the percentage of scores that are at or below a person's score.

A z score is a standard score that indicates how far in standard deviation units a raw score is from the mean.

The four currently popular approaches to ability grouping are between-class ability grouping, regrouping, the Joplin Plan, and within-class ability grouping. Within-class ability grouping is most frequently used in the elementary grades, whereas between-class ability grouping is most frequently used in the high school grades.

Ability grouping is based on the assumptions that intelligence is genetically determined, is reflected by an IQ score, is unchangeable, and that instruction is more effective with homogeneous groups of students.

Identity

Accepting one's body having goals getting recognition

Using guided reflection procedures or, better yet, engaging in systematic and rigorous self-assessment in a Reflective Journal can provide not only insight but documentation of improvement.

According to Ball's model of generativity, teachers who use narrative tools to reflect on their teaching learn from their teaching. As they progress through stages of self-awakening to metacognitive awareness to self-efficacy, they emerge as change agents who generate knowledge about teaching and generate learning in their students.

The IEP is to be planned by a multidisciplinary team composed of the student's classroom teacher in collaboration with a person qualified in special education, one or both of the student's parents, the student (when appropriate), and other individuals at the discretion of the parents or school.

According to the 1994 Code of Federal Regulations that governs the implementation of IDEA, educational services must be provided to children with disabilities in the least restrictive environment that their disability will allow.

It is different from Sternberg's, however, in that it describes eight separate types of intelligence.

Accordingly, Gardner's work is referred to as the theory of multiple intelligences (or MI theory) (Photos 4-3A and 4-3B).

For maximum usefulness, scores on standardized tests should be as accurate a representation of actual ability as possible.

Accordingly, the day before a standardized test is scheduled, tell your students that they should do their best. Emphasize that the scores will be used to help them improve their school performance and will provide useful feedback to you about the quality of your instruction. If you're thinking about ignoring this suggestion because you don't believe that students will score significantly higher on a standardized test in response to a simple pep talk, you might want to reconsider. Research has shown that students who have a positive attitude toward learning and test taking score higher on tests than do students whose attitudes are less positive or are negative.

In most instances, retrieval of information from long-term memory is extremely rapid and accurate, like finding a book in a well-run library.

Accordingly, we can conclude that information in long-term memory must be organized.

High school years general factors to keep in mind

Achievement of sexual maturity has a profound effect on many aspects of behavior. Peer group and reactions of friends are extremely important. There is concern about what will happen after graduation, particularly for students who do not intend to continue their education. Awareness grows of the significance of academic ability and importance of grades for certain career patterns. There is a need to make personal value decisions regarding use of drugs, premarital sex, and code of ethics.

Piaget believed that individuals inherit two basic intellectual tendencies: organization (the tendency to combine mental processes into more general systems) and adaptation (the tendency to adjust to the environment).

Adaptation occurs through the processes of assimilation (fitting an experience into an existing scheme) and accommodation (changing a scheme or creating a new one to incorporate a new experience).

-In middle school and high school classrooms, you might arrange centers that pertain to different aspects of a single subject. In a science class, for example, you might have an appreciation center stressing aesthetic aspects of science, a display center calling attention to new developments in the field, a library center consisting of attractive and provocative books, and so on.

Adventures

As a consequence of this shift, the terms summative and formative evaluation have been replaced by summative and formative assessment.

After briefly describing summative and formative assessment, we will compare and contrast the two uses of assessment information; our focus will be on assessment that can guide classroom teaching and learning day-to-day, hour-to-hour, or even minute-to-minute.

Rehearsal prevents the quick disappearance of information from short-term memory. Most children do not begin to rehearse on their own until about age seven.

All children, especially younger ones, can benefit from being taught rehearsal techniques.

As we have noted in this and other chapters, classroom assessments can be used both to sum up what students have learned (summative assessment) and to provide information about the effectiveness of instruction and students' specific strengths and weaknesses (formative assessment).

All too often, unfortunately, formative assessment tends to be overshadowed by the summative type.

Because students with intellectual disability tend to oversimplify concepts, try to provide learning tasks that contain only a few elements, at least some of which they have previously learned. For example, you might ask middle or secondary school social studies students with intellectual disability to prepare a report on the work of a single police officer, as opposed to preparing an analysis of law enforcement agencies (which might be an appropriate topic for the most capable student in the class).

Also, because students with intellectual disability tend to have a short attention span, short assignments are preferable to long ones.

This means that IQ scores are not necessarily permanent.

Although IQ scores do not change significantly for most people (Deary, Whalley, Lemmon, Crawford, & Starr, 2000), they can vary up and down from one testing to another by 15 to 30 points for given individuals.

When using PBL with technology, students can plan and organize their own research while working collaboratively with others.

Although PBL has its roots in medical and business school settings, it has been successfully adapted to the elementary, middle, and high school grades. Problem-solving and project-based approaches that are based on constructivist principles and are most likely to foster meaningful learning will do the following:

Many teachers are more concerned with giving students grades than with using information gained from assessment to improve their instruction.

Although both types of assessment are legitimate, we encourage you to emphasize formative assessment because of its potential to positively shape students' learning.

Most of the criticisms of the use of reinforcement as a motivational incentive stem from the fact that it represents extrinsic motivation.

Although extrinsic motivation is widespread in society (individuals are motivated to engage in many activities because they hope to win certificates, badges, medals, public recognition, prizes, or admiration from others), this approach has at least three potential dangers:

Although anxiety, worry, and concern about self-esteem, physical appearance, academic success, and acceptance by peers are prominent emotions among many adolescents, some cope with these emotions better than others.

Although middle schools are doing a better job of meeting the social and emotional needs of early adolescents than they did in the past, the intellectual needs of these youngsters are still largely unmet.

Performance assessments may vary in degree of realism

Although performance assessments strive to approximate everyday tasks, not every test needs to be or can be done under the most realistic circumstances.

Regrouping has two major disadvantages, however.

Although regrouping (as described in the previous section) combines students from different classes, the students are all in the same grade level.

A student who has been taught by the teacher to start a new task after finishing a seatwork assignment and who does that when the teacher is not present is exhibiting self-control.

Although self-control is generally thought of as a good thing, the argument has been made that too much can stifle creativity and flexibility.

Solve an analogous problem. If you are having difficulty solving a problem, possibly because your knowledge of the subject matter is incomplete, it may be useful to think of a similar problem about a subject in which you are more knowledgeable. Solve the analogous problem, and then use the same method to solve the first problem. In essence, this is a way of making the unfamiliar familiar.

Although solving analogous problems is a very powerful solution strategy, it can be difficult to employ, especially for novices. In our previous discussion of understanding the problem, we made the point that novices represent problems on the basis of superficial features, whereas experts operate from knowledge of underlying concepts and principles. The same is true of analogies. Most of us know that DNA is somehow related to the image of a "twisted ladder" called the double helix, but there is much more to mapping the human genome than visualizing a twisted ladder. Novices are more likely than experts to use superficial analogies (Gick, 1986). Analogous problems are discussed in the upcoming Suggestions for Teaching and in the Resources for Further Investigation at the end of the chapter.

Students who adopt performance-approach goals often do well on tests, but they are less likely than students who adopt mastery goals to develop a strong interest in various subjects.

Although students who choose performance-approach goals tend to have high levels of self-efficacy, that may decrease over time if they are repeatedly subject to a classroom environment that stresses high test scores at the expense of subject mastery.

In these ways, we facilitate both the transfer of information to long-term memory and its maintenance in short-term memory.

Although the capacity of STM is relatively small, we can expand this limit somewhat by using a technique called chunking.

Although some researchers claim that gender differences in math are nonexistent, other evidence suggests that such differences, while relatively small, still exist.

Although the gender disparity in language skills has moderated a bit over the years, females continue to outscore males on tests of spelling and reading comprehension.

Self-regulation involves the consistent and appropriate application of self-control skills to new situations.

Although the skills of self-control and self-regulation are important to academic success, some students are more successful than others in acquiring and using these skills.

Teachers whose classes have a high percentage of children from ethnic minority and low-SES backgrounds often assume that they need to emphasize mastery of basic skills (such as computation, spelling, grammar, and word decoding) because minority and low-SES students are often deficient in those skills.

Although this approach does improve children's performance on tests of basic skills, some educators argue that it does so at the expense of learning higher-level skills and that it is possible for students from poverty backgrounds to acquire both basic and higher-level skills.

Recognize that you will not be able to address the various abilities and cognitive styles of all of your students all of the time.

Although this chapter has described three major ways in which students differ from one another and explained why it is important to gear instruction to these differences (the goal of differentiated instruction), we do not want you to get the impression that you should strive to accommodate the unique needs of each student every minute of the day. When you have 25 or more students in a class, such a goal is nearly impossible. But that does not mean you should make no attempt to get to know and work with students as individuals, either. You might, for example, adopt the practice of Lori Tukey (2002), a sixth-grade teacher. She allowed students themselves to provide basic instruction on various aspects of writing. Each student listed aspects of writing, such as spelling, punctuation, and organization that he or she wanted to improve. Then those who were proficient at one or more of these aspects were identified as "experts" to whom other students could go for help. This tactic gave the teacher enough extra time to work individually with each student twice a month.

Rows of chairs face the front of the room, and the teacher governs exchanges with students by talking, asking questions, and listening to answers (Sleeter & Grant, 2009).

Although we don't advocate totally abandoning this format, we do believe that it should be supplemented by other formats such as role-play, peer tutoring, and small-group activities, all of which encourage interpersonal interactions and the use of several sensory modalities.

Consider the variety of learning environments available through multimedia software programs. Some students with learning disabilities may respond better to a combination of visual and auditory information, whereas others may learn best in a hands-on setting. Multimedia programs provide options to address these different styles and also allow the student to control the direction and pace of learning. Examples of such programs can be found on the Special Needs page of the Educational Software Directory website.

Although you and the resource teacher will be the main sources of instruction and support for mainstreamed students, recognize that other sources of classroom support are almost always available. The other students in your class, for example, can supplement your instructional efforts. As we pointed out in the previous chapter, peer tutoring typically produces gains in achievement and improvements in interpersonal relationships and attitudes toward subject matter. These effects have been documented for students with learning disabilities as well as for low-achieving students without learning disabilities. And do not overlook the benefits of having students with learning disabilities play the role of tutor.

Cooperative learning has been shown to produce positive cognitive, social, and affective outcomes, provided its basic elements are implemented.

An analysis of 15 studies that measured the effect of cooperative learning on the motivational levels of elementary grade students found moderate to strong effects in 11 of the studies.

Because of the influential role that working memory plays in academic performance, a number of studies have examined the feasibility of improving students' working memory through training.

An analysis of 23 studies found that while short-term improvements on verbal and nonverbal working memory tasks were noted, they disappeared after about nine months.

The second form of punishment is usually called time-out but is sometimes called Type II punishment or removal punishment.

An athlete who is suspended from competition is another example of this form of punishment.

By age four, children are skilled language users and are aware of their own mental activity and the fact that others may think about the world differently. Although they are not particularly adept at judging how well they perform various tasks, they can be helped to overcome this limitation by being given opportunities to compare their performances with those of more accomplished peers.

An authoritative approach by parents and teachers is more likely to produce competent preschoolers than are authoritarian, permissive, or rejecting-neglecting approaches.

To give you a clearer idea of the nature and power of an optimal problem representation, consider the following situation. When novices are given a set of physics problems to solve, they sort them into categories on the basis of some noticeable feature. For example, they group together all problems that involve the use of an inclined plane or all the ones that involve the use of pulleys. Then novices search their memories for previously learned information. The drawback to this approach is that, although two or three problems may involve the use of an inclined plane, their solutions may depend on the application of different laws of physics. Experts, in contrast, draw on their extensive and well-organized knowledge base to represent groups of problems according to a common underlying principle, such as conservation of energy or Newton's third law.

An important aspect of the problem-solving process is the ability to activate relevant schemes (organized collections of facts, concepts, principles, and procedures) from long-term memory when they are needed. The more relevant and powerful the activated scheme is, the more likely it is that an effective problem solution will be achieved. But as many observers of education have pointed out, acquiring this ability is often easier said than done. John Bransford argues that standard educational practices produce knowledge that is inert. As mentioned earlier in the chapter, inert knowledge can be accessed only under conditions that closely mimic the original learning context. Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, made the same observation in describing how his classmates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology failed to recognize the application of a previously learned mathematical formula: "They didn't put two and two together. They didn't even know what they 'knew.' I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!" (1985, p. 36). To overcome this limitation of inert and fragile knowledge, teachers need to present subject matter in a highly organized fashion, and students need to learn more about the various conditions under which their knowledge applies.

The second analysis found that the math scores of middle school and high school students were considerably higher when teachers used cooperative learning programs than when they used either computer-based instruction or just a textbook (and it didn't matter which textbook they used).

An important part of cooperative learning programs is teaching students how to productively interact with one another, including how to ask relevant, leading questions and how to give group members cogent arguments and justifications for the explanations and help they offer.

Helping Students Process Information

An information-processing approach to instruction uses technology to minimize the cognitive demands of a task; to help learners form schemas, or patterns, of information; to extend or augment thinking in new directions; and to supply information overviews and memory cues. The programs for outlining and note taking mentioned in Chapter 9 on social cognitive theory are consistent with this approach, as are electronic encyclopedias (e.g., Grolier's Multimedia Encyclopedia); interactive databases that contain conceptual resources such as timelines, information maps, and overviews; and concept-mapping software helps students organize their knowledge and ideas.

Explain how the information-processing/social cognitive and constructivist approaches to instruction facilitate meaningful and self-regulated learning.

An information-processing/social cognitive approach to teaching is based on knowledge of how information is meaningfully processed and attempts to teach students how to be self-regulated learners. Teachers should communicate their goals clearly, use attention-getting devices, present information in organized and meaningful ways, present information in relatively small chunks over realistic time periods, use instructional techniques that facilitate encoding of information in long-term memory, and model effective learning processes.

One student, for example, may show evidence of becoming an outstanding trial lawyer, novelist, or journalist because his or her linguistic intelligence produces a facility for vividly describing, explaining, or persuading.

And the student who is adept at understanding her or his own and others' feelings and how those feelings relate to behavior would be exhibiting high intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligence.

Teachers in the second group used classroom discussions to let students work out the reasons behind mathematical procedures or explore alternative solutions to math problems, required students to read longer passages and gave them opportunities to discuss what they had read, taught them reading comprehension strategies, and gave them more extended writing assignments.

And their performance on basic skill items was either no worse or better than that of students whose teachers emphasized the learning of basic skills.

Encourage girls to consider pursuing a career in science.

Anna Kasov, the high school chemistry teacher we mentioned earlier, offers the following suggestions to teachers interested in encouraging adolescent girls to consider a career in science: -Invite female scientists to class to talk about science as a career, or arrange for an electronic exchange through e-mail. -Have students read articles written by female scientists, contact the authors with questions about the articles, and report the findings to the class. -Contact recent female graduates who are majoring in science in college, and ask them to talk to the class about their experiences.

Integrated learning systems (ILS) present an entire curriculum on computer, keep track of student performance, and provide feedback to the student and teacher. Research on the effectiveness of such systems is mixed but seems to be most effective with low-achieving and high-risk students.

Another application of operant conditioning principles is behavior modification. The goal of behavior modification is for the teacher to help students learn desirable behaviors by ignoring or punishing undesired behaviors and reinforcing desired ones. Techniques for achieving this goal include shaping, token economies, contingency contracts, extinction, and punishment.

Exploratory tools for learning math include Logo, the Geometric Supposer, and the Geometer's Sketchpad, all of which have been shown to help students construct meaningful knowledge networks about geometric concepts and reduce the usual rote memorizing of rules and terms.

Another exploratory tool, GenScope, was designed to help students better understand the principles of genetics. Two studies illustrate the benefits to using this program. In the first, high school students in technical biology and general life science courses performed significantly better than did students in classes without the program on a test of genetic reasoning. In the second study, high school honors-biology students with little prior knowledge of the subject showed significant gains in conceptual understanding whereas students who already knew something about genetics did not.

The cooperative learning method Teams-Games-Tournaments is similar to STAD except that students compete in academic tournaments instead of taking quizzes.

Another popular cooperative learning technique, Jigsaw, was created by Elliott Aronson. The class is divided into groups of about five or six, each group works on the same project, and each member of a group is solely responsible for a particular part of the project. For a project on energy consumption in the United States, for example, one student of each group may be responsible for researching and reporting to the other group members on how the price of oil is determined. Another student in each group may report on the factors that determine the size and efficiency of automobiles, still another on the status of alternative energy sources, and so on.

Decreases in television watching among a group of six-year-olds resulted in decreased impulsivity, increased reflection, and more time spent reading (Greenfield, 2009).

Another very popular learning style dimension, known as field dependence-field independence, was proposed by Herbert Witkin (Witkin, Moore, Goodenough, & Cox, 1977) and refers to the extent to which a person's perception and thinking about a particular piece of information are influenced by the surrounding context.

Problem- and Project-Based Learning

Another way to implement constructivist trends in education is to use technology for problem-based or project-based learning (PBL) . These are very similar instructional method that requires learners to develop solutions to real-life problems or to construct answers to such complex questions as how bacteria affect people's health and what are the sources and solutions to water pollution.

Giving students with disabilities the opportunity to tutor either a low-achieving classmate in a subject that is not affected by the student's disability or a younger student in a lower grade can produce a noticeable increase in self-esteem.

Another way to make use of the other students in your class is through cooperative learning. This technique was described in the preceding chapter and is explored in more detail in Chapter 13, "Approaches to Instruction." Like peer tutoring, which it incorporates, cooperative learning also produces gains in achievement, interpersonal relationships, and self-esteem.

Identify imperfections and complications. Is this idea, for example, safe, convenient, efficient, economical, and compatible with existing policies and practices?

Anticipate possible negative reactions from other people. For instance, might parents or the school principal object?

Moratorium

Anxious, dissatisfied with school; changes major often, daydreams, engages in intense but short lived relationships; may temporarily reject parental and societal values.

Describe the characteristics of students with learning disabilities and attention-deficit/hyperactivity (ADHD) disorder, and explain how their learning can be supported.

Anywhere from 25 to 40 percent of children with a learning disability also have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Children with ADHD may be inattentive, hyperactive, and impulsive, or all three, over an extended period of time and in such different settings as home, school, and at play.

Competency tests measure how well high school students have acquired such basic skills as reading, writing, and computation.

Aptitude tests estimate an individual's predisposition to acquire additional knowledge and skill in specific areas with the aid of effective instruction.

Suggestions for Teaching Using a Constructivist Approach to Meaningful Learning

Arrange the learning situation so that students are exposed to different perspectives on a problem or an issue.

When you examine such contemporary intelligence tests as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales-Fifth Edition (SB-5; Roid, 2003), the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-IV (Wechsler, 2004), and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-IV (Wechsler, 2008), you will notice that the items in the various subtests differ greatly from one another.

As David Wechsler (1975) persuasively points out, intelligence is not simply the sum of one's tested abilities. Wechsler defines intelligence as the global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, think rationally, and deal effectively with the environment.

Design lessons that emphasize different intelligences.

As Howard Gardner and others point out, most of the tasks that we ask students to master reflect the linguistic and logical-mathematical forms of intelligence. But there are other ways that students can come to know things and demonstrate what they have learned. Potentially, lesson plans for any subject can be designed that incorporate each of Gardner's eight intelligences. Here are a few examples suggested by Thomas Armstrong (2009) and David Lazear (2003).

Technology can aid in preparing students for standardized tests and in administering and scoring the tests.

As a repository of instructional ideas and techniques that you have either created from your own experiences or gleaned from other sources

For instance, just as Odysseus created a plan to escape from the Cyclops's cave, students should first think about the steps they will need to take to accomplish a goal.

As an instructional tool, RT has at least two positive characteristics: it is defined by a set of clear components and procedures, and it has been demonstrated to improve reading comprehension in numerous studies. But as a three-year study of 17 elementary grade teachers demonstrated, you may encounter some obstacles to implementing a textbook version of RT that will cause you to make some modifications in how you use it.

The positive effect of mastery learning was slightly more pronounced for lower-ability students.

As compared with students in conventional classes, those in mastery classes had more positive feelings about the subjects they studied and the way in which they were taught.

Suggestions for Teaching Effective Assessment Techniques

As early as possible in a report period, decide when and how often to give tests and other assignments that will count toward a grade, and announce tests and assignments well in advance.

To motivate students with a judicial style, have them compare and contrast the literary characters Tom Sawyer (from Mark Twain's novel of the same name) and Holden Caulfield (from J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye).

As implied in these examples, a consideration of the diversity of intellectual styles has implications not only for designing instructional activities, but also—as we will see in Chapter 14—for designing assessments

The three instructional tactics that are recommended most often by proponents of multicultural education are peer tutoring, cooperative learning, and mastery learning.

As its name implies, peer tutoring involves the teaching of one student by another.

For well-structured problems that are relatively simple and familiar (such as arithmetic drill problems), this step in the problem-solving process occurs simultaneously with problem representation. In the process of defining a problem, we very quickly and easily recall from long-term memory all the information needed to achieve a solution.

As problems and issues become more complex, however, we run into two difficulties: the amount of information relevant to the solution becomes too great to keep track of mentally, and there is an increasing chance that we may not possess all the relevant information. As a result, we are forced to compile what we know in the form of lists, tables, pictures, graphs and diagrams, and so on, and to seek additional information from other sources.

Because of the rapid pace of change in today's world, individuals increasingly need to be self-directed, autonomous learners not just during their school years but over their lifetimes.

As students move through the primary, elementary, middle school, and high school grades, they have to learn and be tested over increasingly larger amounts of more complex material. With less parental and teacher supervision, the temptation to put off studying or to do it superficially increases. Unfortunately, the damaging long-term consequences of poorly regulated academic behavior (low grades and diminished opportunities for higher education and employment) are not immediately apparent.

Exposure to gender bias apparently begins early in a child's school life.

As technology became more available in classrooms, many hoped that digital environments would reduce gender bias, but recent research suggests that biases have simply taken on a new form within technologically mediated learning.

The government wants to contact all druggists, all gun store owners, and all parents in a town without contacting anyone twice. Based on the following statistics, how many people must be contacted?

As the Venn diagram illustrates, the total number of people who must be contacted is 2990+7+3+3+2=3005.

Beginning in the 1960s, the notion of the United States as a cultural melting pot became less popular, and the concept of cultural diversity, or cultural pluralism, increased in popularity.

As the latter became more widely accepted, calls were made for the establishment of multicultural education programs in American public schools.

In shaping, actions that move progressively closer to the desired terminal behavior (to use Skinner's term) are reinforced.

As we have pointed out, when you are trying to get a new behavior established, especially if it is a complex behavior that requires shaping, learning proceeds best when every desired response is positively reinforced and every undesired response is ignored.

Thus, the additions to, deletions from, or modifications of individuals' knowledge structures result from the sharing of multiple perspectives.

As we have seen in previous chapters, scholars form and reform their positions on aspects of theory or research as a result of years of discussion and debate with colleagues who bring multiple perspectives and experiences to the issues at hand.

Help make students aware of the contributions that specific ethnic groups have made to the development of the United States and the rest of the world.

As we noted earlier, James Banks has identified four approaches to multicultural education, the first of which is the contributions approach. This approach emphasizes the contributions that prominent individuals of various ethnic groups have made to the United States, as well as each group's major holidays, celebrations, and customs. One suggestion for implementing this approach is to invite family members of students (and other local residents) of different ethnic backgrounds to the classroom. Ask them to describe the values subscribed to by members of their group and explain how those values have contributed to life in the United States and the rest of the world.

Teach students how to take notes.

As we noted earlier, becoming a proficient self-regulated learner requires thousands of hours of instruction and experience spread over many years. Consequently, the foundation for SRL should be established in kindergarten and the primary grades. Two studies illustrate the benefits of such an approach and how it can be done.

Encourage students to adopt appropriate learning goals.

As we noted earlier, students may adopt task mastery goals, performance-approach goals, or performance-avoidance goals. To help students maintain high levels of motivation and achievement, you should establish conditions that encourage the adoption of mastery goals. The problem with performance-approach goals is that they suppress intrinsic interest in tasks and encourage students to equate failure with low ability. Performance-avoidance goals have many obvious problems, including the reinforcement of low self-efficacy and stunted intellectual growth.

In one study of middle school science classes in which instructors who were committed to increasing girls' active participation emphasized hands-on experiences, gender differences were still noted.

As we pointed out earlier, many children tend to adopt the gender role that society portrays as the more appropriate and acceptable.

Social cognitive theorists refer to this as observation, imitation, and vicarious reinforcement.

As we pointed out in discussing social cognitive theory in an earlier chapter, vicarious reinforcement means that we expect to receive the same reinforcer that we see someone else get for exhibiting a particular behavior.

In this type of performance assessment, students are required to show how well they can use previously learned knowledge or skills to solve a somewhat unique problem (such as conducting a scientific inquiry to answer a question, interpreting a graph, or diagnosing the cause of a malfunctioning engine and describing the best procedure for fixing it) or to perform a task (such as reciting a poem, performing a dance, or playing a piece of music).

As we pointed out previously, the goal of performance assessment is to gain some insight into how competently students can carry out various tasks.

Provide Scaffolded Instruction Within the Zone of Proximal Development

As we said previously in the book, the zone of proximal development is the difference between what a learner can accomplish without assistance and what can be accomplished with assistance. The assistance that teachers give to students as they try to master new knowledge and skills is called scaffolding.

Despite this one disappointing result, the research to date indicates that triarchically based instruction produces significant gains in students' vocabulary and reading-comprehension skills, as well as their analytical, creative, and practical-thinking skills (Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2004).

As we will see later in the chapter, more recent work supports these conclusions and points to promising advances in assessments of cognitive abilities (Stemler, Sternberg, Grigorenko, Jarvin, & Sharpes, 2009; Sternberg et al., 2009).

Make use of learning goals and objectives that are challenging but attainable and, when appropriate, that involve student input.

As will be discussed in Chapter 13, "Approaches to Instruction," you will have primary responsibility for choosing the learning objectives for your students. You can use this process to heighten motivation by inviting your students to participate in selecting objectives or at least in thinking along with you as you explain why the objectives are worthwhile. This will tend to shift the emphasis from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation.

There are four ways in which the performance capabilities of students are typically assessed: direct writing assessments, portfolios, exhibitions, and demonstrations.

As with direct writing assessments and portfolios, the products a student chooses to exhibit are evaluated according to a predetermined set of criteria.

Help students master your objectives.

As you have seen, a student's past accomplishments on a particular task influence his or her self-efficacy and academic self-concept. Consequently, you should do whatever you can to help students achieve at an acceptable level. One important recommendation for helping students become better learners was made earlier: teach them how to create and use learning strategies. Another suggestion that will help them get the most out of their strategies is to assign moderately difficult tasks and provide the minimum amount of assistance necessary to complete the task successfully (think of Vygotsky's zone of proximal development and the concept of scaffolding).

For example, a student who has mastered the skill of two-column addition and correctly completes three-column and four-column addition problems with no prompting or instruction is exhibiting low-road transfer.

As you may have suspected, low-road transfer is basically a contemporary version of Thorndike and Woodworth's identical elements theory.

Children with intellectual disability are prone to devalue themselves because they are aware that they are less capable than their classmates at doing many things. One way to combat this tendency toward self-devaluation is to make a point of showing that you have positive feelings about less capable students. You might, for example, say something like, "I'm so glad you're here today. You make the classroom a nicer place to be in." If you indicate that you have positive feelings about an individual, that person is likely to acquire similar feelings about herself.

As you saw in the preceding chapter, many teachers, usually inadvertently, tend to communicate low expectations to some of their students.

One potential drawback to the use of projects is the amount of time they take. To help teachers overcome that barrier, several websites offer project-based programs that provide curriculum materials, assignments, resources, and contact with experts, such as JASON Learning and Journey North: A Global Study of Wildlife Migration and Seasonal Change.

As you think about how you are going to organize your lesson plans for each day and each period, you might ask yourself: "Are there ways that I can incorporate activity, investigation, adventure, social interaction, and usefulness into this presentation?" "Are there projects that I can assign to students, particularly as cooperative groups, that incorporate most of these features?" Here are some examples of techniques you might use.

In making a request of a government official, students should be encouraged to discuss which arguments are likely to be most effective and how they would respond should the official turn their proposal down.

As you will see when you read Chapter 9, "Social Cognitive Theory," effective learners approach tasks strategically, which is to say they analyze the task, formulate a plan for dealing with it, use a variety of specific learning skills, and monitor their progress.

The evaluation of solutions to ill-structured problems is likely to be more complicated and time-consuming for at least two reasons. First, the evaluation should occur both before and after the solution is implemented. Although many flaws and omissions can be identified and corrected beforehand, some will slip through. There is much to be learned by observing the effects of our solutions. Second, because these ill-structured problems are complex, often involving a dozen or more variables, some sort of systematic framework should guide the evaluation. Vincent Ruggiero suggests the following procedure (1988, pp. 44-46):

Ask and answer a set of basic questions. Imagine, for example, that you have proposed a classroom incentive system (a token economy, perhaps) to enhance student motivation.

This is the crux of the discovery approach and the constructivist view of learning. The basic idea is to arrange the elements of a learning task and guide student actions so that students discover, or construct, a personally meaningful conception of a problem or issue (as opposed to someone else's conception). In some cases, you may present a topic that is a matter of opinion or that all students are sure to know something about. In other cases, you might structure the discussion by exposing all participants to the same background information.

Ask students to discuss familiar topics or those that are matters of opinion.

Certainly a teacher and his or her students need to know who reaches (and exceeds) important learning targets—thus summative assessment, or assessment of learning, has a place in teaching.

Assessment of Learning (Summative Assessment)

If this sounds to you like a description of the well-known concept of wisdom, Robert Sternberg, a leading intelligence theorist and researcher whose work we describe in the next section, would agree.

Assessment of intelligence in everyday settings would be highly subjective and would take a great deal of time.

Previously, we mentioned seven methods for formulating a problem solution: study worked examples, work on a simpler version of the problem, break the problem into parts, work backward, use backward fading, solve an analogous problem, and create an external representation of the problem.

At the end of the chapter, under Resources for Further Investigation, we recommend several recently published books on problem solving that, taken together, provide numerous examples of each method.

The groups formed under a regrouping plan are more flexible in assignments and narrower in scope than between-class groups.

At the high school level, as we mentioned, this approach is often called tracking.

Self-regulation skills are learned best in a four-level process: observation, emulation, self-control, self-regulation.

At the observation level, learners pick up the major features of a skill or strategy, as well as performance standards, motivational beliefs, and values, by watching and listening as a model exhibits the skill and explains the reasons for his behavior: for example, a model who persists at trying to solve a problem and expresses the belief that he is capable of solving the problem.

Accordingly, it may be necessary to make extensive use of completion, short-answer, and short-essay items that can be printed on the board or on paper. If you find it impossible or impractical to make up a table of specifications for each exam, at least refer to instructional objectives or a list of key points as you write questions.

At the secondary level, you might do your best to develop some sort of table of specifications for exams not only to ensure measurement of objectives at various levels of the taxonomy but also to remind yourself to use different types of items.

Observation

Attend to actions and verbalizations of the model and discriminate relevant from irrelevant behaviors.

Recognition involves noticing key features of a stimulus and integrating those features with relevant information from long-term memory.

Attention is a selective focusing on a portion of the information in the sensory register. Information from long-term memory influences what we focus on.

2-3 years or toddlers

Autonomy vs shame and doubt age range

Preconventional morality

Avoid punishment receive benefits in return

For primary grade students explain the development of metacognition.

Awareness and monitoring of one's learning processes begins to emerge (Schneider, 2011).

Work backward. This is a particularly good solution strategy to use whenever the goal is clear but the beginning state is not. Bransford and Stein (1993) offer the following example. Suppose you arranged to meet someone at a restaurant across town at noon. When should you leave your office to be sure of arriving on time? By working backward from your destination and arrival time (it takes about 10 minutes to find a parking spot and walk to the restaurant; it takes about 30 minutes to drive to the area where you would park; it takes about minutes to walk from your office to your car), you would more quickly and easily determine when to leave your office (about 11:15) than if you had worked the problem forward.

Backward fading. Students vary in how much they know about the subject matter on which the problems are based, and students with more prior knowledge do better on problem-solving tests when they are given problem-solving instruction and practice than when they are given worked examples to study. For these reasons, a good procedure to use with all students is something called backward fading. Backward fading is basically a combination of studying worked examples, working backward, and practicing solving problems. First, a completely worked-out example (such as one that requires three steps to complete) is provided. Then a similar problem is presented with only the first two steps worked out. The last step has to be completed by the learner. A third problem provides the solution to the first step and requires the learner to determine the solution for steps two and three. Finally, the fourth problem requires the learner to solve all three steps. Compared with peers who saw ordinary worked examples and practiced solving problems, a group of college students who were exposed to the backward fading procedure scored significantly better on problems that were both similar to and different from the practice problems.

Perceptual centration, irreversibility, egocentrism

Barriers to logical thought

Erikson psychological development personality development

Based on epigenetic principle

Using the framework of successful intelligence—sometimes called the WICS model (referring to wisdom, intelligence, creativity, and success)—Sternberg and his colleagues have addressed how teachers can successfully interact with other teachers, with parents, and with principals and other administrators (Stemler, Elliott, Grigorenko, & Sternberg, 2006; Sternberg et al., 2009).

Based on his triarchic view of successful intelligence, Sternberg proposes a teaching and assessment model (Stemler et al., 2009; Sternberg, 1996, 1997a).

Ideally you might take an earlier-released version of the test or a publicly available practice test yourself so that you become thoroughly familiar with what your students will be doing. If there are any aspects of recording answers that are especially tricky or if the test contains unfamiliar terminology, you might mention these when you give your test-taking skills presentation or when you hand out examination booklets and answer sheets. Knowledge of test vocabulary and terminology has been found to have a significant effect on students' performance on high-stakes tests.

Be cautious when interpreting scores, and always give the student the benefit of the doubt.

As you peruse student test scores, do your best to resist the temptation to label or categorize students, particularly those who have a consistent pattern of low scores. Instead of succumbing to thoughts that such students are incapable of learning, you might make an effort to concentrate on the idea that they need extra encouragement and individualized attention. Use the information on test profiles to help them overcome their learning difficulties, not to justify fatalistically ignoring their problems.

Be prepared to offer parents clear and accurate information about their children's test scores.

Use instructional techniques and classroom activities that are consistent with the value system of students who share a particular cultural background and that encourage students to learn from and about one another's cultures.

Bear in mind, however, that students whose families have recently immigrated to the United States may not be familiar or comfortable with such student-centered techniques. In some cultures, for example, students are taught not to speak unless asked a direct question by the teacher, not to volunteer answers without being asked (so as not to appear boastful or conceited), and never to question what the teacher says, even when they know it to be wrong.

An IQ score is not a once-and-for-all judgment of how bright a child is.

Because IQ tests are designed to predict academic success, anything that enhances classroom performance (such as a wider range of factual information or more effective learning skills) will likely have a positive effect on intelligence test performance.

As much as possible, try to avoid placing students with intellectual disability in situations that are likely to lead to their frustration. When, despite your efforts, such students indicate that they are close to their limit of frustration tolerance, encourage them to engage in relaxing change-of-pace pursuits or in physical activities.

Because children with intellectual disability are more likely to experience frustration than their more capable peers, try to minimize the frequency of such experiences in the classroom. Probably the most effective way to do this is to give students with intellectual disability individual assignments so that they are not placed in situations in which their work is compared with that of others. No matter how hard you try, however, you will not be able to eliminate frustrating experiences, partly because you will have to schedule some all-class activities and partly because even individual assignments may be difficult for a child with intellectual disability to handle.

The questionnaire items asked students to rate how honestly they voiced their ideas when they were in the presence of teachers, male classmates, female classmates, parents, and close friends.

Because constructivism relies heavily on free and open discussion to produce its effects, teachers need to monitor carefully the verbal exchanges that occur among students and to intervene when necessary to ensure that all students feel that their opinions are getting a fair and respectful hearing.

Positive interdependence and promotive interaction are not likely to occur if students do not know how to make the most of their face-to-face interactions.

Because cooperative groups are heterogeneous with respect to ability and their success depends on positive interdependence, promotive interaction, and individual accountability, it is important that steps be taken to ensure that all students have an opportunity to contribute to their team.

After experimenting with various ways to prepare lists of objectives that would be more useful to teachers than vaguely worded sets of goals, the test specialists decided to develop taxonomies of educational objectives.

Because goals of education are extremely diverse, the decision was made to prepare taxonomies in three areas, or domains: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor.

At the emulation level, learners reproduce the general form of the model's behavior.

Because learners rarely copy the exact behaviors of a model, the term emulation is used here instead of imitation.

Moreover, compared with the parents of low-SES children, the parents of middle-SES children in the United States expose their children to a wider variety of experiences.

Because low-SES parents speak about 600 words per hour to their children, whereas middle- and upper-middle-SES parents speak about 2,100 words per hour to their children, many Black and Latino children start school with a vocabulary of about 5,000 words, whereas the average White student has a vocabulary of about 20,000 words (Hart & Risley, 1995).

Extend and augment classroom discussions with discussion-oriented websites.

Because of competing academic demands, classroom discussions must be limited both in number and length. But by using such websites as Collaborize Classroom, those discussions can be extended and new discussions can be started. The Topic Library page contains lessons contributed by other teachers on such topics as English and Language Arts, History and Social Studies, Math, Science and Technology, Health and Life Skills, and the Visual and Performing Arts. Teachers can create various discussion groups based on a wide range of student characteristics (interests, gender, or language proficiency, for example), monitor discussions, and relate them to curriculum content.

Structure learning tasks to help students with learning disabilities and ADHD compensate for weaknesses in psychological processes.

Because of their weaknesses in basic psychological processes, students with learning disabilities and ADHD are often distractible, impulsive, forgetful, disorganized, poor at comprehension, and unaware of the factors that affect learning. Research findings indicate that the most effective instructional approach in such cases is one that combines direct instruction with strategy instruction. This combined approach has produced substantial improvements in reading comprehension, vocabulary, word recognition, memory, writing, cognitive processing, and self-concept.

Most of the achievement and aptitude tests just described are referred to as norm-referenced tests because performance is evaluated with reference to norms—the performance of others—established when the final form of the test was administered to the sample of students who made up the standardization group.

Because of this feature, you may find criterion-referenced tests more useful than norm-referenced tests in determining who needs how much additional instruction in what areas (provided, of course, that the test's objectives closely match your own).

Two values that lie at the heart of mainstream American society are competition ("Competition brings out the best in people") and rugged individualism ("People's accomplishments should reflect their own efforts").

Because schools tend to reflect mainstream beliefs, many classroom activities are competitive and done on one's own for one's personal benefit.

Cooperative goal structures are characterized by students working together to accomplish shared goals.

Because students in cooperative groups can obtain a desired reward only if the other students in the group also obtain the same reward, cooperative goal structures are characterized by positive interdependence.

Gender bias, or treating male students differently from female students when such differences are neither warranted nor desirable, should have no place in any teacher's classroom.

Because such biases are typically based on stereotypes and prejudices (the type of nonsystematic data we criticized in Chapter 1, "Applying Psychology to Teaching"), they are likely to have the negative impact on students' attitudes toward school, motivation for learning, classroom participation, course selection, and career choice that researchers have documented.

For example, in Latino families in which there are several siblings and the parenting style is authoritarian, children may be reluctant to enter into a teacher-led discussion in class.

Because teachers, like parents, are viewed as authority figures, many children consider it disrespectful to offer their opinions.

The decision as to whether a child qualifies for special education services under IDEA is made largely on the basis of information supplied by the multidisciplinary assessment team.

Because the 1997 and 2004 amendments of IDEA require that classroom teachers be part of the multidisciplinary assessment team and potentially use RTI, you should be prepared to provide such information as the child's responsiveness to instructional interventions, the quality of the child's homework and test scores, ability to understand and use language, ability to perform various motor functions, alertness at different times of the day, and interpersonal relationships with classmates.

Teach students how to identify problems.

Because the notion of finding problems is likely to strike students as an unusual activity, you may want to introduce this skill in gradual steps. One way to start is to have students list different ways in which problems can be identified. Typical responses are to scan newspaper and magazine articles, observe customer and employee behavior in a store, watch traffic patterns in a local area, and interview local residents, including, for instance, teachers, business owners, police, clergy, or government officials. A next step is to have students carry out these suggested activities to gain an understanding of the status quo and to find out how people identify problems. They may learn, for example, that a principal periodically has lunch with a teacher to learn of conditions that decrease the teacher's effectiveness.

He defines wisdom as the use of one's abilities for the benefit of oneself and others by either adapting to one's environment, shaping it to better suit one's needs, or selecting a more compatible environment in which to function (Keane & Shaughnessy, 2002; Sternberg et al., 2009).

Because these abilities need information on which to operate, memory ability underlies each of them (Photo 4-2) (Grigorenko, Jarvin, & Sternberg, 2002).

Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, for example, describes several different ways of expressing intelligent behavior.

Because these intelligences are presumed to be independent of one another, an individual would likely exhibit different levels of skill in each of these domains.

You may recognize that the transformative approach is based on the principle of constructivism.

Because this approach requires the concrete operational schemes, it is typically introduced at the middle school level.

If you follow the suggestions for formulating objectives presented in Chapter 13, "Approaches to Instruction," you should be able to develop a reasonably complete master plan that will permit you to devise a course outline even though you have only limited experience with teaching or with a particular text or unit of study. In doing so, you will have not only a good sense of the objectives you want your students to achieve but also the means by which achievement will be assessed.

Before the term starts is a good time to block out the number of tests you will give in that term. Recall that research cited earlier has shown that students who take six or seven tests per term (two or three per grading period) learn more than students who are tested less frequently or not at all. Don't assume, however, that if giving three tests per grading period is good, then giving five or six tests is better. A point of diminishing returns is quickly reached after the fourth test.

A third consequence that weakens undesired behavior but is not considered to be a type of punishment is extinction.

Before we look at a few other basic principles, we're going to repeat a point we made earlier to make sure your understanding of reinforcement, punishment, and extinction is perfectly clear.

We have already referred in a general way to the third memory store, long-term memory (LTM), which is perhaps the most interesting of all.

Before we move on to a discussion of how information is organized in long-term memory, let's make sure we understand what the research mentioned in the previous two paragraphs does and does not imply.

Suggestions for Teaching Using Standardized Tests

Before you give a standardized test, emphasize that students should do their best.

Middle school years cognitive development

Beginning of formal operational thought for some. There is increasing ability to engage in mental manipulations and test hypotheses.

Ethnocentrism

Belief that one's own culture is superior to other cultures

Stern and Terman's use of the IQ as a quantitative summary of a child's performance was not endorsed by Binet, who worried that educators would use a summary score as an excuse to ignore or get rid of uninterested or troublesome students.

Binet's intent was "to identify in order to help and improve, not to label in order to limit".

For example, native Hawaiian children's achievement improved when teachers switched from whole-class instruction and independent seatwork to small-group learning centers, because the latter approach was more similar to the children's out-of-school social structure (Okagaki, 2001).

Black students also seem to favor learning tasks that allow for interpersonal interaction, multiple activities, and the use of multiple sensory modalities (such as combining body movement with sound) (Sleeter & Grant, 2009).

Females who choose careers in science or mathematics have a high level of self-efficacy for science and math that was the result of early and consistent academic success, encouragement to pursue a career in science or math from significant others, and the availability of respected models in the math and science areas.

Both adolescent males and females have a tendency not to express their true beliefs and opinions when in the company of teachers, parents, and members of the opposite sex. This phenomenon is called loss of voice.

Note where gender differences do and do not exist on tests of cognition and achievement, and explain how gender bias affects students.

Boys tend to outscore girls on tests of visual-spatial ability, math skills, and college entrance exams. Girls tend to outscore boys on tests of memory and language skills.

Third, specific objectives can restrict the flexibility of the teacher. Gronlund's objectives allow performance criteria to be kept separate from the objective so a teacher can revise performance standards as needed without having to rewrite the objective.

Bruce Joyce and Marsha Weil identify five general components, or phases, that make up direct instruction: orientation, presentation, structured practice, guided practice, and independent practice.

Vygotsky's role of instruction

But Lev Vygotsky believed that children learn more from the instructional interactions they have with those who are more intellectually advanced, particularly if the instruction is designed to fall within the child's zone of proximal development.

Like many other risk factors, such as experiencing homelessness, the effect of a one-parent family on the academic performance of a child is not straightforward.

But although one-parent families may not negatively affect a child's performance in school, two-parent families are likely to be more effective because each parent separately—as well as both parents in combination—have the potential to exert a positive influence (Barton & Coley, 2007).

Search your memory for techniques that your past teachers used.

But given the complexity of classroom teaching, lessons or techniques that looked good on paper do not always produce the intended effect.

That is one reason that current intelligence tests assess only a small sample of cognitive abilities.

But if recent formulations of intelligence by Robert Sternberg and Howard Gardner become widely accepted, future intelligence tests may be broader than those in use today.

Examples of this type of feedback include "Yes, that's right, and it was particularly well done" or "Sorry, that's not quite right; here's what it should have been." This type of general feedback is certainly beneficial; it has been shown to have strong positive effects on achievement.

But it does have a limitation: it frequently does not carry over to other tasks. hat drawback can be reduced to some extent by also giving students specific feedback about how certain tactics, processes, or approaches helped the student produce an acceptable response or how failing to use certain tactics or approaches led to a less desirable result.

There is no question that alternative assessment methods have excited educators and will be used with increasing frequency.

But some of the same features that make these new assessment methods attractive also create problems.

First-grade children who were judged to be at risk for academic failure, either because their mothers had below-average levels of education or because they demonstrated such maladaptive classroom behaviors as aggression, defiance, lack of sustained attention, and poor ability to follow instructions, scored at about the same level on a standardized achievement test as their not-at-risk peers when they experienced high levels of emotional and instructional support from their teachers.

By contrast, at-risk children whose teachers were judged to provide lower levels of emotional and instructional support scored significantly below their not-at-risk peers (Hamre & Pianta, 2005).

Well-designed computer-based simulations that engage students by helping them understand the consequences of their decisions are an effective means of improving students' knowledge construction and problem-solving skills.

By contrast, students under the influence of intrinsic motivation study a subject or acquire a skill because it produces such inherently positive consequences as becoming more knowledgeable, competent, and independent.

One proponent of performance assessment cited the old farm adage "You don't fatten the cattle by weighing them" to make this point.

By the same token, the assessment of students' performances should be limited to just the criteria emphasized during instruction.

Emphasize Relevant Problems and Tasks

Can you recall completing a class assignment or reading a chapter out of a textbook that had no apparent relevance to anything that concerned you? Not very interesting or exciting, was it? Unfortunately, too many students perceive too much of schooling in that light. One constructivist remedy is to create interest and relevance by posing problems or assigning tasks that are both challenging and realistic. One basic purpose of emphasizing problems and tasks that are relevant to the lives of students is to overcome the problem of inert knowledge, mentioned in Chapter 10 on constructivism. Constructivists believe that the best way to prepare students to function effectively in real-life contexts is to embed tasks in contexts that come as close as possible to those of real life.

Susan Brookhart describes the "sort of" phenomenon that can occur with performance assessments: in such a case the performance "sort of taps a learning outcome but also requires extraneous skills or doesn't require all of the relevant skills".

Care would need to be taken to ensure that the assignment—and the assessment of the performance—focused on demonstrating understanding of the characters and the events in the chapter.

The mindful part of the phrase indicates that the abstraction must be thought about and fully understood for high-road transfer to occur.

Carl Bereiter argues that, when learning is too strongly situated in a particular context, as in the case of Feynman's MIT classmates, high-road transfer is impeded.

Noddings's care theory emphasizes the critical nature of caring relationships, in which each person feels that she or he is cared for by the other.

Character development, which includes intellectual character, moral character, civic character, and performance character, is increasingly being adopted by schools as a basic goal.

Preoperational stages

Child forms many new schemes but does not think logically

Formal operational stage

Child is able to deal with abstractions form hypotheses engage in mental manipulations

Concrete operational stage

Child is capable of mentally reversing actions but generalizes only from concrete experiences

Preschool and kindergarten general factors to keep in mind

Children are having their first experiences with school routine and interactions with more than a few peers and are preparing for initial academic experiences in group settings. They need to learn to follow directions and get along with others.

Describe the characteristics of learners with intellectual disability, and explain how their learning can be supported.

Children with mild intellectual disability score two or more standard deviations below the mean on a standardized test of intelligence and are likely to be mainstreamed for some part of the school day and week. They are likely to have a low tolerance for frustration, lack confidence and self-esteem, oversimplify matters, and have difficulty generalizing from one situation to another.

Piaget cognitive development theory underestimates

Children's abilities

Nowhere else is this time orientation more evident than in our schools.

Classes begin and end at a specified time regardless of whether one is interested in starting a project, pursuing a discussion, or finishing an experiment.

Eating disorders, substance abuse, schizophrenia, depression, and suicide are prominent emotional disorders among adolescents. Depression is the most common emotional disorder during adolescence. Depression coupled with an unstable family situation places adolescents at risk for suicide.

Cognitively, high school students become increasingly capable of formal operational thought, although they may function at the concrete operational level a good deal of the time. The influence of formal operational reasoning can be seen in political thinking, which becomes more abstract and knowledgeable.

Most teachers use test questions that measure knowledge-level objectives, largely ignoring higher-level cognitive outcomes.

Compare and contrast the types of objectives recommended by Robert Mager and Norman Gronlund.

Recognition involves relating a stimulus to information from long-term memory.

Compared with older students, elementary school students have less knowledge stored in long-term memory; therefore, they need structured learning tasks in which one step leads clearly to the next.

Compared with younger children, seven- and eight-year-olds show greater awareness of the concept of ability, distinguish ability from other characteristics, think of ability as an internal capability that is stable over time, and are more likely to compare their performance to those of their peers.

Compared with seven- and eight-year-olds, ten- to twelve-year-old children are more likely to distinguish between ability and effort, to evaluate their ability accurately, to think of ability as a stable and fixed characteristic, and to be concerned with getting the highest grade.

Learning occurs best when the student is convinced that the teacher accepts the student for what he or she is and is there to help the student succeed.

Competitive goal structures are those in which one's grade is determined by how well everyone else in the group performs (a reward structure that is typically referred to as norm-referenced).

Because only a small percentage of students in any group can achieve the highest rewards and because this accomplishment must come at some other students' expense, competitive goal structures are characterized by negative interdependence.

Competitive reward structures may decrease motivation to learn.

Technology increases intrinsic motivation by making learning more interesting and meaningful

Computer-based technology can accommodate both extrinsic and intrinsic approaches to motivation.

Discovery and Exploratory Environments

Computers are not just tools to transmit or represent information for the learner; they also provide environments that allow for discoveries and insights. In such an exploratory environment , students might explore ocean life or find the ideal ecosystem for a Tyrannosaurus rex dinosaur.

Be alert to the potential dangers of the teacher expectancy effect.

Concentrate on individuals while guarding against the impact of stereotyping.

Micromoral issues

Concern personal interactions in everyday situations such as courtesy helpfulness loyalty dedication and caring.

Purpose is to improve student learning

Conducted continually while learning is in progress

Purpose is to summarize and audit learning

Conducted periodically to capture what learning has occurred

This assumption highlights the importance of what educational psychologists call prior knowledge—the previously learned knowledge and skill that students bring to the classroom.

Constructivists view learners not as passive recipients of new information but as active agents who use their prior knowledge and experiences to engage their environments (including other people), to enhance their existing knowledge structures (Piaget's concept of assimilation), and to build new knowledge structures (e.g., accommodation).

Describe how technology can help students improve how much and how well they learn different subjects.

Contemporary computer-based technology supports information processing by helping students to organize and mentally represent ideas, write more clearly, better comprehend text, interpret scientific and mathematical data, understand musical patterns, and solve problems.

Robert Sternberg's theory maintains that intelligence is compose of practical ability, creative ability, and analytical ability.

Contemporary theories typically view intelligence as being composed of several types of capabilities.

Three kinds of evidence that underlie test-based inferences are content validity evidence, predictive validity evidence, and construct validity evidence.

Content validity: how well test items cover a body of knowledge and skill

A specific goal, such as a grade or a certificate of recognition, is identified for the group to attain. Students are told that they will have to support one another because the group goal can be achieved only if each member learns the material being taught (in the case of a task that culminates in an exam) or makes a specific contribution to the group's effort (in the case of a task that culminates in a presentation or a project).

Cooperative learning characterized by heterogeneous groups, positive interdependence, promotive interaction, individual accountability

The various features of cooperative learning, particularly positive interdependence, are highly motivating because they encourage such achievement-oriented behaviors as trying hard, attending class regularly, praising the efforts of others, and receiving help from one's groupmates.

Cooperative learning effects likely due to stimulation of motivation, cognitive development, meaningful learning

In the Suggestions for Teaching: Motivating Students to Learn section in Chapter 11, "Motivation and Perceptions of Self," we described two particular cooperative learning techniques: Student Teams-Achievement Divisions (STAD) and Jigsaw.

Cooperative structures lead students to focus on effort and cooperation as the primary basis of motivation.

Before discussing those mistakes, we turn to the strengths and weaknesses of criterion-referenced grading.

Criterion-referenced grading systems (and criterion-referenced tests) have become increasingly popular in recent years primarily because of the following advantages.

-Criterion-referenced tests and grading systems provide more specific and useful information about student strengths and weaknesses than do norm-referenced grading systems. Parents and teachers are more interested in knowing that a student received an A on an earth science test because she mastered 92 percent of the objectives for that unit than they are in knowing that she received an A on a test of the same material because she outscored 92 percent of her classmates. -Criterion-referenced grading systems promote motivation to learn because they hold out the promise that all students who have sufficiently well-developed learning skills and receive good-quality instruction can master most of a teacher's objectives. The motivating effect of criterion-referenced grading systems is likely to be particularly noticeable among students who adopt mastery goals (which we discussed in Chapter 11 on motivation) because they tend to use grades as feedback for further improvement.

Criterion-referenced grading: compare individual performance with stated criteria

One lens, for example, brings prior knowledge into relief; another places the multiple perspectives of social interaction in the foreground.

Critical constructivism focuses on the social aspects of learning environments that teachers create in their classrooms, whether those environments perpetuate cultural misconceptions (for example, "children from lower socioeconomic groups do not have sufficient prior knowledge to construct knowledge"), and how learners' cultural backgrounds influence how they interact with others and with the content they are being asked to learn.

Proponents of high-stakes testing argue that it will have a number of beneficial effects: greater goal clarity, improved quality control, improvements in teaching skills and methods, and increased motivation among students.

Critics of high-stakes testing argue that the NCLB law will have detrimental effects because of structural limitations (such as an inherent contradiction between challenging standards and 100 percent proficiency, and assessments that are narrow in scope, limited in range, and shallow in depth), misinterpretation/misuse of test results, a narrow approach to motivation (essentially a behavioral one), inflexible standards, and undesirable side effects (such as excessive time devoted to test preparation and decreased time for nontested subjects).

Define cultural pluralism, and explain how immigration and birth-rate patterns have made the United States more culturally diverse.

Culture refers to the perceptions, emotions, beliefs, ideas, experiences, and behavior patterns that a group of people have in common.

-Give a quiz that contains no more than 10 items. -Evaluate and provide corrective feedback about homework assignments. -Assign in-class worksheets and writing assignments. -Ask students to read orally. -Observe the behavior of students as you teach and as they carry out assignments. -Have students respond to questions. The usual way this assessment is carried out is by directing questions to one student at a time and getting an oral response. The high-tech version uses a personal response system. The teacher directs a question with two or more response options to all the students, and each responds by pressing a button on a device that looks like a television remote (commonly called clickers) that corresponds to one of the options. The results are instantly tabulated and sent to the teacher's laptop or tablet. This system provides an immediate picture of which students understand the content of a lesson and which students do not. -Have students write essays that describe what they learned from class discussions, activities, and readings during the past week. -For science projects and experiments, have students note in a journal how their activities and findings relate to assigned chapters in their textbook.

Decide whether a written test or a performance assessment is more appropriate.

The instructional decisions you make in the classroom will be guided but not dictated by the test scores. Many parents fear that if their child obtains a low score on a test, she will be labeled a slow learner by the teacher and receive less attention than higher-scoring students do. This is a good opportunity to lay such a fear to rest in two ways. First, note that test scores are but one source of information about students. You will also take into account how well they perform on classroom tests, homework assignments, and special projects, as well as in classroom discussions. Second, emphasize that you are committed to using test scores not to classify students but to help them learn.

Define the term "standardized test"; explain why reliability, validity, and norms are important characteristics of standardized tests; list four types of test scores; and point out how norm-referenced tests are different from criterion-referenced tests.

A child's self-image (the combination of self-descriptions, self-concept, and self-esteem) becomes more stable and generalized during the elementary grades. As a result of the decline of egocentric thought and the competitive nature of American society, self-image is based primarily on comparisons with peers.

Delinquency occurs more frequently among elementary grade children than at earlier ages and is associated with dysfunctional parent-child relationships and academic failure.

The relationship between a student's academic self-concept and achievement is reciprocal. That is, not only does academic self-concept influence motivation for learning a particular subject, which influences achievement, but also prior achievement has a positive effect on both motivation and academic self-concept.

Describe how technology can increase students' motivation.

Primary grade children recognize that fact-based explanations are superior to theory-based explanations and are beginning to realize that their cognitive processes are under their control. They learn best when tasks are relatively short and when less cognitively demanding tasks occasionally follow more cognitively demanding tasks.

Describe one or more aspects of the physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development of elementary grade students.

Self-efficacy beliefs, or how competent one feels at carrying out a particular task, begin to stabilize during the middle school years and influence the willingness of students to take on and persist at various academic and social tasks.

Describe one or more aspects of the physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development of high school students.

The thinking of elementary grade children, although more logical, can be wildly inconsistent and is constrained by the limitations of Piaget's concrete operational stage.

Describe one or more aspects of the physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development of middle school students.

Research on the impact of high-stakes testing has found a small number of modest positive effects and many negative effects.

Describe the ways in which technology is used in standardized testing programs, and comment on whether you think this development is beneficial or detrimental.

Continually point out that what is being learned can be used outside class. Ask students to keep a record of how they use in real life what they learn in class.

Develop exercises that make students aware that what they are learning has transfer value. Have students in an English class write a job application letter; have math students balance a checkbook, fill out an income tax form, or work out a yearly budget; have biology students think about ways they can apply what they have learned to avoid getting sick.

Students who are experiencing difficulties in learning are especially in need of tangible proof of progress. When, for instance, they correctly fill in blanks in a programmed workbook and discover that their answers are correct, they are encouraged to go on to the next question. You might use the same basic approach in more general ways by having students with intellectual disability keep their own records showing their progress. (This technique might be used with all students in a class.) For example, you could make individual charts for primary grade students. As they successfully complete assignments, have them color in marked-off sections, stick on gold stars or the equivalent, or trace the movement of animal figures, rockets, or something else toward a destination.

Devise and use record-keeping techniques that make it clear that students have completed assignments successfully and are making progress.

Standardized achievement tests measure how much has been learned about a particular subject. The major types of achievement tests are single subject, batteries, diagnostic, competency, and special purpose.

Diagnostic tests identify specific strengths and weaknesses in basic learning skills.

As many researchers have noted, class projects for all grade levels can be designed to make use of various forms of technology. Because projects are based on children's natural interests and involve a wide range of activities, they are more likely to be intrinsically motivating.

Diane Curtis describes a fifth-grade project that helped students fulfill state curriculum standards in social studies, math, writing, and technology.

Describe how such technology tools as digital portfolios can be used to improve your inquiry skills.

Digital resources can provide ideas to test in the classroom, ways to connect with other teachers to gain peer feedback and support, and platforms through which to explore evidence-based information regarding effective and excellent teaching methods and techniques.

To accommodate the different profiles of intelligences that exist in a typical classroom, Gardner recommends that teachers use MI theory as a framework for devising alternative ways of teaching subject matter.

Digital tools can strengthen the different aspects of intelligence that Sternberg and Gardner described.

Describe the components that make up direct instruction.

Direct instruction is an approach derived from behavioral learning theory. Lessons are broken down into small steps, the teacher models the desired behavior, material is presented in a variety of formats, students are given extensive opportunities to practice, and feedback is given consistently.

In other cases, present a controversial topic for which there is no single answer.

Discussions might center on provocative issues about which there are differences of opinion. One caution here is to avoid topics (such as premarital sex or legalized abortion) that parents may not want discussed in school, either because they are convinced it is their prerogative to discuss them with their children or because they feel that students may be pressured to endorse your opinion because you assign grades. You should not avoid controversy, but neither should you go out of your way to agitate students and their parents.

Learning disabilities

Disorders in basic processes that lead to learning problems not due to other causes

To spur your reflections about standardized tests, see the Thought Questions and Reflective Journal Questions on the textbook's student website.

Do your best to control the impact of negative expectations.

Because MI theory stresses different ways of learning and expressing one's understanding, it fits well with the current emphasis on performance assessment (described in Chapter 14, "Assessment of Classroom Learning").

During the early 1960s, Jerome Kagan (1964a, 1964b) found that some students seem to be characteristically impulsive, whereas others are characteristically reflective (Photos 4-4A and 4-4B).

Piaget concluded on the basis of his studies that schemes evolve through four stages: sensorimotor (birth to two years), preoperational (two to seven years), concrete operational (seven to eleven years), and formal operational (eleven years and older).

During the sensorimotor stage, the infant and toddler use senses and motor skills to explore and understand the environment.

What are some of the common psychiatric disorders of high school students?

Eating disorders, substance abuse, schizophrenia, depression and suicide.

Information is transferred from short-term memory to long-term memory by the linking of the new information to related information in long-term memory. This process is called elaborative rehearsal.

Elaborative rehearsal is based partly on organization. This involves grouping together, or chunking, items of information that share some important characteristic.

Elaborative rehearsal (also called elaborative encoding) consciously relates new information to knowledge already stored in long-term memory.

Elaborative rehearsal, whereby information from long-term memory is used in learning new information, is the rule rather than the exception.

Integrity vs despair age group

Elderly

Second, Sternberg believes that each of these abilities can be improved through instruction and that students learn best when all three are called into play.

Elena Grigorenko, Linda Jarvin, and Robert Sternberg (2002) conducted three experiments to test the educational applicability of the triarchic theory.

Although most of the reported effects of cooperative learning have been positive, negative results have occasionally appeared.

Eleventh-grade students whose chemistry classes used a form of cooperative learning experienced declines in motivation, whereas students in the whole-class instruction group reported slight increases.

Designing classroom instruction along these guidelines has both benefits and costs.

Embed basic skills instruction within the context of complex and realistic tasks.

Emotional behavior disorder

Emotional disturbance. Personal and social problems exhibited in an extreme degree over a period of time that adversely affect a child's ability to learn and get along with others (prior to the 1997 amendments to IDEA, this category was called "serious emotional disturbance").

One implication of the information-processing approach to instruction is to use attention-getting devices because information not attended to will not be learned.

Emphasize Organization and Meaningfulness

Problems can be challenging either because the correct answer is not immediately apparent or because there is no correct answer. The ill-structured problems and issues that we described previously are, by their nature, challenging and realistic and do not have solutions that everyone perceives as being appropriate and useful. But if you assign students an ill-structured task to investigate, pose it in such a way that they will see its relevance. For example, instead of asking high school students to debate the general pros and cons of laws that restrict personal freedoms, have them interview their community's mayor, chief of police, business owners, and peers about the pros and cons of laws that specify curfews for individuals under a certain age and that prohibit such activities as loitering and the purchase of alcohol and tobacco. Because many adolescents consider themselves mature enough to regulate their own behavior, analyzing and debating laws that are intended to restrict certain adolescent behaviors is likely to produce a fair amount of disequilibrium.

Encourage Students to Become More Autonomous Learners

-Combine attribution training with strategy instruction for students who don't understand the relationship between strategy use and success and failure.

Encourage students to think of ability as a set of cognitive skills that can be added to and refined, rather than as a fixed entity that is resistant to change, by praising the processes they use to succeed.

A scheme is an organized and generalizable pattern of behavior or thought that guides what we see, think, and do.

Equilibration is the process of trying to organize a system of schemes that allows us to adapt to current environmental conditions. Equilibration is produced by a state of disequilibrium.

Individuals with a strong sense of identity are comfortable with their physical selves, have a sense of purpose and direction, and know they will be recognized by others. When faced with making an occupational choice, some adolescents declare a psychosocial moratorium.

Erikson's observations about identity were extended by James Marcia, who described four identity statuses: identity diffusion, foreclosure, moratorium, and identity achievement. Each status reflects the extent to which individuals have explored and committed themselves to a set of values on such critical issues as occupation, religion, sex role, and politics.

People of the same ethnic group typically share many of the following characteristics: ancestral country of origin, race, religion, values, political interests, economic interests, and behavior patterns.

Ethnic differences in communication patterns and preferences, time orientation, values, and instructional format and learning process preferences can lead to misunderstandings among students and between students and teachers.

-Listen to or read directions carefully. -Listen to or read test items carefully. -Set a pace that will allow time to complete the test. -Bypass difficult items and return to them later. -Make informed guesses rather than omit items. -Eliminate as many alternatives as possible on multiple-choice items before guessing. -Follow directions carefully when marking the answer sheet (e.g., be sure to darken the entire space). -Check to be sure the item number and answer number match when marking an answer. -Check to be sure the appropriate response is marked on the answer sheet. -Go back and check the answers if time permits.

Examine the test booklet and answer sheet in advance so that you are familiar with the test.

Portfolios can also be constructed for math and science, as well as for projects that combine two or more subject areas.

Exhibitions involve just what the label suggests: a showing of such products as paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, videotapes, and models.

This recognition will activate one or more solution-relevant schemes from long-term memory. It is this level of knowledge of subject matter and problem types that distinguishes the high-quality problem representations of the expert problem solver from the low-quality representations of the novice.

Experts typically represent problems in terms of one or more basic patterns or underlying principles, whereas novices focus on limited or superficial surface features of problems.

Technology consistent with Vygotsky's view of cognitive development provides a virtual environment that plays the role of an expert tutor who gives a high degree of support and structure that is gradually withdrawn (scaffolding). It also allows online mentoring and provides opportunities for students to interact with other students in sophisticated virtual environments.

Explain how cognitive development influences moral thinking and moral behavior.

A current view of general transfer is called high-road transfer. This kind of transfer is produced by teaching students how to formulate a general rule, strategy, or schema that can be used in the future with a variety of problems that are fundamentally similar to the original.

Explain how online environments, especially those designed using the principles of gaming, support constructivist learning and problem solving.

As you can see, this type of item analysis is not difficult to do, nor is it likely to be very time-consuming. It is important to remember, however, that the benefits of item analysis can quickly be lost if you ignore certain limitations. One is that you will be working with relatively small numbers of students. Therefore, the results of item analysis are likely to vary as you go from class to class or from test to test with the same class. Because of this variation, you should retain items that a measurement specialist would discard or revise. In general, you should retain multiple-choice items whose difficulty index lies between 50 and 90 percent and whose discrimination index is positive. Another limitation is that you may have objectives that everyone must master. If you do an effective job of teaching these objectives, the corresponding test items are likely to be answered correctly by nearly every student. These items should be retained rather than revised to meet arbitrary criteria of difficulty and discrimination.

Explain the various purposes of assessment and the kinds of evaluative judgments that derive from each purpose.

"Information is important for learners; they need to know things," says Connie.

Explain what is meant by "the information processing view of learning."

Fixed ratio schedules: reinforce after a set number of responses

FR schedules tend to produce high response rates because the faster the learner responds, the sooner the reinforcement is delivered.

One instructional recommendation that flows from this analysis is the same as one of the recommendations for direct instruction: break lessons into small, manageable parts and don't introduce new topics until you have evidence that students have learned the presented material. A second recommendation is to build into lessons opportunities for students to write about, discuss, and use the ideas they are learning. By monitoring the accuracy of their responses, you will also have the information you need to judge whether it is time to introduce new ideas. Finally, arrange for relatively short practice sessions spread over several weeks rather than one or two long practice sessions, because distributed practice leads to better learning than massed practice.

Facilitate Encoding of Information into Long-Term Memory

Direct

Feedback from the model and/or others

Studies have found that teachers are more willing to listen to and accept the spontaneous answers of male students than female students.

Female students are often reminded that they are to raise their hands and be recognized by the teacher before answering.

Among children between the ages of five and seventeen, the same percentage of males and females use computers at school and at home.

Females experience more anxiety about using computers, which may be related to career choice.

To see how Gronlund's method differs from Mager's, imagine that you are teaching an educational psychology course and that you want to write objectives that reflect an understanding of the four stages of Piaget's theory of cognitive development.

Figure 13-1 compares objectives you might develop using Gronlund's approach with objectives that follow Mager's method.

Second, as we do in this textbook, make your explanations meaningful by emphasizing how concepts and principles are relevant to your students' everyday lives and to what they already know. Third, give students the opportunity to use the concepts and principles that are embedded in your explanations.

Finally, because of the factors mentioned in the first guideline, some students will learn best from very direct, detailed explanations whereas others will do best when left to figure things out for themselves.

This is what Bandura refers to as vicarious experience.

Finally, our sense of self-efficacy may be influenced by observing the successes and failures of individuals with whom we identify.

Affective processes

Finally, when faced with a challenging task, the individual with high self-efficacy is more likely to experience excitement, curiosity, and an eagerness to get started rather than the sense of anxiety, depression, and impending disaster that many individuals with low self-efficacy feel.

When you introduce students to new material, one of the most straightforward ways to provide scaffolded instruction is by the time-honored technique of providing explanations. An analysis of research suggests four guidelines for creating effective instructional explanations.

First, and this echoes what we said in the previous paragraph, make sure your explanations are within you students' zone of proximal development so that you make learning neither too difficult nor too easy. This guideline implies that you will need to be aware of what students know and do not know, what misconceptions they have, and what kinds of cognitive skills they posses.

In all likelihood, you will have too many classroom responsibilities to spend a great deal of time working directly with a withdrawn child. It may be possible, however, using the steps that follow, to train other students to initiate contact with withdrawn students.

First, choose a student as a helper who interacts freely and well, can follow your instructions, and can concentrate on the training task for at least 10 minutes. Second, explain that the goal is to get the withdrawn child to work or play with the helping student but that the helper should expect rejection, particularly at first. Role-play the actions of a withdrawn child so that the helper understands what you mean by rejection. Emphasize the importance of making periodic attempts at interaction. Third, instruct the helper to suggest games or activities that appeal to the withdrawn student. Fourth, reinforce the helper's attempts to interact with the withdrawn child.

Problems with verbal communication can occur in a number of ways.

First, classroom discussions may not go as planned if teachers have students who do not understand—or feel overly confined by—the mainstream convention of "you take a turn and then somebody else takes a turn."

The problem solver has to construct an optimal representation, or understanding, of the nature of a problem or issue. The preceding sentence stresses the word optimal for two reasons.

First, most problems can be expressed in a number of ways. Written problems, for example, can be recast as pictures, equations, graphs, charts, or diagrams.

The self-regulation level is attained when learners can adapt the modeled behavior to changes in internal and external conditions (such as a low level of interest in a topic or negative reactions of others).

First, self-regulation is possible only in an environment that allows students the opportunity to make choices.

Here are two easy-to-implement suggestions for reducing the gender difference in math and science: remind all students, but girls in particular, that success is due to ability and effort whereas failure is due to insufficient effort, and praise girls as often as boys (boys tend to be praised more often) for their achievements in math and science.

First, there are many tasks for which differences do not exist.

There are four basic intermittent reinforcement schedules: fixed interval (FI), variable interval (VI), fixed ratio (FR), and variable ratio (VR). Each schedule produces a different pattern of behavior.

Fixed interval schedules: reinforce after regular time intervals.

Although teachers cannot work magical changes in a student's social class, health, family, or peer group, they can, as the following study illustrates, do a great deal to encourage learning among students of all social classes.

Following the example of good athletic coaches, you should strive to make your classroom one where students respect and support one another, where students recognize that making mistakes is an inevitable part of learning, where each student's strengths are used to contribute to a larger group goal, where students receive constant feedback about their progress, and where students with more advanced knowledge and skills serve as models for and actively tutor classmates whose skills are not as well developed (Nasir, 2008).

Instead of focusing on how much intelligence students have, we need to attend to the different ways in which students make the most of their intelligences.

For example, Thomas Hatch (1997), an associate of Gardner, describes how three children, all of whom were judged to have a high level of interpersonal intelligence, used that ability in different ways.

The profiles or reports you will receive a few weeks after a test has been administered will contain information that is potentially beneficial to you and your students. If misused or misinterpreted, however, the information is potentially harmful. Misinterpretations of scores can lead to complaints by parents. Therefore, as you examine the scores, concentrate on ways you can make positive use of the results.

For example, if a student's test scores are lower than you expected them to be, examine them to discover areas of weakness but guard against thinking, "Well, I guess he had me fooled. He's not as sharp as I thought he was. Maybe I had better lower his grades a notch on the next report card." There are many reasons a student may not do well on a test (e.g., anxiety, fatigue, illness, worry about some home or school interpersonal situation), and scores may not be an accurate reflection of current capability. Thus, whenever there is a discrepancy between test scores and observed classroom performance, always assume that the more favorable impression is the one to use as an indication of general capability. Try to use indications of below-average performance in constructive ways to help students overcome inadequacies.

In fact, research (Perkins, Tishman, Ritchhart, Donis, & Andrade, 2000) has shown that in everyday settings, intelligent behavior is related to the ability to recognize occasions that call for various capabilities and the motivation to actually use those capabilities.

For example, in a situation that has the potential to become confrontational and hostile, intelligence might involve being open-minded and using a sense of humor.

Considerable research has shown that the nature of childhood experiences affect a child's cognitive development and school achievement (see, for example, Barton & Coley, 2007; Raudenbush, 2009) and SES affects the kinds of experiences students have growing up.

For example, low-SES students are more likely than middle-SES students to grow up in one-parent families.

In social situations, field-dependent people, in comparison with field-independent people, spend more time looking directly at the faces of others; are more aware of prevailing attitudes, values, and behaviors; prefer to be in the company of other people; and are generally thought of as more tactful, considerate, socially outgoing, and affectionate than field-independent individuals (Fehrenbach, 1994; Morgan, 1997; Witkin et al., 1977).

For example, when some individuals are shown a set of simple geometric figures and asked to locate each one (by outlining it with a pencil) within a larger and more complex display of intersecting lines, those with a field-dependent style take significantly longer to respond and identify fewer of the figures than individuals with a field-independent style.

But this benefit occurred only when the homework was sufficiently easy that they could successfully complete all or most of it. As for high school students, any benefit they might receive from doing homework appears to depend on the outcome measure that is used.

For final course grades in math and science researchers found no relationship, but they did find a significant relationship for standardized test scores. Apparently, teachers assign the same kinds of problems for homework as are found on standardized tests.

Accelerated instruction is often suggested as one way to meet the academic needs of gifted and talented students.

For many people, the phrase accelerated instruction means allowing the student to skip one or more grades, which, although not as common as in years past, does occasionally occur.

If you announce at the beginning of a report period when you intend to give exams or set due dates for assignments, you not only give students a clear idea of what they will be expected to do, but you also give yourself guidelines for arranging lesson plans and devising, administering, and scoring tests. For the most part, it is preferable to announce tests well in advance. (If you will be teaching elementary students, it will be better to announce exams and assignments for a week at a time rather than providing a long-range schedule.) When tests are announced, be sure to let students know exactly what material they will be held responsible for, what kinds of questions will be asked, and how much tests will count toward the final grade (Photo 14-4). As we noted in the Take a Stand! feature in Chapter 8 on information-processing theory, and as others have pointed out, students need complete information about the content and nature of tests if they are to function strategically. In addition, research indicates that students who are told to expect (and who receive) an essay test or a multiple-choice test will score slightly higher on an exam than students who do not know what to expect or who are led to expect one type of test but are given another type.

For students to plan effectively how they will master your objectives, they need to know as early as possible how many tests they will have to take, when the tests will occur, what types of items each test will contain, and the content on which they will be tested.

For students who seem unable to attend to important stimuli such as significant sections of a text page, show them how to underline or outline in an effort to distinguish between important and unimportant material. Or suggest that they use a ruler or pointing device under each line as they read so that they can evaluate one sentence at a time. To help them attend to important parts of directions, highlight or write keywords and phrases in all capitals. For especially important tasks, you might want to ask students to paraphrase or repeat directions verbatim.

For students who have a short attention span, give brief assignments, and divide complex material into smaller segments.

Calls for multicultural education were stimulated by changing immigration and birth rate patterns, low levels of school achievement by many ethnic minority children, and students' need to work productively with members of other cultures.

For students who live in culturally homogeneous communities, an increased understanding of the characteristics of students from different cultural backgrounds and the problems they face can be gained by using such technological tools as videoconferencing and electronic communities.

Because MI theory helps students mentally represent ideas in multiple ways, students are likely to develop a better understanding of the topic and be able to use that knowledge in everyday life.

For the same reason, MI theory also suggests that learning in out-of-school settings should lead to increased transfer of learning in school subjects.

A norm-referenced grading system assumes that classroom achievement will naturally vary among a group of heterogeneous students because of differences in such characteristics as prior knowledge, learning skills, motivation, and aptitude (to be discussed in Chapter 15, "Understanding Standardized Assessment").

For this reason, norm-referenced grading procedures are also referred to as "grading on the curve."

Erikson's theory describes eight stages, from birth through old age. The stages that deal with the personality development of school-age children are initiative versus guilt (four to five years), industry versus inferiority (six to eleven years), and identity versus role confusion (twelve to eighteen years).

Forcing students to compete with one another for grades is likely to have a negative effect on their sense of industry.

Piaget cognitive development most adolescents are not

Formal operational thinkers

High school years cognitive development

Formal operational thought for many students. There is increasing ability to engage in mental manipulations, understand abstractions, and test hypotheses.

By its very nature, constructivism implies the need to let students discover things for themselves. But what things? According to Jerome Bruner, whose pioneering work we mentioned in Chapter 10, on constructivist learning theory, the process of discovery should be reserved for those outcomes that allow learners to be autonomous and self-directed. These include understanding how ideas connect with one another, knowing how to analyze and frame problems, asking appropriate questions, recognizing when what we already know is relevant to what we are trying to learn, and evaluating the effectiveness of our strategies. The case we cited in Chapter 10 of the fifth-grade teacher who wanted his students to understand the relationship between the circumference of a circle and its diameter is a good example of how these outcomes can be learned by guided discovery.

Foster Multiple Viewpoints

Construction of ideas is strongly influenced by the student's prior knowledge

Four key ideas provide a constructivist frame through which we can view learning and learners: prior knowledge, multiple perspectives, self-regulation, and authentic learning.

As we mentioned earlier, it is a mistake to think that every lesson has to be designed to involve all eight intelligences.

Gardner's general recommendation for applying MI theory in the classroom is essentially the same as Sternberg's.

Research has shown that students learn more when learning tasks require them to use all three of Sternberg's types of abilities: analytical, creative, and practical.

Gardner's multiple intelligences (MI) theory holds that each person has eight distinct intelligences, and that some are better developed than others.

Late elementary grade and middle school girls tend to receive higher grades than boys in language arts, social studies, science, and math. Girls in these grades also show higher levels of self-discipline and experience higher levels of worry and depression over their academic performance.

Gender bias is the consistent differential response (both positive and negative) to male and female students when there is no sound educational reason for doing so.

A large body of research shows that there are reliable gender differences in cognitive functioning and achievement.

Generally, research on gender differences has found that males tend to outscore females on the following tests: visual-spatial ability, math operations and college entrance.

Kohlberg's theory has been criticized because the level of an individual's response to a moral dilemma can be influenced by the nature of the dilemma, moral reasoning may vary from one culture to another, the moral dilemmas used by Kohlberg are not relevant to everyday social settings, and the theory relies too much on macromoral issues.

Gilligan maintains that Erikson's theory of identity development and Kohlberg's theory of moral development more accurately describe male development than female development, although research suggests that the difference may not be as large as Gilligan originally thought.

Despite increased awareness of how society reinforces gender-role stereotyping and measures taken to ensure greater gender equity, girls and boys continue to receive different messages about what is considered to be appropriate behavior.

Girls, for example, feel less capable than boys in math and science and place a lower value on success for those subjects because of the threat it poses to their gender identity and social life.

Techniques you might use for this purpose were described in our discussion of operant conditioning in Chapter 7. They include verbal praise, shaping, modeling, symbolic reinforcers (smiley faces, stars, and the like), and contingency contracting.

Give praise as positive reinforcement, but do so effectively.

One of Bruner's contributions from the 1960s was the concept of discovery learning.

Given the promise that discovery learning holds for improvements in meaningful learning, problem solving, and transfer, researchers have not been reluctant to test its effectiveness.

Like David Wechsler, Robert Sternberg (2002a, 2002b, 2003) believes that most of the research evidence supports the view that intelligence has many facets, or dimensions, and that traditional mental ability tests measure just a few of these facets.

Given this definition, which many psychologists endorse, an IQ score reflects just one facet of a person's global capacity: the ability to act purposefully, rationally, and effectively on academic tasks in a classroom environment.

Excessive use of external rewards may lead to temporary behavior change, materialistic attitudes, decreased intrinsic motivation

Giving students extrinsic rewards for completing a task may lessen whatever intrinsic motivation they may have for that activity.

To fulfill the goals of multicultural education, teachers should practice what is referred to as either culturally relevant pedagogy or culturally responsive pedagogy. This approach to instruction is based on two premises. First, all students, regardless of their ethnic, racial, and social class backgrounds, have assets they can use to aid their learning. Second, teachers need to be aware of and meet students' academic needs in any number of ways. In other words, simply adopting a multicultural basal reader is not culturally responsive pedagogy. In addition to adopting multicultural reading material, you should do everything possible to help all students learn to read. For example, successful teachers of Latino students in Arizona and California have high expectations for students, make their expectations clear, never accept low-quality work, scaffold students' learning, and use Spanish for instruction or allow students to speak Spanish among themselves when working in pairs or groups.

Gloria Ladson-Billings, who has written extensively about working with minority and at-risk students, provides several examples of culturally relevant or responsive teaching. A second-grade teacher allowed her students to bring in lyrics from rap songs that both she and the students deemed to be inoffensive. The students performed the songs, and the teacher and students discussed the literal and figurative meanings of the words and such aspects of poetry as rhyme scheme, alliteration, and onomatopoeia. The students acquired an understanding of poetry that exceeded both the state's and school district's learning standards. Another teacher invited the parents of her students to conduct "seminars" in class for two to four days, one to two hours at a time.

Explain why you would use the taxonomies in the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains to help you create lesson plans and classroom tests.

Goals are broad, general statements of desired educational outcomes. Because of their general language, they mean different things to different people and cannot be precisely measured.

Teach students how to compile relevant information.

Good problem solvers start with themselves when compiling information to solve a problem or evidence to support a position on an issue. They recognize the importance of recalling earlier-learned information (metacognitive knowledge) and are adept at doing so (cognitive skill). Poor problem solvers, by contrast, lack metacognitive knowledge, cognitive skills, or both. If their deficiency is metacognitive, they make little or no effort to recall solution-relevant memories, even when the information was recently learned, because they do not understand the importance of searching long-term memory for potentially useful knowledge.

Use every possible means for motivating educationally disadvantaged students to do well in school.

Good suggestions for teaching educationally disadvantaged students come not only from those who teach them but also from the students themselves. You may notice some overlap in the two following lists, but that only serves to strengthen the validity of the suggestions.

Mager states that well-written objectives should specify what behaviors the learner will exhibit to indicate mastery, the conditions under which the behavior will be exhibited, and the criteria of acceptable performance.

Gronlund believes that complex and advanced kinds of learning do not lend themselves to Mager-type objectives. Complex outcomes are so broad that it is impractical to ask students to demonstrate everything they have learned. Instead, Gronlund suggests that teachers first state a general objective and then specify a sample of related specific outcomes.

Gronlund: state general objectives, list sample of specific learning outcomes

Gronlund gives several reasons for beginning with general objectives.

The size of cooperative-learning groups is relatively small and as heterogeneous as circumstances allow. The recommended size is usually four to five students. At the very least, groups should contain both males and females and students of different ability levels. If possible, different ethnic backgrounds and social classes should be represented as well.

Group Goals/Positive Interdependence

In a cooperative atmosphere, students are motivated out of a sense of obligation: one ought to try, contribute, and help satisfy group norms.

Group Heterogeneity

Erikson psychological development personality

Grows out of successful resolution of psychosocial crises

Piaget cognitive development instruction can accelerate development of schemes that

Have begun to form

Becoming a better teacher through critical reflection can put a novice teacher on the path to National Board Certification.

Having colleagues observe and critique your teaching, using observation checklists, or implementing more formal lesson study procedures all provide rich sources of data for improving your practice.

As was mentioned earlier and as can be seen from the research we have reviewed, Sternberg's triarchic theory of intelligence has become known more recently as a theory of "successful intelligence."

He suggests that, for any grade level and for any subject, teaching and testing can be designed to emphasize the three abilities in his triarchic theory—analytical, creative, and practical—as well as memory.

Vygotsky cognitive development teachers should

Help students learn how to use psychological tools

Scaffolding

Helping students answer difficult questions or solve problems by giving them hints or asking leading questions is an example of a technique called

In the second study, kindergarten through third-grade teachers whose classrooms were rated as high-SRL classrooms emphasized student choice of activities, support in meeting academic challenges (a technique we referred to earlier in the book as scaffolding), and evaluation of oneself and classmates in a nonthreatening, mastery-oriented environment.

Here are some specific examples of how SRL-oriented instruction was carried out.

Not only did the technology engage the students in ways that enhanced their listening, reading, and writing skills, but it did so in ways that made the students less anxious about difficulties they encountered and more likely to persist when difficulties were encountered.

High school students in Israel—where engineering education is part of the high school curriculum—have used technology, including creating their own computer programs, to design and build, using LEGO blocks, robots, cars, cranes, and even a system that would allow a boat to cross a waterfall in both directions.

High-road transfer refers to the ways people transfer prior knowledge and skills over longer time periods to new situations that look rather different from the original task.

High-road transfer involves the conscious, controlled, somewhat effortful formulation of an "abstraction" (that is, a rule, a schema, a strategy, or an analogy) that allows a connection to be made between two tasks.

You might ask such questions as:

How will this program be implemented? By whom? When? Where? With what materials? How will the materials be obtained?

The individual with average test scores who succeeds in getting people to do what she or he wants is, in this view, at least as intelligent as the person who scores at the 99th percentile of a science test.

Howard Gardner's conception of intelligence, like Sternberg's, is broader than traditional conceptions.

For me, the reality of using formative and summative assessments when teaching writing is that they mix together into a kind of stew of pedagogy.

I spent time crafting the language of each domain of my summative assessment tool to define clearly the particulars of the skills we had developed as a class ... and then I started using that tool as a formative assessment tool.

-What general effects do you think characters in novels who rebel against adult authority have on a reader's behavior? -Are certain groups of people, such as middle and high school students, likely to be influenced by the motives and actions of such characters? Why do you think so? -Does a ban on a certain book violate the author's right to free speech? -Does a book ban violate the principle of academic freedom? Why? -Is it the proper role of a school board to prevent or discourage students from exposure to certain ideas during school hours?

If a reasonably informed person is not available, recognized authorities can often be interviewed by phone. If a student chooses this tactic, Ruggiero suggests calling or writing in advance for an appointment, preparing questions in advance, and asking permission to record the interview.

To minimize any metacognitive deficiency, make sure your instruction in problem-solving methods emphasizes the importance of retrieving and using previously learned knowledge. To minimize retrieval problems, make sure you recall and implement the Suggestions for Teaching section that we offered in Chapter 8.

If a student does not possess all the relevant information needed to work out a solution or analyze an issue, you will have to guide her toward individuals and sources that can help. In referring students to individuals, select people who are judged to be reasonably knowledgeable about the subject, are careful thinkers, and are willing to share their ideas.

Support for specific transfer, as well as for the identical elements theory, comes from a study of college students in Germany who had taken either French or Latin as their second foreign language when they were in seventh grade.

If groups 1 and 2 score the same but both outscore group 3, the difference is attributed to nonspecific transfer, or general transfer, of similarities between the two tasks because Chinese shares no apparent specific characteristics with French or Spanish, both Romance languages.

Zero transfer is defined as a situation in which prior learning has no effect on new learning.

If on a Spanish test, group 1 scores higher than group 2, the difference is attributed to specific transfer of similarities between French and Spanish (such as vocabulary, verb conjugations, and sentence structure).

The main cost is the lack of transfer that usually occurs when knowledge and skills are learned as isolated segments in a nonmeaningful context.

If teachers combine the seven guidelines just mentioned with current thinking about promoting higher-order learning among at-risk students (Gordon, Rogers, Comfort, Gavula, & McGee, 2001; Knapp, Shields, & Turnbull, 1995; Torff, 2011; Zohar & Dori, 2003; as well as later chapters of this book), they may be able to raise the basic skill level of educationally disadvantaged students and improve their ability to transfer what they have learned to meaningful and realistic contexts.

Performance-approach goals involve demonstrating to teachers and peers one's superior intellectual ability by outperforming most others in class.

If the best way to accomplish this goal is to do assignments neatly and exactly according to directions, or to memorize large amounts of information to get a high grade on a test without necessarily understanding the ideas or how they relate to one another, then these tactics will be used.

Regular classroom teachers may be involved in activities required directly or indirectly by IDEA in four possible ways: referral, assessment, preparation of the IEP, and implementation and evaluation of the IEP.

If the initial conclusions of the school psychologist support the teacher's or parents' perception that the student needs special services, the multidisciplinary assessment team required under IDEA will be formed.

If other students are reinforcing a youngster's undesired behavior or if a behavior becomes disruptive, you may want to apply the time-out procedure.

If verbal requests, reminders, or warnings fail to limit shoving, the boy can be required to take a five-minute time-out period immediately after he shoves a classmate.

The concept of positive reinforcement is easy to understand.

If you can recall spending more time studying for a certain subject because of a compliment from the teacher or a high grade on an examination, you have experienced positive reinforcement.

Variable ratio schedules: reinforce after a different number of responses each time

If you decided to use a VR 15 schedule, you might reinforce a desired behavior after 12, 7, 23, and 18 occurrences, respectively (that is, after the 12th, 19th, 42nd, and 60th desired behaviors).

If you follow the procedure of supplying feedback booklets, it is almost essential to prepare at least two forms of every exam. Having two or more forms also equips you to use a mastery approach. After writing the questions, arrange them into two tests. Make perhaps half of the questions the same and half unique to each exam. (If you have enough questions, you might prepare three forms.) If you teach multiple sections, give the first form to period 1, the next form to period 2, and thereafter use the forms in random order. This procedure will reduce the possibility that some students in later classes will have advance information about most of the questions on the test.

If you find that you do not have time to prepare feedback booklets, you might invite students to select three answers to defend as they record their choices when taking multiple-choice exams. This will supply you with information about ambiguous questions, even though it will not provide feedback to students. It may also provide you with useful information about how well the items were written.

A final point about the characteristics of gifted and talented students is that some of them are challenged with learning disabilities, attention disorders, or autism spectrum disorders—such as Asperger syndrome—which means they have difficulty with social relations. Such students are identified as twice exceptional : they are exceptional because they are gifted and talented and they are exceptional because they are challenged in some intellectual, social, physical, or emotional way.

If you find yourself working with twice exceptional students, you may need to combine the following instructional options with Suggestions for Teaching from earlier sections.

These students will need time to become used to such practices as working with other students, asking the teacher for additional explanations, and evaluating the work of peers.

If you have Asian students in your class who have recently immigrated, you may also want to be cautious about using writing software that allows classmates to edit each other's work online. Because of the importance of "maintaining face" (one's public image), students in Singapore were quite resistant to the prospect of publicly correcting a classmate.

Both extinction and time-out are most effective when combined with other consequences, such as positive reinforcement.

If you have been reading this section on basic principles carefully, you may have begun to wonder whether the use of operant conditioning principles, particularly positive reinforcement, requires you as the teacher to be present every time a desired response happens.

During and after the grading process, analyze questions and answers to improve future exams.

If you prepare sufficient copies of feedback booklets for multiple-choice exams, you can supply them to all students when you hand back scored answer sheets (and copies of the question booklets). After students have checked their papers and identified and examined questions that were marked wrong, invite them to select up to three questions that they wish to challenge. Even after they read your explanation in the feedback booklet, many students are likely to feel that they selected a different answer than you did for logical and defensible reasons. Permit them to write out a description of the reasoning behind their choices. If an explanation seems plausible, give credit for the answer. If several students chose the same questions for comment, you have evidence that the item needs to be revised. (It's also possible that the information reflected in the item was not directly related to your objectives or was poorly taught.)

As with extinction and time-out, research confirms that response cost helps reduce a variety of problem behaviors (such as getting off-task, not following directions, and engaging in disruptive behavior) for a wide range of children.

If you recall the operant conditioning principles we discussed earlier in the chapter, you'll understand the reason for this recommendation: students have to do or say something before you can use reinforcement, extinction, or punishment to either strengthen desired behaviors or weaken undesired behaviors.

According to constructivist and humanistic theory (which we discuss later in this chapter), students should, under the right circumstances, be able to work more independently of the teacher than they typically do. One important condition that paves the way for students becoming more autonomous is the way in which teachers interact with students. Students in one study were more likely to feel as if they were in control of their own learning when teachers engaged in such behaviors as giving students time to work on a task in their own ways, giving students the opportunity to talk, encouraging students to complete tasks, listening to students, and being responsive to students' questions. By contrast, student autonomy was more likely to be negatively related to such teacher behaviors as giving students the solutions to problems or the answers to questions, giving students commands and directions, telling students they should or should not do something, and asking students such controlling questions as, "Can you do it the way I showed you?"

If you still believe, despite the findings cited in the preceding paragraph, that school-age children simply don't have the emotional maturity and cognitive skills necessary to direct more of their own learning, a program for eighth graders in Radnor, Pennsylvania, called Soundings has illustrated its feasibility. The program is built around a set of questions that students have identified as being of interest and importance to them. Students then help the teacher develop the curriculum, study methods, and assessments.

The triadic model holds that a person's behavior is always the result of interactions among personal characteristics, behavioral patterns, and environmental factors.

If, for example, you happen to be in a setting, such as school, in which rules and regulations place limits on behavior, the behavioral aspect of the model is likely to have less impact than if you are allowed more freedom of expression.

Orthopedic impairments

Impairment in a child's ability to use arms, legs, hands, or feet that significantly affects that child's educational performance.

Deaf-blindness

Impairments of both hearing and vision, the combination of which causes severe communication, developmental, and educational problems. The combination of these impairments is such that a child's educational and physical needs cannot be adequately met by programs designed for only deaf children or only blind children.

Some students, for example, are impulsive thinkers who tend to react quickly when asked a question; other students are reflective thinkers who prefer to mull over things before answering.

Impulsive students are said to have a fast conceptual tempo (Zhang & Sternberg, 2009).

Teach simple techniques for improving memory, and consistently point out how use of these techniques leads to more accurate recall.

In Chapter 9, "Social Cognitive Theory," we describe a set of memory aids called mnemonic devices. Used for thousands of years by scholars and teachers in different countries, most are fairly simple devices that help a learner organize information, encode it meaningfully, and generate cues that allow it to be retrieved from memory when needed. The simplest mnemonic devices are rhymes, first-letter mnemonics (also known as acronyms), and sentence mnemonics. For example, a first-letter mnemonic or acronym for the Great Lakes is HOMES: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior.

Not surprisingly, in one study kindergarten children gave field-dependent teachers higher ratings than field-independent teachers.

In Sternberg's theory, 13 mental self-government styles fall into one of five categories: functions, forms, levels, scope, and leaning.

Stimulate awareness

In a high school English class, ask the students to discuss how the author developed the plot.

In certain elementary and middle school subjects and in skill or laboratory subjects at the secondary level, performance assessments may be more appropriate than written tests. At the primary grade level, for instance, you may be required to assign a grade in oral reading.

In a high school home economics class, you may grade students on how well they produce a garment or a soufflé. In a wood shop class, you may base a grade on how well students construct a piece of furniture.

Encourage participation

In a high school political science class, illustrate the jury system by staging a mock trial. (Note that the use of a simulation satisfies the constructivist criterion of realistic tasks and contexts.)

Stimulate informed guessing

In a middle school unit on natural science, you might say, "Suppose we wanted to figure out some kind of system to classify trees so that we could later find information about particular types. What would be the best way to do it?" After students have developed a classification scheme, show them schemes that specialists have developed.

James Banks (2009), a noted authority on multicultural education, describes four approaches to multicultural education.

In a third approach, which Banks calls the transformative approach, the assumption is that there is no one valid way of understanding people, events, concepts, and themes.

Students in one ability group typically have little or no contact with students in other ability groups during the school day.

In ability grouping, students are selected and placed in homogeneous groups with other students who are considered to have very similar learning abilities.

Scholars use their prior knowledge to decide what questions need to be asked next and how to go about answering those questions.

In addition to allowing students to engage their prior knowledge, authentic tasks often provide opportunities for learners to work collaboratively, thus providing opportunities for social interaction and the negotiation of meaning through multiple perspectives.

No one knows for sure, although hormonal differences, differences in brain structure, differences in cognitive processes, and socialization differences have all been mentioned at one time or another as contributing factors.

In addition to gender differences on standardized tests, males and females differ in the grades they receive in school and the emotions that accompany those grades.

One possible explanation for improved student recitation when teachers wait longer for a response is that reflective thinkers have an opportunity to figure out what they want to say. But even impulsive thinkers probably welcome a few more seconds of thinking time. It seems logical to expect that snap answers will be more superficial than answers supplied after even a few seconds of reflection.

In addition to giving students ample time to make an initial response, you should encourage them to pursue an idea. If it seems appropriate, probe for further information or clarification of a point by asking students who give brief or incomplete answers to explain how or why they arrived at a conclusion or to supply additional comments.

Finally, make use of the various ways in which information can be presented to students and in which students can respond. In addition to text material and lecturing, you can use films, computer-based presentations, picture charts, diagrams, and demonstrations.

In addition to having students demonstrate what they have learned through paper-and-pencil tests and other written products, you can have them make oral presentations, produce pictorial products, create an actual product, or give a performance. Hands-on activities are particularly useful for students with ADHD.

One parent who was famous for the quality of her sweet potato pie taught the students how to make one.

In addition, the students were required to complete such related projects as a written report on George Washington Carver's research on the sweet potato, a marketing plan for selling pies, and a statement of the kind of education and experience one needed to become a cook or chef. Similar seminars were done by a carpenter, a former professional basketball player, a licensed practical nurse, and a church musician, all of whom were parents or relatives of the students.

Others, although different from many students in some noticeable respect, will not qualify for special education services under IDEA.

In addition, though not mentioned in IDEA or Section 504, students who are gifted and talented require special forms of instruction, as we will also discuss.

Emphasize the importance of SRL skills to learning and when they should be used.

In all likelihood, you will want students to attain some degree of proficiency in goal setting, planning, use of tactics and strategies, monitoring of one's actions and progress, self-evaluation, and self-reinforcement. When teaching planning skills, for example, point out that students who are good planners know the conditions under which they learn best and choose or arrange environments that eliminate or decrease distractions.

Emphasize contrast

In an elementary school social studies unit on cultural diversity, say, "When you watch this film on Mexico, look for customs and ways of living that differ from ours. Then we'll talk about what these differences are and why they may have developed."

First, it includes an aspect of intelligence that has been—and still is—largely overlooked: how people use practical intelligence to adapt to their environment.

In describing the nature of practical intelligence, Sternberg argues that part of what makes an individual intelligent is the ability to achieve personal goals (e.g., graduating from high school or college with honors, working for a particular company in a particular capacity, or having a successful marriage).

People frequently have difficulty understanding the concept of negative reinforcement, most often confusing it with punishment, so we will examine it carefully here.

In everyday life, negative reinforcement occurs quite frequently.

Although you should be aware of the gender differences we have mentioned and should take steps to try to reduce them, you should also keep the following points in mind.

In fact, a recent review of research on gender differences, supported by the National Science Foundation, advanced the "gender similarities hypothesis" over the hypothesis of "gender differences"

When we talk about individuals who have a field-dependent style and compare them with individuals who have a field-independent style, we do not mean to imply that there are two distinctly different types of individuals.

In fact, relatively few individuals exhibit a pure field-dependent or field-independent style (Morgan, 1997; Zhang & Sternberg, 2009).

Of the three main ways in which computers are used in schools—using the computer as a tutor (meaning the use of drill-and-practice, tutorial, and simulation programs), using the computer as a learning and problem-solving tool, and learning how to program computers—the first is most closely allied with the principles of operant conditioning.

In general, computer-based instruction (CBI) has had a moderate positive effect on learning. In particular, simulation programs have had a positive effect on science achievement.

As an example, consider the issue of whether certain books (such as the novels Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Native Son by Richard Wright, and Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain) should be banned from a school's reading list.

In interviewing a knowledgeable person, students might ask questions such as the following because they allow some insight into the individual's reasoning process and the evidence used to support his position:

Spearman ascribed to the g factor the tendency for score rankings to remain constant over tests.

In other words, intelligence tests still reflect Binet's original goal and Spearman's two-factor theory.

Self-control (also referred to as self-discipline) is the ability to control one's actions in the absence of external reinforcement or punishment.

In other words, self-control involves behaving in ways that lead to the accomplishment of desirable goals and suppressing behaviors that are detrimental when no one is looking.

Students with high levels of self-efficacy choose this goal more often than do students with low levels of self-efficacy.

In pursuit of task mastery goals, students with high efficacy will use a variety of encoding techniques, do more organizing of information to make it meaningful, review and practice more frequently, monitor their understanding more closely, formulate more effective learning strategies, and treat mistakes as part of learning.

Elementary grades Punctuation marks Interpersonal

In small groups of four to six, students teach and test one another on proper punctuation usage.

Major provisions of IDEA include the right to a free and appropriate public education, an appropriate and valid preplacement evaluation, the development of an individualized education program (IEP), the education of students with disabilities in the least restrictive environment (also known as mainstreaming), and procedural safeguards.

In some school districts, mainstreaming has been extended to the point at which students with disabilities are taught only in regular classrooms by regular and special education teachers. This practice is known as inclusion, or full inclusion.

Reinforce appropriate behavior, and, if necessary, punish inappropriate behavior.

In suggestion 2, we described the use of positive reinforcement to encourage desired behavior. Reinforcement has the dual effect of teaching the aggressive student which behavior is appropriate and reducing the frequency of inappropriate behavior as it is replaced by desired behavior. Disruptive behavior will still occur, however. Three effective techniques for suppressing it while reinforcing desired behaviors are contingency contracts, token economies and fines, and time-out. Each of these techniques will be described in Chapter 7.

In the preoperational stage, the child masters symbol systems but cannot manipulate symbols logically.

In the concrete operational stage, the child is capable of logical thinking, but only with ideas with which he has had firsthand experience.

Specifically, evidence suggests that these skills are learned most efficiently and effectively when they are acquired according to the following four-level model: observation, emulation, self-control, and self-regulation.

In the description that follows, note how the high levels of support and guidance (or scaffolding, to use the constructivist terminology) that are present for the observation and emulation levels are reduced at the self-control level and eliminated at the self-regulation level.

Allowing low-track students to take honors classes does not in itself result in more students moving into higher tracks.

In the light of research findings on ability grouping, educators may choose to discontinue the use of between-class ability grouping, use only within-class grouping and the Joplin Plan, or discontinue all forms of ability grouping.

As this theoretical analysis suggests, both the student doing the tutoring and the one receiving the tutoring should benefit from the interaction.

In the next two paragraphs, we'll briefly summarize the research on the cognitive benefits of tutoring for both parties.

Perhaps the clearest way to distinguish between traditional paper-and-pencil tests (such as multiple-choice tests) and performance assessments is to say that the former measure how much students know, whereas the latter measure what students can do with what they know.

In the sections that follow, we will first define four different types of performance assessments and then look at their most important characteristics.

This may seem to be an odd entry in a list of cooperative-learning components, especially in the light of the comments we already made about the ineffectiveness of competition as a spur to motivation and learning. But we're not being contradictory. The main problem with competition is that it is rarely used appropriately. When competition occurs between well-matched teams, is done in the absence of a norm-referenced grading system, and is framed as a mechanism that encourages students to put forth their best effort, it can be an effective way to motivate students to cooperate with each other.

In the vast majority of studies, forms of cooperative learning have been shown to be more effective than noncooperative reward structures in raising the levels of variables that contribute to motivation, in raising achievement, and in producing positive social outcomes.

Personal characteristics

Include mental and emotional factors (such as goals and anxiety), metacognitive knowledge (understanding how one's own cognitive processes affect learning), and self-efficacy (beliefs about one's ability to successfully carry out particular tasks). Self-efficacy is a concept we introduced in Chapter 3 on age-level characteristics, and we will discuss it in detail in a later section of this chapter. To cite just one example of the role of personal characteristics in learning, students who have higher levels of reading ability, relevant prior knowledge, and interest learn more from text passages than do students who have low levels of these same characteristics.

Behavioral patterns

Include self-observation (such as using personal journals to note how various factors influence learning, motivation, and self-efficacy); self-evaluation; making changes in behavior to overcome or reduce perceptions of low self-efficacy, anxiety, and ineffective learning strategies; and creating productive study environments.

The evidence on inclusion, although somewhat limited and inconsistent, indicates that the practice produces at least moderate benefits for some students with disabilities but has little beneficial effect on others.

Inclusion is likely to work best for students with disabilities for whom the regular classroom is an appropriate setting and in classrooms in which the teacher uses instructional methods that are proven to be effective with a wide variety of learners.

But for students whose ethnic cultures are not so time bound (Latinos and American Indians, for example), such a rigid approach to learning may be upsetting.

Indeed, it may also be upsetting to some students who reflect the mainstream culture (Bennett, 2011; Pewewardy, 2002).

Define and provide an example of self-regulation and self-efficacy, and describe how they contribute to achievement.

Individual differences in self-regulation are strongly related to the personal characteristic of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a belief about how capable or prepared individuals feel they are to meet the demands of particular types of tasks.

Some researchers have argued that competitive reward structures lead students to focus on ability as the primary basis for motivation.

Individualistic goal structures are characterized by students working alone and earning rewards solely on the quality of their own efforts.

Atkinson proposes that people are motivated by a need for achievement, which is a general desire to attain goals that require some degree of competence. Individuals with a high need to achieve have a greater expectation of success than they do a fear of failure. They prefer moderately difficult tasks because such tasks provide an optimal balance between the possibility of failure and the expectation of success.

Individuals with a low need to achieve are dominated by a fear of failure.

Elementary grade years psychosocial development

Industry vs. inferiority. Keep students constructively busy; try to play down comparisons between best and worst learners.

Primary grades year psychosocial development

Industry vs. inferiority. Students need to experience a sense of industry through successful completion of tasks. Try to minimize and correct failures to prevent development of feelings of inferiority.

Short-term/working memory is both a temporary storehouse and a place where information is processed. The short-term store holds about seven bits of information for about 20 seconds (in the absence of rehearsal). Common working memory processes include encoding, organization, and retrieval. Working memory appears to be strongly related to proficiency of learning.

Information can be held in short-term memory indefinitely through the use of maintenance rehearsal, which is rote repetition of information.

As you have seen, long-term memory plays an influential role throughout the information-processing system.

Information in long-term memory influences what we attend to

Elementary grade years general factors to keep in mind

Initial enthusiasm for learning may fade as the novelty wears off and as the process of perfecting skills becomes more difficult. Differences in knowledge and skills of fastest and slowest learners become more noticeable. "Automatic" respect for teachers tends to diminish. Peer group influences become strong.

Preschool and kindergarten psychosocial development

Initiative vs. guilt. Children need opportunities for free play and experimentation, as well as experiences that give them a sense of accomplishment.

Students who provide the tutoring also reap substantial learning benefits, but only if they are trained and periodically reminded to provide what are called knowledge-building explanations and questions.

Instead of merely telling the other student the answer, summarizing facts, or describing procedures, the tutor should, like any good teacher, also provide new examples, discuss underlying concepts, connect ideas, and pose questions that require integration and application.

As you think about which types of questions to use in a particular situation, consider the student characteristics and curriculum differences noted earlier. In the primary grades, you may not use any written tests in the strict sense.

Instead, you might ask your students to demonstrate skills, complete exercises (some of which may be similar to completion tests), and solve simple problems (often on worksheets). In the upper elementary and middle school grades, you may need to use or make up dozens of measurement instruments, because many subjects must be graded.

One way to help you understand the nature of instructional objectives is to contrast them with something with which they are often confused: educational goals.

Instructional objectives, in contrast to these broad educational goals, specify the kinds of observable and measurable student behaviors that make it possible for the underlying goals to be achieved.

A potential limitation of operant conditioning theory is its emphasis on extrinsic sources of motivation. The learner is motivated to attain a goal so as to receive a reward that is not inherently related to the activity. This may produce only temporary changes in behavior, a materialistic attitude toward learning, and an undermining of whatever intrinsic motivation a student may have for a particular task.

Intrinsic motivation can be undermined by extrinsic reinforcement when initial interest in a task is high, the rewards are tangible, the rewards are promised in advance as an incentive to exhibit the desired behavior, the reward is given just for engaging in an activity, and students have to compete with one another for a limited supply of rewards.

In contrast, intrinsic motivation rises when the reward consists of positive verbal feedback and is available to all who meet the standard.

Intrinsic motivation is undermined by forcing students to compete for limited supply of rewards

Theoretical learning

Involves using psychological tools to learn scientific concepts.

Integrity vs despair

Is "the acceptance of one's one and only life cycle as something that had to be and that, by necessity, permitted of no substitutions...expresses the feeling that the time is now short, too short for the attempt to start another life and to try out alternate roads to integrity."

The appraisal of intelligence is limited by the fact that

It cannot be measured directly.

Self-control is controlling one's actions in the absence of reinforcement or punishment. Self-regulation is the consistent and appropriate application of self-control skills to new situations.

It is important for students to acquire self-regulation skills for at least three reasons. First, as students progress through school, they are expected to assume more responsibility for their learning and so receive less prompting and guidance from teachers and parents. Second, as they move from grade to grade, the amount and complexity of material they have to learn and be tested on increases. Third, when they leave school, they will have to cope with a world that changes at a rapid rate.

Structure discussions by posing a specific question, presenting a provocative topic-related issue, or asking students to choose topics or subtopics.

It is important to structure a discovery session by giving students something reasonably specific to discuss; otherwise, they may simply engage in a disorganized and desultory bull session. You may supply directions in different ways.

Because of the limitations imposed by large numbers of students and small amounts of time, your evaluation will have to be based on a sample of behavior—a three- or four-minute reading performance and questions covering points made in only a few sections of text material assigned for an exam.

It is therefore important to try to obtain a representative, accurate sample.

For primary and elementary grade students, the formative evaluation purpose of tests should be emphasized at least as much as the summative purpose.

Item-analysis procedures exist to determine the difficulty and discriminating power of multiple-choice items.

The usual purpose for such behavior is to memorize information for later use, although occasionally we simply want to hold material in short-term memory for immediate use (for example, to redial a phone number after getting a busy signal).

Its only purpose is to use mental and verbal repetition to hold information in short-term memory for some immediate purpose.

The first three factors are used by the federal government to determine the closely related concept of socioeconomic status (SES).

Keep in mind as you read the next several pages that, although we often mention the impact of social class on Black, Latino, and American Indian students, the effects are often the same for low-SES Whites (see, for example, Entwisle, Alexander, & Olson, 2010; Wiggan, 2007).

The social behavior of preschool and kindergarten children is marked by rapidly changing friendships and play groups, a variety of types of play, short quarrels, and a growing awareness of gender roles.

Kindergartners openly display their emotions. Anger and jealousy are common.

Conditional knowledge concerns knowing when and why we use certain learning processes in certain circumstances.

Knowing that good readers first skim a reading passage to learn about its length, structure, and familiarity, and that effective study requires a certain minimum amount of time with no distractions, are examples of conditional knowledge.

The least restrictive environment provision of IDEA has led to mainstreaming—the policy that children with disabilities should attend regular classes to the maximum extent possible.

Known as inclusion or full inclusion, this extension of the mainstreaming provision has become one of the most controversial outgrowths of IDEA.

Piaget identified two types of moral reasoning in children: morality of constraint (rules are inflexible and external) and morality of cooperation (rules are flexible and internal).

Kohlberg defined six stages in the development of moral reasoning: punishment-obedience, instrumental relativist, good boy-nice girl, law and order, social contract, and universal ethical principle. The end product of each stage is a more complete and stable understanding of moral values and behavior.

Computer-based problem-solving programs typically provide students with story problems, laboratory problems, or investigation problems. Story problem programs are usually tutorials and are very much like the math story problems you probably encountered in school.

Laboratory problems are typically simulations of laboratory science problems, such as chemistry or biology. Investigation problems are set in realistic environments (microworlds) and may involve such varied subject areas as astronomy, social studies, environmental science, and anthropology.

Spontaneous concepts

Learn various facts, concepts, and rules but they do so for the most part as a by product of such other activities as engaging in play and communicating with parents and playmates.

The best way to understand a student's behavior is to understand how the student sees herself (what we referred to in earlier chapters as self-esteem and self-efficacy) and the situation she is in. Is she confident and comfortable, or self-doubting, anxious, and fearful?

Learning is most meaningful when students understand how material and lessons relate to their own lives.

A learning tactic is a specific technique one uses to help accomplish an immediate task-related objective.

Learning tactics can be classified as memory directed or comprehension directed. The former are used when accurate storage and retrieval of information are important. The latter are used when comprehension of ideas is important.

Teaching phase

Lesson is taught by 1 member of the research team and observed by others.

The most popular form of ability grouping, occurring in almost all elementary school classes, within-class ability grouping , involves the division of a single class of students into two or three groups for reading and math instruction.

Like regrouping and the Joplin Plan, within-class ability grouping has the advantages of being flexible in terms of group assignments and being restricted to one or two subjects.

Elaborative rehearsal is also based on meaningfulness. Meaningful learning occurs when new information that is clearly written and logically organized is consciously related to information the learner currently has stored in long-term memory. Visual imagery encoding is a particularly effective way to enhance the meaningfulness of information.

Long-term memory is thought by some psychologists to be an unlimited storehouse of information from which nothing is ever lost.

Social class indicates an individual's or a family's relative position in society in terms of such factors as income, occupation, level of education, place of residence, and material possessions. Socioeconomic status (SES) is a somewhat narrower concept that focuses on the first three of these factors.

Low-SES students, especially students of color, tend to achieve at significantly lower levels than White, middle-SES children for a variety of reasons. They are more likely than middle-SES students to experience homelessness and other adverse childhood experiences (ACE), including witnessing or being victims of violence. Students who have social capital—people in their family, community, and school that support them—are more resilient in overcoming adverse experiences.

Gavriel Salomon and David Perkins combine aspects of specific and near transfer and general and far transfer under the labels low-road transfer and high-road transfer, respectively.

Low-road transfer refers to a situation in which a previously learned skill or idea is almost automatically retrieved from memory and applied to a highly similar current task.

He believes that teachers should use MI theory as a framework for devising alternative ways to teach subject matter (Chen et al., 2009).

MI theory should lead to increased transfer of learning to out-of-school settings.

Erikson psychological development individuals who have reached identity achievement status have

Made their own commitments

Mager recommends that teachers use objectives that identify the behavioral act that indicates achievement, define conditions under which the behavior is to occur, and state the criteria of acceptable performance.

Mager: state specific objectives that identify the act, define conditions, state criteria

Suggestions for Teaching Satisfying Deficiency Needs and Strengthening Self-Perceptions

Make learning inviting to students.

To evaluate a product such as a garment or a piece of furniture, you might use a checklist that you devised and handed out at the beginning of a course. Such a checklist should state the number of possible points that will be awarded for various aspects of the project—for example, accuracy of measurements and preparation of component parts, neatness of assembly, quality of finishing touches, and final appearance. To evaluate a performance, you might use the same approach, announcing beforehand how heavily you intend to weigh various aspects of execution. In music, for instance, you might note possible points to be awarded for tone, execution, accuracy, and interpretation. For both project and performance tasks, you might multiply the final score by a difficulty factor. (You have probably seen television coverage of Olympic events in which divers and gymnasts have their performance ratings multiplied by such a difficulty factor.)

Make up and use a detailed answer key or rubric.

To measure the extent of loss of voice in different contexts, Susan Harter, Patricia Waters, and Nancy Whitesell gave questionnaires to several hundred students of both genders in grades 6 through 12.

Males and females are most likely to speak their minds when they are with close friends and classmates of the same gender and are less likely to do so when they are in the presence of members of the opposite gender, parents, and teachers.

The insights it provides help to illuminate the encoding and retrieval processes associated with long-term memory.

Many cognitive psychologists believe that our store of knowledge in long-term memory is organized in terms of schemata (which is plural for schema and is related in meaning to Jean Piaget's scheme).

On average, ethnic minority and low-SES students do not perform as well as other groups in school because of such factors as poor health care, an unstable family environment, low motivation, negative attitudes toward school, and negative classroom environments.

Many low-SES children live in families that do not have health insurance.

While it is commonly believed that many low-SES and minority students see themselves as less academically capable than middle-SES students, researchers have found, on average, not much of a difference.

Many low-SES students of color place a lower value on success in school than their White middle-SES peers because they don't believe that society will offer them the same opportunities later in life, and this belief may be sufficient to override whatever positive perception an individual has of his or her competence (Kumar & Maehr, 2010; Rowley, Kurtz-Costes, & Cooper, 2010).

The work that Carol Dweck has done on students' beliefs about ability clearly shows that those who adopt an entity view are more likely to develop a maladaptive approach to learning than are students who adopt an incremental view. One way to help students develop incremental rather than entity beliefs is to praise them for their effort and use of effective skills rather than for their ability after doing well on a task.

Many parents and teachers believe they are strengthening a student's motivation for learning by praising their ability with such comments as, "You did very well on this test; you certainly are smart" or "You're really good at this." Dweck's research shows that this type of praise encourages students to develop entity beliefs that impede their motivation. A better alternative is to offer what Dweck calls process praise. Examples of process praise are: "That's a really high score; you must have worked really hard at these problems"; "Now that you've mastered this skill, let's go on to something a bit harder that you can learn from"; and "You did a fine job on this paper because you started early and used the writing skills we practiced in class."

Make sure that students know what they are to do, how to proceed, and how to determine when they have achieved goals.

Many times students do not exert themselves in the classroom because they say they don't know what they are supposed to do. Occasionally, such a statement is merely an excuse for goofing off, but it may also be a legitimate explanation for lack of effort. Recall that knowing what one is expected to do is important information in the construction of a learning strategy.

Explain how basic human needs serve as the foundation for choice making and are prerequisite to personal and academic growth.

Maslow's humanistic view of motivation is based on the idea that a person must satisfy a hierarchical sequence of deficiency needs (physiological, safety, belongingness and love, and esteem) before satisfying the growth need for self-actualization.

To control for the fact that some students may not listen attentively to or may criticize the reports of others in the group because of preexisting animosities (Maria thinks Brandon is a jerk because he insulted her friend last week), they are reminded that they will be taking an exam based on the content of each person's report. So it is in Maria's interest to lay aside her dislike of Brandon because he is the only source of part of the information she will be tested on. Before reporting to the other members of their group, the students from each group with identical assignments get together to share information, discuss ideas, and rehearse their presentations. They are referred to as the "expert" group. Research on Jigsaw shows improvements in listening, interpersonal relationships, and achievement when compared with traditional instruction.

Maximize factors that appeal to both personal and situational interest.

Self actualization

Maximizing one's potential

Classroom assessment, which involves the measurement and evaluation of student learning, accounts for about one-third of a teacher's class time.

Measurement involves ranking individuals according to how much of a particular characteristic they possess. Evaluation involves making judgments about the value or worth of a set of measures.

Accurately assess the level of their own capabilities. Primary grade children are likely to overestimate what they can do if they have learned only some aspects of a skill or if they use incorrect learning or problem-solving skills that accidentally produce an acceptable outcome. Conversely, young children can underestimate their competence when they are uncertain about the correctness of their responses

Memory-directed tactics, which contain techniques that help produce accurate storage and retrieval of information

Metacognitive skills include analysis of learning tasks, goal setting, creating learning plans, monitoring progress, and evaluating goal achievement.

Metacognition increases gradually with experience. This helps explain why junior high and high school students are more flexible and effective learners than primary grade students.

Metacognition, on the other hand, refers to two things: what we know about how we think, and how we guide and control our cognitive processes.

Metacognition refers to the knowledge we have about how we learn.

Metacognition refers to any knowledge an individual has about how humans think (metacognitive knowledge) and to how those processes can be used to achieve learning goals (metacognitive skills).

Metacognitive knowledge is made up of declarative, conditional, and procedural knowledge components.

Another student may excel at the kind of direct, fact-oriented style of writing that characterizes good newspaper reporting but be limited in her ability to write a long, highly analytical essay.

Misconception: Ability is destiny.

Lastly, continually remind students that self-regulated behavior is the product of self-motivational beliefs as well as various cognitive skills. The success of any instruction you will provide on SRL skills will greatly depend on students' beliefs about their self-efficacy and the basic nature of their learning ability. As we discuss in more detail in Chapter 11, many students believe that they have inherited a certain capacity to learn that cannot be changed. Such students are much less likely to engage in SRL behaviors after a failure or two.

Model SRL skills, including the standards you use to evaluate your performance and reinforce yourself.

Correlational studies show that, as expected, self-efficacy, epistemological beliefs, and self-regulation processes are strongly related to each other and strongly related to achievement.

Modeling has been shown to be an effective means of helping students acquire the SRL skills and self-efficacy beliefs that contribute both to mathematical problem-solving ability and to writing ability.

Primary grade years moral development

Morality of constraint, preconventional. Rules are viewed as edicts handed down by authority. Focus is on physical consequences, meaning that obeying rules should bring benefit in return.

Preschool and kindergarten moral development

Morality of constraint, preconventional. Rules are viewed as unchangeable edicts handed down by those in authority. Punishment-obedience orientation focuses on physical consequences rather than on intentions.

Elementary grade years moral development

Morality of constraint; transition from preconventional to conventional. A shift to viewing rules as mutual agreements is occurring, but "official" rules are obeyed out of respect for authority or out of a desire to impress others.

High school years moral development

Morality of cooperation, conventional level. There is increasing willingness to think of rules as mutual agreements and to allow for intentions and extenuating circumstances.

Probably because they are operating from traditional gender-role stereotypes: they expect boys to be more impulsive and unruly and girls to be more orderly and obedient

Moreover, there is evidence that some of the bias-reducing practices that were introduced in classrooms in recent years have been reversed within technologically mediated learning environments

RTI can be thought of as a type of formative assessment.

Moss & Brookhart (2009) define formative assessment as "an active and intentional learning process that partners the teacher and the students to continuously and systematically gather evidence of learning with the express goal of improving student achievement".

Techniques applied in education to strengthen behaviors include shaping, token economies, and contingency contracts.

Most attempts at shaping important classroom behaviors should include at least the following steps: -Select the target behavior. -Obtain reliable baseline data (that is, determine how often the target behavior occurs in the normal course of events). -Select potential reinforcers. -In small steps, reinforce successive approximations of the target behavior each time they occur. -Reinforce the newly established target behavior each time it occurs. -Reinforce the target behavior on a variable reinforcement schedule.

Describe the following types of bilingual education programs: transition, maintenance, and two-way bilingual.

Most bilingual education programs reflect a transition goal, a maintenance goal, or a two-way bilingual goal. Transition programs teach students in their native language only until they speak and understand English well enough to be placed in a regular classroom. Maintenance programs try to maintain or improve students' native language skills. Two-way programs provide subject matter instruction in both the majority and minority languages in roughly equal proportions to all students, and they are growing in popularity.

A form of nonverbal communication that mainstream American culture highly values is direct eye contact.

Most people are taught to look directly at the person to whom they are speaking, because this behavior is believed to signify honesty on the part of the speaker and interest on the part of the listener.

Mastery learning

Most students can master the curriculum

Self-regulated learning occurs when a person purposely generates and controls thoughts, feelings, and actions to achieve a learning goal. Because of their complexity, self-regulation skills develop throughout one's school career.

Most students do not use strategic learning skills either systematically or consistently.

Define multicultural education, and name four basic approaches to multicultural education.

Multicultural education programs assume that minority students will learn more and have a stronger self-concept if teachers understand, accept, and reward the thinking and behavior patterns characteristic of the students' culture.

[How the student will proceed] Signed ___________

My preparation and study will involve choosing work from the workbook activities, number games, and filmstrip materials.

I will complete this contract when I can finish the mastery test with no more than three errors. [The degree of proficiency to be demonstrated]

My preparation and study will involve choosing work from the workbook activities, number games, and filmstrip materials. [How the student will proceed] Signed ____________

The practice of using standardized test scores to determine promotion to the next grade, graduation from high school, additional state funding, job security for teachers and administrators, and school accreditation is called high-stakes testing. Although high-stakes tests are given in every state and are related to learning standards, little is known about their effects on student achievement.

NCLB has five main requirements. First, all states must establish challenging content and performance standards for mathematics, reading/language arts, and science. Second, the states are required to administer annual assessment tests in math, reading/language arts, and science to students in grades 3 through 8. The format of the tests, the type of items used, and the length of the tests is decided by each state. Third, states must demonstrate every year that a certain additional percentage of all students, including students in such subgroups as racial and ethnic minorities, low-income, English language learners, and special education, have scored at the proficient level or higher. This feature is known as adequate yearly progress, or AYP. Fourth, states and school districts must publish yearly reports that describe how every group of students performed on the annual assessment. Fifth, states must create an accountability system that specifies rewards and punishments for schools that do and do not meet their AYP requirement.

Race to the Top is another federal program designed to stimulate improvement in education. In this program, improvement is measured by comparing what students are predicted to score on tests—based on past performance—with their actual scores. Actual scores that are higher than those predicted are attributed to high-quality instruction. This kind of measurement is referred to as value-added modeling, which has attracted many critics among educational researchers.

NCLB left the question of what should be measured to the states. To address the range in rigor of state standards, the Common Core State Standards Initiative was undertaken to create uniform national standards. As is the case with both NCLB and Race to the Top, there are many critics of the "Common Core" within the educational research community.

Many people confuse negative reinforcement with punishment.

Negative reinforcement strengthens a target behavior, whereas punishment weakens or eliminates a behavior.

Gender bias is not a simple problem, and understanding it requires placing gender within the context of other social influences such as race, family structures, and socioeconomic class

Nevertheless, gender bias has been shown to affect students in a variety of ways.

Mager's proposals were widely endorsed immediately after the publication of Preparing Instructional Objectives, but in time it became apparent that the very specific kinds of objectives he recommended were most useful in situations in which students were asked to acquire knowledge of factual information or to learn simple skills.

Norman E. Gronlund concluded that a different type of objective was more appropriate for more complex and advanced kinds of learning.

If a child exhibits a high level of linguistic intelligence, she will not necessarily choose to major in English or journalism or seek a job as a writer.

Not only do intelligences change over time in how they are used, but decisions about a college major and career are influenced by many other factors.

Identity diffusion

Not self directed; disorganized, impulsive, low self esteem, alienated from parents; avoids getting involved in schoolwork and interpersonal relationships.

Vicarious

Note rewards received by the model and anticipate receiving similar rewards for exhibiting similar behavior

Under other conditions, external rewards may enhance intrinsic motivation.

Notice, in particular, that intrinsic motivation falls when students must compete for a limited supply of rewards.

Based on their view that giftedness is a combination of above-average cognitive ability, creativity, and task commitment, Renzulli and Reis describe three levels of curriculum enrichment for gifted and talented learners.

Numerous sites on the Internet are devoted to long-distance education, enrichment, and tutoring.

Safety

Nurturance money

Objectives must be consistent with the instructional approach one uses and the types of tests one creates.

Objectives work best when students are aware of them and understand their intent, when they are clearly written, and when they are provided to average students for tasks of average difficulty. Objectives often increase intentional learning but may decrease incidental learning.

Closely related to peer tutoring is cooperative learning.

Of particular relevance to this chapter are the findings that students who cooperate in learning are more likely to list peers from different ethnic groups as friends and are better able to take the perspective of a classmate than are students who do not work in cooperative groups.

Performance assessment strives for a closer match between teaching and testing.

Often a performance assessment can be a variation or extension of a task used during instruction.

Focus is on products of learning

Often perceived as an activity that occurs after the teaching-learning process has finished

Robert Slavin (1995), a leading exponent of cooperative learning, reports that cooperative learning produced significantly higher levels of achievement than did noncooperative arrangements in 63 of 99 studies (64 percent).

On the basis of a comprehensive review of this literature, Chen-Lin Kulik, James Kulik, and Robert Bangert-Drowns (1990) conclude that mastery-learning programs produce moderately strong effects on achievement.

A general suggestion for putting many of the previous suggestions into practice is to create a classroom environment and set of instructional processes that are similar to those found in such favorite extracurricular activities as athletics.

On the basis of such characteristics as race, SES, ethnic background, dress, speech pattern, and test scores, teachers form expectancies about how various students will perform in class.

To raise students' awareness of the value of a good learning environment, you can have them keep a log of how much time they spend studying in various places and at various times, what internal and external distractions they experience, and how they deal with those distractions.

On the basis of this information, they can draw conclusions about when and under what circumstances they best learn.

Complex behaviors can be learned by the reinforcement of successive approximations to the terminal (final) behavior and by the ignoring of nonapproximate behaviors, a process called shaping.

Once a new behavior is well established, it can be maintained at that level by supplying reinforcement on an intermittent schedule. The four basic schedules are fixed interval, variable interval, fixed ratio, and variable ratio.

If these students had genuinely understood concepts and principles regarding the composition of the earth (such as the relationship between igneous fusion and heat), instead of having simply memorized meaningless phrases, they would have been able to answer the original question.

Once you are satisfied that students meaningfully understand the elements of a problem, you can demonstrate methods to represent those elements and how they interrelate. One frequent recommendation is to use visual forms of problem representation (concept maps, Venn diagrams, flowcharts, and drawings, for example). Visual representations of ideas foster comprehension because of their concreteness.

Eliminating ability grouping (in the elementary and middle school grades) and tracking (in the high school grades) and using heterogeneously grouped classes supplemented by extra support classes and after-school help.

One New York high school that did this increased its graduation rate for Black/Latino and White students from 32 percent and 88 percent, respectively, to 82 percent and 97 percent. We discuss ability grouping and tracking more fully in Chapter 6, "Accommodating Student Variability."

In these guided learning environments , teachers might help students set goals, ask questions, encourage discussions, and provide models of problem-solving processes.

One guided learning environment, the Higher Order Thinking Skills program (HOTS), focuses on higher-order thinking skills among at-risk youths in grades 4 through 8.

Csikszentmihalyi and other researchers concluded that a sense of flow (i.e., intense engagement) is more likely when students feel a sense of control over their own learning and when the learning activities challenge students at a level appropriate to their skills.

One limitation of the cognitive development view is that teachers may not always find it possible to induce a sense of disequilibrium in students.

Although most such children are White (meaning of European ancestry), Figure 5-2 shows that the poverty rates among Black, American Indian, and Hispanic American families are almost three times higher than those for White children (Aud, Hussar, Johnson, et al., 2012). The effect of living in poverty can have devastating effects on the willingness of a child to be fully engaged in school (Photo 5-2).

One major effect is that significantly fewer Black, Latino, and American Indian adolescents graduate from high school than do Whites, thereby shortening their years of education and earning potential.

Performance accomplishments

One obvious way in which we develop a sense of what we can and cannot do in various areas is by thinking about how well we have performed in the past on a given task or a set of closely related tasks. If, for example, my friends are always reluctant to have me on their team for neighborhood baseball games, and if I strike out or ground out far more often than I hit safely, I will probably conclude that I just do not have whatever skills it takes to be a competitive baseball player. Conversely, if my personal history of performance in school includes mostly grades of A and consistent rank among the top 10 students, my sense of academic self-efficacy is likely to be quite high.

Standardized tests are typically used to identify students' strengths and weaknesses, to inform parents of their child's general level of achievement, to plan instructional lessons, and to place students in special groups or programs.

One of the most important characteristics of a standardized test is its reliability—the similarity between two rankings of test scores obtained from the same individuals.

Evaluate each answer by comparing it with the key or rubric.

One of the most valuable characteristics of a test is that it permits comparison of the permanently recorded answers of all students with a fixed set of criteria. A complete key or rubric not only reduces subjectivity but can also save you much time and trouble when you are grading papers or defending your evaluation of questions.

To illustrate how shaping might be used, imagine that you are a third-grade teacher (or a middle or high school teacher) with a chronic problem: one of your students rarely completes more than a small percentage of the arithmetic (or algebra) problems on the worksheets you distribute in class, even though you know the student possesses the necessary skills.

One popular shaping technique that has stood the test of time involves having students list favorite activities on a card.

One useful method for positively reinforcing desired behavior is a token economy—supplying students with objects that have no inherent value but that can be accumulated and redeemed for more meaningful reinforcers.

One reason for the development of the token economy approach was the limited flexibility of more commonly used reinforcers.

On the basis of neurological, experimental, and clinical evidence, most cognitive psychologists think that the storage capacity of LTM is virtually unlimited and that it contains a permanent record of everything an individual has learned, although some doubt exists about the latter point.

One researcher, Thomas Landauer, estimates the capacity of LTM at 10 trillion bits of information.

Cultural conflicts arise from differences in perceptions, beliefs, and values. American culture, for example, places great value on self-reliance. Americans generally respect and praise individuals who, through their own initiative, persistence, and ingenuity, achieve substantial personal goals, and they tend to look down on individuals who are dependent on others for their welfare. Consequently, American parents who are financially dependent on their children, even though the children may be prosperous enough to support them, would probably feel ashamed enough to hide the fact. The same situation in China would likely elicit a different reaction because of different values about self-reliance and family responsibilities. Chinese parents who are unable to provide for themselves in their old age but have children successful enough to support them might well brag about it to others.

One technique for exploring cultural conflict is to have students search through newspapers and news magazines for articles that describe clashes. Ask them to identify the source of the conflict and how it might be positively resolved. Another technique is to involve students in games that simulate group conflict. Class members can, for example, play the role of state legislators who represent the interests of diverse ethnic groups and who have been lobbied to change the school funding formula so that poorer school districts receive more money. The use of both simulations and the discussion of newspaper articles will probably work best at the high school level because adolescents are better able than younger students to understand the abstract concepts involved in these activities.

Most constructivist theories take one of three forms: cognitive constructivism, social constructivism, or critical constructivism.

One variation of constructivism, cognitive constructivism, is an outgrowth of Piaget's ideas because it focuses on the cognitive processes that take place within individuals.

The notion of metacognition was proposed by developmental psychologist John Flavell to explain why children of different ages deal with learning tasks in different ways.

One way to grasp the essence of metacognition is to contrast it with cognition.

Define operant conditioning and at least five of its basic principles.

Operant conditioning is a theory of learning devised by B. F. Skinner. It focuses on how voluntary behaviors are strengthened (made more likely to occur in the future) or weakened by the consequences that follow them.

In the next few paragraphs, we will briefly describe three of them, with the first two being types of punishment.

Operant psychologists define punishment as reducing the frequency of an undesired behavior through the use of an aversive stimulus.

Scheme

Organized pattern of behavior or thought

For tasks in which a set of discrete elements must be learned in a one-at-a-time fashion, such as learning foreign language vocabulary or the symbols of chemical elements, the demand on working memory and comprehension is low because the elements are independent. Learning the meaning of one word or symbol has no effect on learning any of the others. As long as the external load on working memory is kept reasonable by limiting the number of words or symbols that students have to learn at any time, learning problems should be minimal.

Other tasks make greater demands on working memory because their elements interact. Learning to produce and recognize grammatically correct utterances ("The cat climbed up the tree" versus "Tree the climbed cat up the") is a task that places a higher demand on working memory because the meaning of all the words must be considered simultaneously to determine if the sentence makes sense. For such tasks, keeping the amount of information that students are required to learn at a low level is critically important because it leaves the student with sufficient working memory to engage in schema construction.

Try to make learning interesting by emphasizing activity, investigation, adventure, social interaction, and usefulness.

Over 40 years ago, May Seagoe suggested an approach to motivation that is based on students' interests and is consistent with many of the motivation theories and technology tools mentioned in this chapter.

Triarchic view

Part of intelligence is the ability to achieve personal goals

Effective multicultural teachers use such proven instructional techniques as providing clear objectives, communicating high expectations, monitoring progress, providing immediate feedback, and making lessons meaningful. In addition, they have experience in teaching culturally diverse classes, exhibit a high level of dedication, and have a strong affinity for their students.

Peer tutoring, cooperative learning, and mastery learning are three generally effective instructional tactics that are particularly well suited to multicultural education programs.

Piaget cognitive development more strongly influenced by

Peers than by adults

Focus is on learning in process

Perceived as integral to the teaching-learning process

In recent years, many teachers, learning theorists, and measurement experts have argued that the typical written test should be used far less often than it is because it reveals little or nothing of the depth of students' knowledge and how students use their knowledge to work through questions, problems, and tasks.

Performance assessments are different from traditional written tests in that they require the student to make an active response, are more like everyday tasks, contain problems that involve many variables, are closely related to earlier instructional activities, use scoring guides that clearly specify the criteria against which responses will be evaluated, emphasize formative evaluation, and are probably more responsive to cultural diversity.

Performance assessments pose several challenges for teachers

Performance assessments have been promoted as a way to assess more fairly and accurately the knowledge and skills of all students, and particularly minority students, because of their realism (including group problem solving) and closer relationship between instruction and assessment.

Essay tests measure such high-level skills as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation but are difficult to grade consistently, are time-consuming to grade, and allow only limited coverage of material. In the near future, essay scoring by computer may reduce these disadvantages.

Performance assessments measure how well students use basic knowledge to perform a particular skill or produce a particular product under somewhat realistic conditions.

When performance assessment is conducted under such realistic conditions, it is also called authentic assessment.

Performance assessments provide students the opportunity to demonstrate what they can do with what they know.

One way to address these concerns is to use performance assessments.

Performance assessments require students to use a wide range of knowledge and skills over an extended period of time to complete a task or solve a problem under more or less realistic conditions.

Collaboration of teacher and student

Performance measures (e.g., scores on an exam) show a student's journey

Teacher-directed

Performance measures (e.g., scores on an exam) show where a student has arrived

Standardized tests are typically used as summative assessments (assessments of learning).

Performance-based classroom tests, on the other hand, lend themselves to the formative assessment (assessment for leaning).

After each short lesson segment, provide both immediate positive feedback and tangible evidence of progress. (Many sets of published materials prepared for use with students with learning disabilities are designed in this way.)

Perhaps the best overall strategy to use in building self-esteem is to help children with intellectual disability successfully complete learning tasks.

Formative assessments are conducted more or less continually during an instructional unit, using both formal and informal assessment techniques.

Periodic quizzes, homework assignments, in-class worksheets, oral reading, responses to teacher questions, and behavioral observations are all examples of formative assessments if the results are used to generate timely feedback about what students have learned, what the source of any problems might be, and what might be done to prevent small problems from becoming major ones later in the year.

Hearing impairment

Permanent or fluctuating difficulty in understanding speech that adversely affects educational performance.

Bandura and others describe these three elements as follows:

Personal characteristics, behavioral patterns and environmental factors

During the formal operational stage, the individual is capable of hypothetical reasoning, dealing with abstractions, and engaging in mental manipulations. Although some adolescents are capable of formal operational reasoning, adolescent egocentrism restricts its range and power.

Piaget believed that social interactions among peers on the same level of development would do more to stimulate cognitive development than social interactions between children and adults because interactions among intellectual equals are more likely to lead to fruitful discussions, analyses, and debates.

Systematic instruction may have modest positive effects on the rate of cognitive development as long as the schemes that will govern the next stage have already begun to develop.

Piaget's theory has been criticized for underestimating children's abilities, for overestimating the capability of adolescents to engage in formal operational thinking, for vague explanations of how individuals move from stage to stage, and for not addressing cultural differences.

Planning phase

Plan lesson and plan the observations through which data will be collected.

Mainstreaming

Policy of placing students with disabilities in regular classes

Emotional disturbance

Poor relationships, inappropriate behavior, depression, fears

Two types of memory-directed tactics are rehearsal and mnemonic devices. Because most forms of rehearsal involve little or no encoding of information, they are not very effective memory tactics. Because mnemonic devices organize information and provide built-in retrieval cues, they are effective memory tactics.

Popular mnemonic devices include rhymes, acronyms, acrostics, the loci method, and the keyword method.

Basic learning principles that derive from Skinner's work are positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, punishment (Type I, or presentation punishment), time-out (Type II, or removal punishment), extinction, spontaneous recovery, generalization, and discrimination.

Positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement strengthen behaviors. Punishment, time-out, and extinction weaken target behaviors.

Positive transfer occurs when a new learning task is similar to a previously learned task and calls for a similar response. Negative transfer occurs when a new learning task is similar to a previously learned task but calls for a different response. Zero transfer occurs when previously learned information or skills are so dissimilar to new information or skills that they have no effect on how quickly the latter will be learned.

Positive transfer that is due to identifiable similarities between an earlier-learned task and a current one is referred to as specific transfer. Positive transfer that is due to the formulation, use, and carryover of cognitive strategies from one task to another is referred to as general transfer.

Preschool and kindergarten cognitive development

Preoperational thought. Children gradually acquire the ability to conserve and decenter but are not capable of operational thinking and are unable to mentally reverse operations.

For term papers or other written work, list your criteria for grading the papers (e.g., how much emphasis will be placed on style, spelling and punctuation, research, individuality of expression). In laboratory courses, most students prefer a list of experiments or projects and some description of how they will be evaluated (e.g., 10 experiments in chemistry, 15 drawings in drafting, 5 paintings in art, judged according to posted criteria).

Prepare a content outline or a table of specifications of the objectives to be covered on each exam, or otherwise take care to obtain a systematic sample of the knowledge and skill acquired by your students.

Logic suggests, and research confirms, that differences in working memory are strongly related to differences in such basic skills as reading comprehension, listening comprehension, oral expression, writing, math calculation, and math reasoning.

Preschool and first-grade children, for example, who scored higher than their peers on a test of working memory were better able to complete a card-sorting task that required keeping track of several pieces of information.

Describe one or more aspects of the physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development of preschool and kindergarten children.

Preschool and kindergarten children are quite active and enjoy physical activity. Their incomplete muscle and motor development limits what they can accomplish on tasks that require fine motor skills, eye-hand coordination, and visual focusing.

Describe one or more aspects of the physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development of primary grade students.

Primary grade children exhibit many of the same physical characteristics as preschool and kindergarten children (high activity level, incomplete muscle and motor development, frequent periods of fatigue). Most accidents occur among third graders because they overestimate their physical skills and underestimate the dangers in their activities.

Negative transfer is defined as a situation in which prior learning interferes with subsequent learning.

Primary grade children often experience negative transfer when they encounter words that are spelled alike but pronounced differently (as in "I will read this story now since I read that story last week").

Primary grade children's friendships are typically same sex and are made on a more selective basis than among younger children. Quarrels among peers typically involve verbal arguments, although boys may engage in punching, wrestling, and shoving.

Primary grade students are becoming more emotionally sensitive. As a result, they are more easily hurt by criticism, respond strongly to praise, and are more likely to hurt another child's feelings during a quarrel.

Teach students how to represent problems.

Problem representation involves transforming the words that express a problem into an internal representation of those words. To do this, students must understand the concepts embedded in the problem statement and the relationships among those concepts. Consequently, the ability to construct a good representation of a problem is based on a command of the subject matter surrounding the problem and familiarity with the particular type of problem.

One approach that incorporates most or all of these features and that can be used with preschool and primary grade children is the project approach. Lillian Katz and Sylvia Chard define a project as an in-depth study of a particular topic that one or more children undertake, that extends over a period of days or weeks, and that involves children seeking answers to questions that they formulate by themselves or in consultation with the teacher.

Projects may involve an initial discussion that captures the students' interest (for example, discussing how a house is built); dramatic play; drawing, painting, and writing; group discussions; field trips; construction activities; and investigation activities.

Norm-referenced grading is based on absence of external criteria

Proponents of norm-referenced grading typically point to the absence of acceptable external criteria for use as a standard for evaluating and grading student performance.

The second study, describes a fourth-grade teacher's use of various types of prompts as a form of scaffolding to help students better understand and discuss stories they had read. Some of the prompts took the form of asking for clarification ("Do you mean...?" "Can you clarify...?"), prompting for the use of evidence ("Where in the story does it say...?"), praising the use of evidence ("That is good story information."), and challenging ("It sounds to me as if no one's trying to look at things from the prince's point of view."). These prompts not only improved the quality of students' discussions of subsequent stories, but they caused students to prompt their classmates in the same ways.

Provide Opportunities for Learning by Discovery

Erikson's theory has been criticized for its heavy reliance on his personal experience, its lack of applicability to other cultures, and its inaccuracies in terms of female personality development.

Provide examples of how Jean Piaget's stage theory of cognitive development can be used to guide learning experiences in and out of the classroom.

Technology consistent with Piaget's view of cognitive development helps students explore and construct knowledge, formulate concrete representations of abstract ideas, and understand the ideas of others.

Provide examples of how technology can encourage cognitive development by challenging current conceptions and encouraging collaborative interactions.

The potential benefits of measurement and evaluation activities can be undermined by any one of several inappropriate testing and grading practices.

Provide examples of how technology can support both assessment and evaluation based on those assessments.

Extrinsic rewards may enhance intrinsic motivation when initial interest in a task is low because it is seen as boring or irrelevant; when initial interest in a task is high and reward involves positive verbal feedback; and when the highest level of reward is potentially available to all who qualify.

Provide examples of the influences on self-efficacy and how self-efficacy serves as motivation to learn.

A limitation of the humanistic view is that the teacher may not always find it possible to identify a student's unmet deficiency needs or to satisfy them once they are identified.

Provide examples of the ways in which self-perceptions influence student motivation.

You can enhance the learning of SRL skills by having students observe and imitate what you and other skilled learners do. As noted, when you demonstrate a skill or process, you should first explain what you are going to do. Then take time to describe why you are going to do it and how you will evaluate the quality of your performance. Then demonstrate the behavior, evaluate your performance, and, if you feel your behavior has met your standards, verbally administer some self-praise. The importance of modeling thought processes that are normally hidden from observation was noted by Margaret Metzger (1998), a high school English teacher. To help students better understand the process of literary interpretation and criticism, she recommended a procedure in which she led some students through a discussion of a story while other students observed and took notes on the process.

Provide guided practice and corrective feedback for the SRL skills you want students to learn.

Help students make appropriate attributions for success and failure by reminding them that effort is the primary cause of success and insufficient effort is the primary cause of failure. If you mention that ability also plays a role in performance, emphasize that ability is a set of learnable skills and not a fixed cognitive capacity.

Provide students with clear guidelines for determining the appropriateness of their behavior and point out when they have and have not satisfied those guidelines.

Inform students that note taking is an effective comprehension tactic when used appropriately. Think, for example, about a reading passage that is long and for which test items will demand analysis and synthesis of broad concepts (as in "Compare and contrast the economic, social, and political causes of World War I with those of World War II"). Tell students to concentrate on identifying main ideas and supporting details, to paraphrase this information, and to record similarities and differences.

Provide students with practice and corrective feedback in answering questions that are similar to those on the criterion test (meaning the test that assesses how well the students met the teacher's objectives).

Scientific concepts

Psychological tools that allow us to manipulate our environment consciously and systematically.

The brief amount of time that information remains available in STM may seem surprising, but it can be easily demonstrated.

Psychologists use the term working memory to refer to the aspect of STM that actively processes information.

Making learning fun by using games that allow students to manipulate-physically or virtually-the game environment.

Push students to learn by such actions as not accepting excuses for missed or late work, constantly checking homework, giving rewards, and keeping parents informed.

Above all, remember that each student is a unique person. Although descriptions of various ethnic groups and subgroups may accurately portray some general tendencies of a large group of people, they may apply only partly or not at all to given individuals.

Rather than thinking of culture as a set of perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, and actions that are inherent in all individuals who nominally belong to a culture (perhaps because of surname or country of origin), you will be far better served in working with students and their parents if you take the time to understand the extent to which individuals participate in the practices of their cultural communities. For example, some Latino students may prefer cooperative learning arrangements because such behavior is the norm at home and in their community, whereas others may prefer to work independently because that behavior is more typical for them.

Allow sufficient time for initial responses, and then probe for further information (if appropriate).

Recent research has found that many teachers fail to allow enough time for students to respond to questions. Quite often, instructors wait only one second before repeating the question, calling on another student, or answering the question themselves. When teachers wait at least three seconds after asking a question, students are more likely to participate; their responses increase in frequency, length, and complexity; and their achievement improves. There are changes in teacher behavior as well. As a function of waiting longer, teachers ask more complex questions and have higher expectations for the quality of students' responses.

Test. Each student individually takes a quiz. Using a scoring system that ranges from 0 to 30 points and reflects degree of individual improvement over previous quiz scores, the teacher scores the papers.

Recognition. Each team receives one of three recognition awards, depending on the average number of points the team earned. For example, teams that average 15 to 19 improvement points receive a GOODTEAM certificate, teams that average 20 to 24 improvement points receive a GREATTEAM certificate, and teams that average 25 to 30 improvement points receive a SUPERTEAM certificate.

Environmental factors

Refer to an individual's social and physical environment. They include such things as the nature of a task, reinforcing and punishing consequences, explanations and modeling of various skills by others, and verbal persuasion from others to exhibit particular behaviors.

Performance character

Refers to personal qualities that facilitate the achievement of one's goals.

Self concept

Refers to the evaluative judgments people make of themselves in specific domains, such as academic performance, social interactions, athletic performance, and physical appearance.

Intellectual character

Refers to ways of thinking that direct and motivate what a person does when faced with a learning task and that that often lead to a meaningful outcome.

In problem-solving situations, the impulsive student collects less information, does so less systematically, and gives less thought to various solutions than do more reflective students.

Reflective students, in contrast, prefer to spend more time collecting information (which means searching one's memory as well as external sources) and analyzing its relevance to the solution before offering a response (Morgan, 1997).

Most 504 plans cover students with health or medical challenges or those with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder who are not already covered by IDEA.

Regardless of whether a disability is covered legally through IDEA or through ADAAA changes to Section 504, the types of students you will sometimes be expected to teach in your classroom will vary.

By making the language of each assessment level concrete, I avoided the grief of not having a clear explanation for a score, and, more importantly, I could help students begin to make real and effective improvements in their writing by pointing to a specific line or place in the essay.

Reliability and validity of performance assessments not yet firmly established

For these occasions, you might consider some form of extinction.

Research has demonstrated that extinction is effective in reducing the frequency of many types of problem behaviors.

The teacher expectancy effect occurs when teachers communicate a particular expectation about how a student will perform and the student's behavior changes so as to be consistent with that expectation.

Research has demonstrated that teacher expectancy strongly affects classroom achievement and participation in both positive and negative ways.

Teachers assess students' products and performances for two primary reasons: to assign grades (summative assessment, or assessment of learning) and to monitor student progress (formative assessment, or assessment for learning).

Research indicates that students who take four to six exams a term learn more than students who take fewer or no exams.

Self-regulation skills allow learners to take charge: to function as the agents of their own learning rather than objects of instruction.

Research is a form of learning that requires highly developed self-regulation skills.

Consequently, they prefer either very easy tasks (because success is ensured) or very difficult tasks (because there is no shame in failing to do well at them).

Research on attribution theory has found marked differences between high achievers and low achievers. High achievers attribute success to ability and effort, and failure to insufficient effort. Low achievers attribute success to luck or easiness of the task and failure to lack of ability.

Given the obvious implications of the teacher expectancy effect for shaping student behavior, researchers have been investigating its validity and limits for the past 40 years (see Spitz, 1999, for an excellent summary and analysis of the original and subsequent research, and Rosenthal, 2002, for the views of the senior author of the original study).

Research that has investigated the effect of teacher expectancy on classroom achievement and participation has generally found sizable positive and negative effects (Benner & Mistry, 2007; Good & Nichols, 2001; Hinnant, O'Brien, & Ghazarian, 2009; McKown, Gregory, & Weinstein, 2010).

The theoretical basis of peer tutoring comes from Jean Piaget's notions about cognitive development.

Researchers have consistently found that peer tutoring (also referred to as peer-assisted or dyadic learning) aids achievement for a wide range of students and subject matters.

And although many Latino students earn lower grades and test scores than their White peers, there are also many who do not fit this pattern.

Researchers have found that Latino students who spoke English at home, who came from two-parent families, who spent more time on homework than their peers, and who had parents who supervised their homework not only significantly outscored their Latino peers who did not share these characteristics but also scored at the same level as White students who shared the same characteristics.

Gender bias

Responding differently to male and female students without having sound educational reasons for doing so

Piaget kohlberg and gilligan moral development knowledge does not always

Result in moral behavior

Design lessons and test items that call for memory, analytical, creative, and practical abilities.

Robert Sternberg (1997a; Sternberg et al., 2008) has pointed out that many teachers tend to emphasize memory and analytical abilities, which is fine for students—male or female—who are good at memorizing facts or breaking things down into their component parts and explaining how the parts relate to each other. But students whose abilities are in the creative or practical areas may appear to be less capable than they really are. You can get a better idea of each student's strengths and weaknesses and how well students have learned the subject matter you just taught by using a variety of instructional cues and test items.

Recognize that different styles of learning call for different methods of instruction.

Robert Sternberg's work on styles of mental self-government calls for the same approach to instruction and testing as does his work on intellectual abilities: use a variety of instructional methods and testing formats. Not only will you have a more accurate picture of what students know, but you will also be helping them learn how to shift styles to adapt to changing conditions. For example, students with a judicial style have a preference for "why" questions (e.g., Why did the United States go to war with Iraq in 2003?), whereas students with a legislative style have a preference for "suppose" or "what if" questions (e.g., If you were President George W. Bush, would you have gone to war with Iraq?). Table 4-3 indicates which of Sternberg's learning styles are most compatible with particular methods of instruction.

Performance assessments are characterized by active responding, realistic conditions, complex problems, a close relationship between teaching and testing, use of scoring rubrics, and use of test results for formative evaluation purposes.

Rubrics are beneficial for both teachers and students. They help teachers to assess student performances more objectively, consistently, and efficiently and to align instructional activities with the demands of the performance measure. They help students understand the teacher's expectations, monitor their progress, and make improvements in their work.

One reason that proponents of performance assessment push for this feature is that it has always been a standard part of successful programs in sports, the arts, and vocational education.

Rubrics increase objectivity and consistency of scoring, align instruction with assessment, communicate teachers' expectations, help students monitor progress

Morality of cooperation (moral relativism)

Rules are flexible intent important in determining guilt

Morality of constraint (moral realism)

Rules are sacred consequences determine guilt

As we pointed out in previous chapters, cooperative-learning methods have proven effective in increasing self-esteem and motivation for learning, redirecting attributions for success and failure, fostering positive feelings toward classmates, and increasing performance on tests of comprehension, reasoning, and problem solving. Accordingly, you may want to try one or more of the cooperative learning techniques described by David Johnson and Roger Johnson, Robert Slavin, and Kath Murdoch and Jeni Wilson. To familiarize you with these methods, we will briefly describe the Student Teams-Achievement Divisions (STAD) method that Slavin and his associates at Johns Hopkins University devised.

STAD is one of the simplest and most flexible of the cooperative-learning methods, having been used in grades 2 through 12 and in such diverse subject areas as math, language arts, social studies, and science. As with other cooperative-learning methods, students are assigned to four- or five-member groups, with each group mirroring the makeup of the class in terms of ability, background, and gender. Once these assignments are made, a cycle is initiated.

Accommodation

Scheme is created or revised to fit new experience

Sensorimotor stages

Schemes reflect sensory and motor experiences

Just from a logical standpoint, we may have pretty well convinced you that metacognition plays a critical role in learning.

Second, metacognition has been found to be a stronger predictor of achievement than intelligence.

First, while these differences are statistically significant (meaning it's highly unlikely that they occur by chance), they are sometimes quite small and may eventually disappear.

Second, the findings that are summarized below are average differences.

First, most learning activities are too complex to be described in terms of a specific objective for every learning outcome, as Mager proposed.

Second, the kind of specific objective Mager advocated may tend to cause instructors and students to concentrate on memorizing facts and mastering simple skills.

First, the ways in which students learn can change over time and situations.

Second, using various teaching techniques and testing formats may stimulate students to expand their own repertoire of learning styles

Many teachers say that, although they agree with the philosophy behind IDEA, they feel that their training has not adequately prepared them to meet the needs of students with disabling conditions.

Section 504 of that act prevents discrimination against people with disabilities who participate in any federally funded program, which includes public schools.

Link new topics to information students are already likely to have or provide relevant background knowledge in creative yet understandable ways.

Select reading materials that are logically organized and written in an engaging style.

You are more likely to draw correct inferences about students' capabilities by using a variety of selected-response and constructed-response items.

Selected-response tests are objectively scored and efficient but usually measure lower levels of learning and do not reveal what students can do

Quite often all three item types are used in a single test. Although guidelines exist for writing selected-response items (see, for example, the 31 guidelines for writing multiple-choice items discussed by Haladyna, Downing, and Rodriguez, 2002), many of these guidelines have not been validated by research.

Selected-response tests are sometimes called "objective" tests because they have a simple and set scoring system.

Selected-response tests are so named because the student reads a relatively brief opening statement (called a stem) and selects one of the provided alternatives as the correct answer.

Selected-response tests are typically made up of multiple-choice, true-false, or matching items.

People have an inherent desire to make the most of their capabilities, a characteristic that Maslow called self-actualization. Think of it as an inherent desire to learn and become competent.

Self-actualization cannot occur until the more basic physiological, safety, belonging, and esteem needs have been satisfactorily met, and teachers can play a critical role in helping students meet these needs (a point we discussed in Chapter 11).

The self-control level of observational learning is marked by the learner's being able to exhibit the modeled behavior in the absence of the model.

Self-control is achieved through self-directed practice.

A person's level of self-efficacy is affected by past accomplishments, by the persuasive comments of others, by emotional states such as anxiety or well-being, and by observing the accomplishments of others with whom we identify.

Self-efficacy affects a person's choice of goals and activities; the cognitive processes one uses to meet the demands of various tasks; the amount and persistence of effort expended to accomplish a goal, especially in the face of obstacles; and the emotions one experiences while working on a task, such as excitement, curiosity, anxiety, and dread.

By the term selection processes, we mean the way the person goes about selecting goals and activities.

Self-efficacy influences goals and activities, cognitive processes, perseverance, emotions

To help students choose or create a hospitable learning environment, you can prepare and distribute a checklist of desirable features. Likely features of a good learning environment would include relative quiet, good lighting and ventilation, and comfortable furniture; it would be best not to include other people, a television set, and alternative reading material such as comic books or magazines.

Self-regulated learners commonly use many types of memory and comprehension tactics. You can help students appreciate the value of these skills by using such techniques as mnemonic devices, outlines, concept maps, previews, graphs, flowcharts, and tables as you teach and by explaining how they are used and the ways in which they aid learning.

The complex process of becoming an effective teacher is a good example of the need for multiple perspectives, including the perspectives of other teachers.

Self-regulation by learners is a key to successful learning.

Explain what it means to be a self-regulated learner, and note how teachers can help students acquire this capability.

Self-regulation is, under ideal circumstances, a cyclical process that moves through three phases. These phases and some of their associated self-regulatory processes are: forethought (goal setting, planning, self-efficacy for self-regulated learning, beliefs about consequences of achieving a goal, intrinsic interest, and learning-oriented versus performance-oriented goals), performance (attention focusing, self-instruction, learning tactics, recording one's behavior, trying out different forms of behavior), and self-reflection (evaluating one's behavior, making constructive attributions for success and failure, self-reinforcement, and drawing inferences about improving self-regulation skills).

Involve students, especially at the secondary level, in community service activities.

Service-learning programs, found in many school systems, serve several purposes. First, they afford students the opportunity to broaden the knowledge they acquire in school by working to solve real problems in a community setting. As a result, students who participate in service programs earn higher grades and improve their social skills. Second, they help students develop a sense of civic and social responsibility. Third, they help students become more knowledgeable about career options. And fourth, they provide a useful and needed service to the community. To cite one example, Natalie Russell, who teaches English as a second language to high school students, describes how she uses service-learning projects, such as the creation of a Spanish/English phrasebook that was distributed free to community members, as a way to help students feel more connected to their community and to make their English lessons more meaningful and immediately useful. More detailed information about service-learning programs and organizations can be found on the Corporation for National and Community Service website.

Like selected-response tests, short-answer tests can be scored quickly, accurately, and consistently, thereby giving them an aura of objectivity.

Short-answer tests have the same basic disadvantages as selected-response tests.

Selected-response tests are efficient to administer and score but tend to reflect the lowest level of the cognitive domain taxonomy and provide no information about what students can do with the knowledge they have learned. They may also lead students to believe that learning is just the accumulation of factual knowledge.

Short-answer tests measure recall, rather than recognition, of information and allow comprehensive coverage of a topic, but they have the same disadvantages as selected-response tests.

Once information has been attended to, it is transferred to short-term memory (STM), the second memory store.

Short-term memory can hold anywhere from five to nine (seven is the average) unrelated bits of information for approximately 20 seconds.

Encourage low-achieving students to attribute success to a combination of ability and effort and failure to insufficient effort.

Should you decide to try to alter the attributions of a student who is having difficulty with one or more subjects, here are suggestions based on an analysis of 20 attribution training studies.

Intellectual disability

Significant subaverage general intellectual functioning accompanied by deficits in adaptive behavior (how well a person functions in social environments). This category was formerly called mental retardation. The change to intellectual disability occurred in 2010.

Personal interest in a subject may be influenced by such factors as the student's own emotions, degree of competence attained, relevance to a goal, and level of prior knowledge.

Situational interest in a subject may be influenced by such factors as hands-on activities, a state of cognitive disequilibrium, well-written material, the opportunity to work with others, and observing influential models.

Describe at least three educational applications of operant conditioning principles.

Skinner's approach to all educational applications followed the same four principles: be clear about what is to be taught, teach first things first, present material in small and logical steps, and let students learn at their own rate.

If you need to remember things for future use, use elaborative rehearsal; if you want to keep something in consciousness just for the moment, use rote rehearsal.

So far, we have explained the effect of elaborative rehearsal in terms of relating new information to information already stored in long-term memory.

Whenever we speak of a test's accuracy in this sense, we are referring to its validity.

So when we inquire about the validity of a test by asking, "Does this test measure what it claims to measure?" we are really asking, "How accurate are the inferences that I wish to draw about the test taker?".

The classic illustration of what can occur when information is not learned meaningfully was given over a century ago by William James in his Talks to Teachers:A friend of mine, visiting a school, was asked to examine a young class in geography. Glancing at the book, she said: "Suppose you should dig a hole in the ground, hundreds of feet deep, how should you find it at the bottom—warmer or colder than on top?" None of the class replying, the teacher said: "I'm sure they know, but I think you don't ask the question quite rightly. Let me try."

So, taking the book, she asked: "In what condition is the interior of the globe?" and received the immediate answer from half the class at once: "The interior of the globe is in a condition of igneous fusion." (1899, p. 150)

Personal characteristics include such things as metacognitive knowledge, self-efficacy beliefs, goals, and anxiety. Behavioral patterns include self-observation, self-evaluation, and changes made to overcome perceptions of low self-efficacy and improve learning strategies. The social environment includes the types of tasks on which people work, the reinforcing and punishing consequences they receive for exhibiting various behaviors, and the explanations and modeling skills they get from others.

Social cognitive theory emphasizes that, through the use of self-control and self-regulation skills, people are the cause of and have control over their behavior, a process that Bandura calls personal agency.

Describe examples of how personal characteristics, behavioral patterns, and environmental factors interact to influence learners' behaviors.

Social cognitive theory was created by Albert Bandura to explain how an individual's personal characteristics, behavioral patterns, and environment interact to produce learning, a process Bandura called triadic reciprocal causation.

The constructivist variation known as social constructivism holds that meaningful learning occurs when people are explicitly taught how to use the psychological tools of their culture (such as language, mathematics, and approaches to problem solving) and are then given the opportunity to use these tools in authentic, real-life activities to create a common, or shared, understanding of some phenomenon.

Social constructivism has also given rise to an increasing focus by researchers on how culture and history influence people's thoughts and actions as they engage with others and with their environment.

-Arrange a "Parade of Presidents" in which each student selects a president of the United States and presents a State of the Union message to the rest of the class, with the rest of the class taking the part of members of Congress. -Hand out a duplicated sheet of 20 questions based on articles in each section of a morning newspaper. Students compete against each other to discover how many of the questions they can answer in the shortest period of time. Typical questions: "Why is the senator from Mississippi upset?" "Who scored the most points in the UCLA-Notre Dame basketball game?" "What city suffered widespread flood damage?"

Social interactions

Students' use of the four comprehension techniques of RT was infrequent or of low quality. For example, most of the questions posed by students were superficial and fact-oriented, predictions were not logical, and clarifying comments were rarely made.

Solutions: Many teachers spent a great deal of time teaching students (through explicit instruction and modeling) how to formulate high-quality questions and tried to stimulate use of clarifying by having students identify words and sentences they did not understand.

Because of the previously mentioned problems with strategy use and dialogue, some teachers continued to provide a high level of support to students long beyond the point suggested by the literature on reciprocal teaching. The amount and duration of scaffolding were related to the age and reading ability of the students. Younger students and those with weaker reading skills required more scaffolding.

Solutions: Teachers provided additional scaffolding through whole-class instruction; reading partnerships; modeling; allowing students more time to learn the elements of RT; writing predictions, clarifications, and summaries; and direct instruction of group skills.

Discussions among the students of the proper use of the four reading skills and the content of the reading passages were both limited and of low quality, largely due to their limited cooperative learning skills, but also because some students were shy about speaking in front of peers.

Solutions: Using whole-class instruction and modeling, teachers taught students how to be good listeners, to take turns talking, to reach a consensus about the details and meaning of a passage, and to give constructive feedback to one another.

Second, because of differences in cultural experiences, some students may be reluctant to speak or perform in public, whereas others may prefer exchanges that resemble a free-for-all shouting match.

Some American Indian children, for example, prefer to work on ideas and skills in private.

Whatever the form of accelerated instruction, this is always a hotly debated topic, with pros and cons on each side.

Some public school districts offer separate classes for gifted and talented students as either an alternative to accelerated instruction or as something that follows accelerated instruction.

Because many real-life performances and products are the result of several feedback and revision cycles, performance assessment often includes this feature as well.

Some specific forms of formative assessment are dress rehearsals, reviews of writing drafts, and peer response groups

Inadequate consolidation

Sometimes forgetting occurs because the material wasn't adequately learned in the first place.

The best we can do is identify the major dimensions that two tasks share (such as subject matter, physical setting, time between two tasks, and the conditions under which each is performed) and subjectively decide that the two dimensions are sufficiently similar or dissimilar to warrant the label near transfer or far transfer.

Sometimes this approach produces a high degree of agreement, but at other times one person's far transfer is another person's near transfer.

In 1904, British psychologist Charles Spearman noticed that children given a battery of intellectual tests (such as the memory, reasoning, and comprehension tests that Binet and Terman used) showed a strong tendency to rank consistently from test to test: children who scored high (or average or below average) on memory tests tended to score high (or average or below average) on reasoning and comprehension tests.

Spearman explained this pattern by saying that intelligence is made up of two types of factors: a general factor (abbreviated as g) that affects performance on all intellectual tests and a set of specific factors (abbreviated as s) that affects performance on only specific intellectual tests.

Finally, where all attempts at adapting or attempting to change the views of others fail, the intelligent person seeks out a setting in which his or her behaviors are more consistent with those of others.

Sternberg's basic point is that intelligence should be viewed as a broad characteristic of people that is evidenced not only by how well they answer a particular set of test questions but also by how well they function in different settings.

Even before such tests are devised, these theories serve a useful purpose by reminding us that intelligence is multifaceted and can be expressed in many ways.

Sternberg's triarchic theory of intelligence (which in later versions is called the theory of successful intelligence) has, as its name suggests, three main parts (see Figure 4-1): -Practical ability involves applying knowledge to everyday situations, using knowledge and tools, and seeking relevance. -Creative ability involves inventing, discovering, imagining, and supposing. -Analytical ability involves breaking ideas and products into their component parts, making judgments, evaluating, comparing and contrasting, and critiquing.

Give some examples of how Robert Sternberg's and Howard Gardner's theories of intelligence can be used to guide classroom instruction.

Sternberg's triarchic theory of successful intelligence is composed of analytical, creative, and practical abilities. The practical component, which includes the ability to adapt to one's environment to achieve personal goals, has been ignored by traditional theories.

Several misconceptions exist about Gardner's multiple intelligences theory. Individuals who have a high level of a particular intelligence should not be expected to excel on all tasks involving that intelligence or to choose a career that calls for that intelligence. Also, it is not necessary, and may be counterproductive, to try to teach every subject in eight different ways.

Sternberg's triarchic view implies that instruction and testing should be designed to involve memory, analytical, creative, and practical abilities.

Gender bias can affect students in at least three ways: the courses they choose to take, the careers they consider, and the extent to which they participate in class activities and discussions.

Sternberg's work is a break with tradition in two respects.

Primary grade years general factors to keep in mind

Students are having first experiences with school learning, are eager to learn how to read and write, and are likely to be upset by lack of progress. Initial attitudes toward schooling are being established. Initial roles in a group are being formed, roles that may establish a lasting pattern (e.g., leader, follower, loner, athlete, or underachiever).

High school grades Boyle's law (Physics) Bodily kinesthetic

Students breathe air into their mouths, move it to one side of their mouths (so that one cheek is puffed out), indicate whether the pressure goes up or down, distribute it to both sides of their mouths, and indicate again whether the pressure goes up or down.

Middle School Grades: American History Linguistic

Students debate the pros and cons of key historical decisions (such as Abraham Lincoln's decision to use military force to prevent the Confederate states from seceding from the Union, the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that allowed separate facilities for Blacks and Whites, or President Harry Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan).

High school grades Boyle's law (Physics) Intrapersonal

Students describe times in their lives when they felt they were either under a lot of psychological pressure or little pressure and whether they felt as if they had either a lot of or a little psychological space.

One way of teaching math to students with these preferences might be to engage them with problems that involve buying, trading, or borrowing.

Students from different ethnic groups often prefer different instructional formats and learning processes.

There is no research support for between-class ability grouping and limited support for regrouping. Moderately positive results have been found for the Joplin Plan and within-class ability grouping.

Students in low-ability groups often receive lower-quality instruction.

Middle school grades America history Musical

Students learn about and sing some of the songs that were popular at a particular point in the country's history.

Technology tools are available to help students construct knowledge, become better problem solvers

Students learn with computers when computers support knowledge construction, exploration, learning by doing, learning by conversing, and learning by reflecting.

Elementary grades Punctuation marks Musical

Students make up different sounds or songs for each punctuation mark.

Describe how beliefs frame students' thinking and how that thinking and personal interests affect motivation.

Students may choose a task mastery goal, a performance-approach goal, a performance-avoidance goal, or a combination of the first two. Students who choose task mastery goals use meaningful learning strategies and treat mistakes as part of learning. Students who choose performance-approach goals are motivated to demonstrate superior ability by outperforming others.

Performance-avoidance goals involve reducing the possibility of failure so as not to appear less capable than other students.

Students most likely to choose performance-avoidance goals are boys and those with low grades and low academic self-efficacy.

High School Grades: Boyle's Law (Physics) Logical-mathematical:

Students solve problems that require the use of Boyle's law: for a fixed mass and temperature of gas, the pressure is inversely proportional to the volume, or

After viewing all the lists and discussing common themes and their importance, the students create a prioritized list of themes to study throughout the year (such as violence in our culture, medical issues affecting our lives, and surviving alien environments).

Students then develop a timeline for studying the selected topics, block out time periods on the calendar, and join a small group that is interested in one of the topics.

Elementary Grades: Punctuation Marks Bodily-kinesthetic

Students use their bodies to mimic the shape of various punctuation marks.

Describe the characteristics of students who are gifted and talented, and explain how their learning can be supported.

Students who are gifted and talented excel in performing tasks that require intellectual, creative, artistic, or leadership ability.

Again because of their short attention span, students with intellectual disability may become distracted or discouraged if they are asked to concentrate on demanding tasks that lead to a delayed payoff. Therefore, it is better to give a series of short activities that produce immediate feedback than to use any sort of contract approach or the equivalent, in which the student is expected to engage in self-directed effort leading to a remote goal.

Students who lack confidence, tend to think of one thing at a time, are unable to generalize, and have a short memory and attention span usually respond quite positively to programmed instruction and certain forms of computer-assisted instruction.

Some students are less motivated than others because they subscribe to what Dweck calls an entity theory of cognitive ability. Because they believe that intelligence is a fixed capacity, they are primarily interested in getting high grades and appearing smart to others and tend to avoid challenging tasks if uncertain of success.

Students who subscribe to an incremental theory tend to pursue more meaningful learning opportunities because they think of intelligence as something that can be improved through experience and corrective feedback.

Recognize that differences are not necessarily deficits.

Students who subscribe to different value systems and exhibit different communication patterns, time orientations, learning modes, motives, and aspirations should not be viewed as incapable (García, 2002). Looking on ethnic and social class differences as deficits usually stems from an attitude called ethnocentrism. This is the tendency of people to think of their own culture as superior to the culture of other groups. You may be able to moderate your ethnocentric tendencies and motivate your students to learn by consciously using instructional tactics that are congruent with the different cultural backgrounds of your students.

Don't ridicule or make fun of students' limited English proficiency. The best way to acquire proficiency in a second language is to use it frequently.

Students will be less inclined to do so if they think teachers and other students will laugh at their mistakes.

Level of interest in a subject is related to intrinsic motivation for that subject. In some instances, students have a preexisting interest in a subject (personal interest), but in other instances, interest grows out of involvement with the subject (situational interest).

Students with a personal interest in a topic or subject are more likely to be intrinsically motivated to learn about that topic or subject.

When faced with a question or a problem for which the answer is uncertain, students with an impulsive learning style spend less time than classmates with a reflective style collecting and analyzing information before making a response.

Students with a strong field-dependent learning style prefer to work in situations in which the procedures are clear and well defined because they take their cues for acceptable behavior from the context in which they work. Students with a strong field-independent style prefer to work in situations in which they can impose their own structure and procedures on a task. Most students exhibit both field-dependent and field-independent behaviors to some degree, depending on the nature of the task.

Cooperative learning:

Students work together in small groups

The evidence for generational changes comes from analyses of IQ scores over several decades in 20 countries.

Studies show that scores on self-control measures predict changes in report card grades better than IQ scores do, but IQ scores are better at predicting changes in standardized test scores (Duckworth, Quinn, & Tsukayama, 2012; Duckworth & Allred, 2012).

If, for example, some of your students still have difficulty comprehending what they read despite the comprehension-enhancing techniques that you embedded into your lessons, you might reread Chapter 8 on information-processing theory, as well as other articles and books on information processing, and decide that your students really need systematic instruction in how to use various comprehension-directed learning tactics.

Study phase Consider curriculum standards learning goals select topic for the research lesson.

Devise improvements.

Suggestions for Teaching Teaching Problem-Solving Techniques

When testing is done for the purpose of assigning a letter or numerical grade, it is often called summative assessment because its primary purpose is to provide an assessment of learning, to sum up how well a student has performed over time and at a variety of tasks.

Summative judgments are assessments of learning

Vygotsky cognitive development scaffolding techniques

Support student learning

Technology tools can help primary to elementary grade children cope with the barriers to logical thinking created by egocentrism and can

Support the development of such higher-level cognitive skills as inquiry, critical thinking, and problem solving among older children.

The intelligences that Gardner describes are logical-mathematical, linguistic, musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal (understanding of others), intrapersonal (understanding of self), and naturalist (the ability to notice the characteristics that distinguish one plant, mineral, or animal from another and to create useful classification schemes called taxonomies) (Gardner, 1999).

Table 4-1 describes each of these intelligences and provides examples of the kind of person who best represents each one.

Self image

Taken together, self-descriptions, self-esteem, and self-concept constitute a person's self-portrait.

Analyses of learning goals suggest that a student may choose a task mastery goal, a performance-approach goal, a performance-avoidance goal, or a combination of task mastery and performance-approach goals.

Task mastery goals involve doing what is necessary to learn meaningfully the information and skills that have been assigned.

Using these taxonomies will help you avoid two common instructional failings: ignoring entire classes of outcomes (usually affective and psychomotor) and overemphasizing the lowest level of the cognitive domain.

Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Cognitive Domain

Obviously, in addition to or in lieu of personal interviews, students can find substantial information in a good library. For example, you can steer them toward books by recognized authorities, research findings, court cases, and interviews with prominent individuals in periodicals. Although the Internet potentially contains a vast amount of information on any topic, warn students about using material gathered there indiscriminately. As with any other medium, there are more and less reliable sources, and only material from reputable sources should be gathered. One additional benefit is that an extra layer of problem-solving activity is introduced when students must decide how to gather and evaluate online information.

Teach several methods for formulating problem solutions.

Once students understand how the mnemonic is supposed to work, have them construct mnemonics to learn various facts and concepts. You might offer a prize for the most ingenious mnemonic.

Teach students how to formulate comprehension questions.

You might, for example, comment on how closely a student followed your directions, constructed a concept map that identified the interrelationships among a set of concepts from a reading assignment, or reviewed her work in an effort to identify mistakes. Evidence suggests that this type of feedback leads to a deeper understanding of the task and more transfer to other learning tasks. The increased use of self-regulatory skills on other tasks is likely due to a strengthening of students' self-efficacy and their attributing successful performances to effort and ability.

Teach students how to use various forms of rehearsal and mnemonic devices.

We encourage you to check out one or more of those references and other sources as demonstrations of worked problems and as opportunities for you to practice your own problem-solving skills so that you will be well prepared to teach each of these seven methods.

Teach students the skills of evaluation.

Social

Teacher assigns students to small, heterogeneous groups and teaches them how to accomplish goals by working together. Each student is accountable for making a significant contribution to the achievement of the group goal. Because of its emphasis on peer collaboration, this approach is consistent with a social constructivist view of learning.

Humanistic

Teacher creates a classroom environment that addresses students' needs, helps students understand their attitudes toward learning, promotes a positive self-concept in students, and communicates the belief that all students have value and can learn. Goal is to activate the students' inherent desire to learn and grow.

Cognitive (constructivist)

Teacher helps students to construct meaningful and adaptive knowledge structures by requiring them to engage in higher levels of thinking such as classification, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation; providing scaffolded instruction within the zone of proximal development; embedding tasks in realistic contexts; posing problems and tasks that cause uncertainty, doubt, and curiosity; exposing students to multiple points of view; and allowing students the time to formulate a consensus solution to a task or problem.

Cognitive (information processing)

Teacher presents and helps students to process information meaningfully. Student accepts all information transmitted by teacher and textbook as accurate and potentially useful. Emphasis is on understanding relationships among ideas, understanding relationships between ideas and prior knowledge, and learning how to control one's cognitive processes effectively.

Behavioral (direct instruction)

Teacher presents information efficiently. Student accepts all information transmitted by teacher and textbook as accurate and potentially useful. Emphasis is on acquiring information in small units through clear presentations, practice, and corrective feedback and gradually synthesizing the pieces into larger bodies of knowledge.

Organization of material into chunks makes it much easier to remember.

Teachers can aid students by presenting material in logical chunks and by showing students how to organize information on their own.

Summarize research findings on various aspects of social cognitive theory.

Teachers can support students' strategy use by using the three-phase self-regulation model as a guide for teaching self-regulation skills, by reminding students that strategies have to be constructed to fit a particular learning task, and by making sure they clearly tell students what it is they want students to learn.

Describe how web-based resources and web-based interaction (e.g., chat sessions and discussion boards) help ELL students to improve listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills.

Teachers can use such technology tools as Internet discussion boards, e-mail exchanges, computer programs, and websites to help ELL students refine their English skills.

Explain how you can improve your inquiry skills by using specific tools to collect information from students, peers, and yourself about how effectively you teach.

Teachers have an enormous influence on student success in school. Those teachers who bring a scholarly mindset to their work learn from the effects of their teaching and, as a consequence, foster greater student success.

Teachers and students use evidence to make adjustments

Teachers join with students as "intentional learners"

Attention is influenced by previous experience stored in long-term memory—we notice what we expect to be important.

Teachers should develop techniques for capturing students' attention and convincing them that the information being presented will be important to them.

Visual imagery is easier to recall than abstractions.

Teachers should help students develop learning skills that incorporate visual imagery and other memory-aiding techniques.

Meaningful learning occurs when the learner relates new information to prior ideas and experiences.

Teachers should mediate learning by relating new information to students' cultural knowledge and by helping students to learn techniques of self-mediation.

Teachers use evidence to make a summary decision about success or failure (e.g., grades)

Teachers take on the role of auditor; students are the audited

Middle-SES students are expected to receive higher grades than low-SES students, even when their IQ scores and achievement test scores are similar.

Teachers tend to perceive children from low-SES homes as less mature, less capable of following directions, less capable of working independently, and less likely to profit from a curriculum that emphasizes higher-order thinking skills than children from more advantaged homes.

Along the way to those summative assessments of learning, you will be engaged in helping students meet the learning goals and objectives that define successful learning in your classroom.

Teachers who are National Board candidates go through an extensive assessment procedure and, at the end of the process, a summative judgment about whether they have or have not met the standards of the National Board.

If you would like to see a more consistent pattern of behavior, you might consider using a variable interval schedule.

Teachers who give surprise quizzes or call on students to answer oral questions on the average of once every third day are invoking a variable interval schedule.

A constructivist approach to teaching is based on the view that meaningful learning occurs when students are encouraged and helped to create the knowledge schemes that produce a broad understanding of ideas and that lead to self-directed learning. Key elements of the constructivist approach include scaffolded instruction within a student's zone of proximal development, learning by discovery, exposure to multiple points of view, use of relevant and realistic problems and tasks, and encouraging students to become more autonomous learners.

Teachers who opt to use a constructivist approach will likely face conceptual, pedagogical, cultural, and political challenges.

You can do this by awarding points for degree of improvement over previous test scores, by having students compete against comparable members of other teams in a game- or tournament-like atmosphere, or by giving students learning assignments (such as math problems) that are geared to their current level of skill.

Team Competition

Teach. The teaching phase begins with the presentation of material, usually in a lecture-discussion format. Students should be told what it is they are going to learn and why it is important.

Team study. During team study, group members work cooperatively with teacher-provided worksheets and answer sheets.

The key to using oneself as an information source is the ability to accurately retrieve from long-term memory information that will aid in the solution of the problem. We need to think back over what we have learned in other somewhat similar situations, make a list of some other form of representation of those ideas, and make a judgment as to how helpful that knowledge might be.

Techniques for ensuring accurate and reliable recall were discussed in Chapter 8 on information-processing theory.

A third technique teachers use to strengthen behavior is contingency contracting.

Techniques that aim to weaken behaviors include extinction and punishment.

Note how technology can be used to promote self-regulated learning.

Technology is a useful tool for helping students acquire SRL skills. It can provide them with models they would not otherwise get to see, with metacognitive feedback, and with scaffolded instruction. Students who already possessed some self-regulation skills and exhibited self-efficacy for SRL reaped the greatest advantages from technologies.

-Require students to state their learning goals, the decisions they make, the strategies they use, and the answers they formulate -Require students to work in cooperative groups in which there is a considerable amount of social interaction.

Technology is also being used to support project-based learning. Project-based learning provides structure by giving students a project or a problem, along with project goals and deadlines. A study conducted in Holland with 16- and 17-year-old high school students illustrates this approach.

Describe how the personalization of Web 3.0 tools can help teachers diversify instruction to meet individual students' needs.

Technology tools can be used across behavioral, information-processing, learner-centered, and social approaches to instruction to support the thinking and sharing that every student must do to learn successfully.

So far we have described how students' ethnic and social class backgrounds influence their approach to and success with various learning tasks.

Telling students that failure was inevitable yet acceptable because that's how we learn.

Psychologists who have studied measurement and evaluation often recommend that, as teachers prepare exams, they use a table of specifications to note the types and numbers of test items to be included so as to ensure thorough and systematic coverage. You can draw up a table of specifications by first listing along the left-hand margin of a piece of lined paper the important topics that have been covered. Then insert appropriate headings from the taxonomy of objectives for the cognitive domain (or for the affective or psychomotor domain, if appropriate) across the top of the page. An example of such a table of specifications for some of the information discussed in this chapter is provided in Figure 14-3. A computer spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel is an ideal tool for creating a table of specifications.

Test specialists often recommend that you insert in the boxes of a table of specifications the percentage of test items that you intend to write for each topic and each type of objective. This practice forces you to think about both the number and the relative importance of your objectives before you start teaching or writing test items. Thus, if some objectives are more important to you than others, you will have a way of ensuring that these are tested more thoroughly. If, however, a test is going to be brief and emphasize all objectives more or less equally, you may wish to put a check mark in each box as you write questions. If you discover that you are overloading some boxes and that others are empty, you can take steps to remedy the situation. The important point is that, by taking steps to ensure that your tests cover what you want your students to know, you will be increasing the tests' validity.

Tests that use a norm-referenced scoring system compare an individual's score with the performance of a norm group.

Tests that use a criterion-referenced scoring system judge scores in terms of mastery of a set of objectives.

Because the IEP is planned by a multidisciplinary team, you will be given direction and support in providing regular class instruction for students who have a disabling condition as defined under IDEA.

The ADAAA addresses the possibility that some students in your class who are not covered by IDEA may have a condition that, if not addressed, could limit their access to and participation in learning opportunities.

Describe the key features of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and how those features influence teaching practice.

The Education for All Handicapped Children Act (Public Law 94-142) was enacted in 1975 to ensure that students with disabling conditions receive the same free and appropriate education as nondisabled students. Since then, the law has been revised and expanded, and it is now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

Every child who is identified as having a disability and who receives special education services must have an individualized education program (IEP) prepared.

The IEP is a written statement that describes the educational program that has been designed to meet the child's unique needs.

The Joplin Plan has the same advantages and disadvantages as simple regrouping, and it is the basis for a successful reading program called Success for All.

The Joplin Plan , in contrast, combines students across grade levels.

Disproportionate numbers of minority students are placed in special education. As one example, according to the National Research Council, Black students are disproportionately placed in special education categories, such as "intellectual disabilities" and "learning disabilities" (these and other types of special needs are described later in this chapter). Black students who are placed in special education achieve at lower levels and are less likely to leave special education placements than their White counterparts. The gap in special education not only mirrors the "achievement gap" discussed in Chapter 5 but also results in Black students with special needs being separated from the curriculum that nondisabled peers experience. This harkens back to the violations of segregation addressed in Brown v. Board of Education and can also contribute to a lack of tolerance among groups.

The Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education declared the doctrine of separate but equal to be unconstitutional. Therefore, pullout programs are a violation of the civil rights of children with special needs because these programs segregate them from their nondisabled peers in programs that are assumed to be separate but equal.

Describe the characteristics of students with emotional disturbance, and explain how their learning can be supported.

The actual number of schoolchildren with serious emotional disturbance is unknown because of vague definitions of emotional disturbance and differences in interpretation of definitions, but it is estimated to be 3 to 5 percent of all school-age children.

In addition to documenting the existence of teacher expectancy effects and the conditions under which they occur, researchers have sought to identify the factors that might create high or low teacher expectations.

The anecdotal experiences of David Gardner and the survey responses of these high school students are supported by a study of 31 highly effective teachers in urban, low-income schools who did many of the same things.

The basic mastery-learning approach is to specify clearly what is to be learned, organize the content into a sequence of relatively short units, use a variety of instructional methods and materials, allow students to progress through the material at their own rate, monitor student progress to identify budding problems and provide corrective feedback, and allow students to relearn and retest on each unit until mastery is attained.

The average student in a mastery-learning class scored at the 70th percentile on a classroom examination, whereas the average student in a conventional class scored at the 50th percentile.

Students with high self-efficacy generally expect a positive outcome for tasks they take on. Students with low self-efficacy are more likely than students with high self-efficacy to expect negative academic outcomes.

The cognitive development view holds that people are inherently motivated by a need to achieve equilibration by overcoming inconsistencies or contradictions between what they know and what they experience.

Explain the basic claims underlying constructivist learning theory, and give examples of constructivist practices.

The constructivist view of learning holds that meaningful learning occurs when people use existing knowledge schemes and the viewpoints of others to interpret the world around them.

Civic character

The desire and willingness to use one's knowledge and skills to become an engaged and responsible citizen.

A useful distinction was made among positive transfer, negative transfer, and zero transfer.

The discussion up to this point has been alluding to positive transfer, defined as a situation in which prior learning aids subsequent learning.

Formative judgments are assessments for learning.

The distinctions between summative assessment and formative assessment outlined in Table 14-1 help us see that the process of assessment—first measuring and then evaluating—is tied closely to the underlying reason or purpose for assessing.

Finally, ethnic groups may differ in terms of the instructional formats and learning processes they prefer (Photo 5-1).

The dominant instructional format, especially at the middle school and high school levels, is one in which all students work from the same text, workbook, and worksheets.

Intelligence can be thought of as the ability to learn, reason, solve novel problems, and deal effectively with the challenges of everyday life.

The first practical test of intelligence was devised by Alfred Binet to identify students who would be best served in a special education program.

To satisfy state learning standards, students needed to learn such things as the nature of slavery, the causes of the war, important dates and the sequence of events, major battles, and significant individuals who affected the course of the war.

The first step was to teach students how to listen to one another and express disagreements in a nonjudgmental way.

The two studies that are summarized below illustrate both the nature of scaffolding and its effects on students.

The first study looked at the effect of providing third graders with either high or low levels of instructional support on a lesson about density and buoyancy (e.g., Why does a large iron ship float?). In the high-instructional-support condition, the teacher sequenced the material into consecutive units, decided when certain instructional materials and objects would be available, pointed out contradictory statements made by the students, and summarized their conclusions.

For example, a common error in multiple-column subtraction problems is to subtract a smaller digit from a larger one regardless of whether the small number is in the minuend (top row) or the subtrahend (bottom row) (Mayer, 1987), as in 522-418=116. Because this answer is off by only 12 units, it "looks right."

The flaw can be discovered, however, by adding the answer to the subtrahend to produce the minuend.

When parents and students think of assessment, they usually think only of such summative assessments as tests, quizzes, and projects that are used to determine a grade. You, on the other hand, should think also of formative assessments. The reason is simple. Research clearly demonstrates that the consistent use of various formative assessments improves the quality of your instruction and how much students learn.

The following list includes examples of formative assessments mentioned earlier in the chapter as well as three new ones suggested by Debra Dirksen. These assessments should be brief, taking no more than about 15 minutes, because they will be used several times a day.

Help students develop mastery learning goals.

The following suggestions were designed with middle school students in mind but are just as applicable to both lower and higher grades:

Help students become aware of the existence of gender bias.

The following techniques have all been used by teachers to demonstrate that males often receive preferential treatment in our society in somewhat subtle ways (Bailey, 1996; Rop, 1998; Rutledge, 1997): -Have students count how often in the space of a month male and female athletes are mentioned in the sports section of the local paper, and have the students create a graph depicting the difference. -Have students survey similar-aged friends and classmates about the size of their allowance and report the results by gender. -Have students review several textbooks and record how often men and women are mentioned. -Have students keep a record of who participates in class discussions, how often they speak, for how long, and how they respond to comments made by male versus female classmates.

Keep in mind that learners can, for example, cycle back to the forethought phase from the performance phase before going on to the self-reflection phase, begin a task without doing a task analysis, or make self-judgments and self-reactions at any point in the process.

The forethought phase is subdivided into the categories of task analysis and self-motivational beliefs.

They also preferred teachers whose styles matched their own (Saracho, 2001).

The former are labeled field dependent because their perception is strongly influenced by the prevailing field.

This lack of metacognitive knowledge makes true strategic learning impossible for young children.

The former is referred to as metacognitive knowledge and the latter as metacognitive skills.

The strongest effects were obtained for younger students (grades 1-3), urban students, ethnic minority students, and low-SES students.

The general idea behind cooperative learning is that, by working in small, heterogeneous groups (of four or five students total) and by helping one another master the various aspects of a particular task, students will be more motivated to learn, will learn more than if they had to work independently, and will forge stronger interpersonal relationships than they would by working alone.

Four approaches to ability grouping are popular among educators today: between-class ability grouping, regrouping, the Joplin Plan, and within-class grouping.

The goal of between-class ability grouping is for each class to be made up of students who are homogeneous in standardized intelligence or achievement test scores.

Specifically, positive reinforcement involves strengthening a target behavior—that is, increasing and maintaining the probability that a particular behavior will be repeated—by presenting a stimulus (called a positive reinforcer) immediately after the behavior has occurred.

The goal of negative reinforcement is the same as that of positive reinforcement: to increase the strength of a particular behavior.

All members understand and agree that the group will strive to reach a consensus on an issue by each member actively contributing to arguments that lead to a solution.

The group will present its arguments to the other members of the class.

Recognition of words and sentences during reading, for example, can be aided by such factors as clear printing, knowledge of spelling patterns, knowledge of letter sounds, and the frequency with which words appear in natural language.

The important point to remember is that recognition and meaningful processing of information are most effective when we make use of all available sources of information.

Break the problem into parts

The key to this approach is to make sure you break the problem into manageable parts. Whether you can do this will depend largely on how much subject-matter knowledge you have. The more you know about the domain from which the problem comes, the easier it is to know how to break a problem into logical, easy-to-handle parts.

Most people assume that if a problem is worth solving, they won't have to seek it out; it will make itself known. Like most other assumptions, this one is only partly true. Well-structured problems are often thrust on us by teachers, in the form of in-class exercises or homework, or by supervisors at work. Ill-structured problems and issues, however, often remain hidden from most people. It is a characteristic of good problem solvers that they are more sensitive to the existence of problems than most of their peers.

The keys to problem recognition, or problem finding as it is sometimes called, are curiosity and dissatisfaction. You need to question why a rule, procedure, or product is the way it is or to feel frustrated or irritated because something does not work as well as it might. The organization known as Mothers Against Drunk Driving, for example, was begun by a woman who, because her daughter had been killed in a traffic accident by a drunk driver, was dissatisfied with current, ineffective laws. This organization has been instrumental in getting state legislatures to pass laws against drunk driving that mandate more severe penalties.

Social cognitive theorists identify four types of emulation effects that result from observing models: inhibition, disinhibition, facilitation, and true observational learning.

The last of the four types of emulation effects, true observational learning, occurs when we learn a new behavioral pattern by watching and imitating the performance of someone else.

Create an external representation of the problem. This heuristic is doubly useful because it also aids in problem framing. Many problems can be represented as pictures, equations, graphs, flowcharts, and the like (Mueller, 2009) (Photo 10-3). The figures in the next Suggestions for Teaching section illustrate how a pictorial or symbolic form of representation can help one both understand and solve the problem (Martinez, 1998).

The last step in the problem-solving process is to evaluate the adequacy of the solution. For relatively simple, well-structured problems in which the emphasis is on producing a correct response, two levels of evaluation are available.

Comprehension-directed tactics, which contain techniques that aid in understanding the meaning of ideas and their interrelationships.

The last three, self-questioning, note taking, and concept mapping , are comprehension-directed tactics and are used frequently by students from the upper elementary grades through college.

That is like saying that people are either tall or short. Just as people's heights range over a measured span, students can vary in the extent to which they are field dependent or field independent.

The latter are called field independent because they are more successful in isolating target information despite the fact that it is embedded within a larger and more complex context.

Like the research on peer tutoring and cooperative learning, the research on mastery learning has generally been positive.

The latter arrangement is usually referred to as cross-age tutoring.

This study points to an interesting conclusion and lesson. The conclusion is that RT may well require more training, practice, and time than the literature suggests.

The lesson, which echoes a basic theme of the first chapter of this book, is that even when a solid scientific basis exists for a particular technique, an effective implementation often requires those improvisational skills referred to as the art of teaching.

Physical development during the high school years is marked by physical maturity for most students and by puberty for virtually all. Sexual activity increases.

The long-range goals, beliefs, and values of adolescents are likely to be influenced by parents, whereas immediate status is likely to be influenced by peers. Many teens have part-time, after-school employment.

This achievement gap has been found even among Black students who are members of relatively affluent middle-SES families (Ogbu, 2003; Rothstein, 2004).

The long-standing achievement gap between low-SES (and some middle-SES) students of color and their White classmates is perhaps the most researched and discussed effect of social class on learning (e.g., Barton & Coley, 2010; Entwisle, Alexander, & Olson, 2010; Gardner, 2007; Ladson-Billings, 2002; Lee & Bowen, 2006; Nieto, 2002/2003; Ogbu, 2003; Rothstein, 2004; Singham, 2003; Sirin, 2005; Wiggan, 2007).

During the 1960s, Jerome Bruner proposed a constructivist view of learning that relied on giving students realistic problems for which they had to discover appropriate solutions. When discovery learning is combined with various types of instructional support, an approach known as guided discovery, students learn more than those who receive direct, explicit instruction from the teacher.

The major aspects of constructivism are that meaningful learning occurs when people actively construct personal knowledge structures, that only part of a teacher's understanding of some concept or issue can be transferred to students through direct instruction, that students who can regulate their own learning are better prepared to construct meaningful knowledge structures, and that meaningful learning and transfer are most likely to occur when lessons are grounded in realistic contexts.

But to be more precise, we need to point out that elaborative rehearsal is based on organization (as in the preceding example, in which several items were grouped together on some basis and rehearsed as a set) and meaningfulness (as in the earlier example, in which lines in a play were related to similar personal experiences).

The meaningfulness of new information that one is about to learn has been characterized as "potentially the most powerful variable for explaining the learning of complex verbal discourse".

A more recent study by Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman (2006) offers an alternative, but related, explanation for the existence of gender differences in cognition and achievement.

The more researchers learn about gender differences, the more a number of factors beyond cognitive and perceptual abilities seem either to account for those differences or to suggest that such differences are less significant than once thought.

Several factors are thought to influence the choice male and female students make to pursue a career in science or engineering.

The opportunities that teachers provide for students to capitalize on out-of-school scientific interests and activities can also nurture thoughts of a science career, particularly in minority females

Elementary grade boys and girls become leaner and stronger and tend to have a gangly look. But some run the risk of becoming overweight because of poor eating habits and lack of exercise. Boys usually outperform girls on such sports-related motor skills as kicking, throwing, catching, running, and jumping, whereas girls often surpass boys on such play-related motor skills as flexibility, balance, and rhythm.

The peer group becomes a strong influence on the norms that govern the behavior of elementary grade children. Friendships in the elementary grades become even more selective and gender based than they were in the primary grades.

The likely source of gender bias, which is communicated by both teachers and students, is a belief in traditional gender-role stereotypes.

The persistent exposure of students to gender bias is thought to play a role, particularly for females, in the courses that students select in high school, the career choices they make, and the extent to which they participate in class discussions.

Most multicultural programs, particularly those in the primary grades, adopt what he calls the contributions approach.

The perspective from which an ethnic group's contributions are viewed, however, tends to be that of the mainstream.

Field-independent students usually perform better in these situations because of their willingness to create a more meaningful structure.

The positive effect of field independence on achievement is particularly noticeable in the sciences because of their emphasis on analyzing objects and ideas into their component parts, reorganizing ideas into new configurations, and identifying potential new uses of that information.

According to Thorndike's analysis, positive transfer occurs when a new learning task calls for essentially the same response that was made to a similar, earlier-learned task.

The preceding description of positive transfer, although useful, is somewhat limiting because it is unclear whether transfer from one task to another is due to specific similarities or to more general similarities.

During the orientation phase, the teacher provides an overview of the lesson, explains why students need to learn the upcoming material, relates the new subject either to material learned during earlier lessons or to their life experience, and tells students what they will need to do to learn the material and what level of performance they will be expected to exhibit.

The presentation phase initially involves explaining, illustrating, and demonstrating the new material.

In discrimination, individuals learn to notice the unique aspects of seemingly similar situations (for example, that teachers are not parents, although both are adults) and to respond differently to each situation.

The principle of shaping best explains how complex responses are learned.

The problem solver can ask whether, given the problem statement, the answer makes sense. For example, if the problem reads 75*5=?and the response is 80, a little voice inside the problem solver's head should say that the answer cannot possibly be right. This signal should prompt a reevaluation of the way the problem was represented and the solution procedure that was used (for example, "I misread the times sign as a plus sign and added when I should have multiplied").

The problem solver can use an alternative algorithm to check the accuracy of the solution. This is necessary because an error in carrying out an algorithm can produce an incorrect response that is still in the ballpark.

Standardized tests are designed by people with specialized training in test construction, are given to everyone under the same conditions, are scored the same for everyone, and are interpreted with reference to either a norm group or a set of predetermined standards.

The purpose of giving a standardized test is to obtain an accurate and representative sample of some characteristic of a person, as it is impractical to measure that characteristic comprehensively.

As the work of Jerome Bruner and David Ausubel indicates, students need to acquire a genuine understanding of many of the associations, discriminations, concepts, and rules of a discipline before they can effectively solve problems in that subject-matter area. Too often, students are taught to state principles on cue, but they reveal by further responses that they do not understand what they are saying.

The recommendations we make in this book about presenting information in an organized fashion and in meaningful contexts will go a long way toward helping students understand the subject matter on which problems are based; see the specific suggestions in Chapters 8 and 13.

Include the development of self-regulated learning skills in your objectives and lesson plans.

The research that we summarized clearly shows that SRL skills make a significant contribution to students' achievement. But this same research also suggests that students should not be given responsibility for their own learning without adequate preparation. Consequently, the development of students' SRL skills should be included in your instructional objectives and lesson plans. You can help students become more effective self-regulated learners by incorporating the following elements into your classroom instruction.

In the first study, first-grade teachers who exhibited what was called a "high mnemonic" style were more likely than other teachers to do such things as ask students to predict what might happen next in a story, prompt recall of previously learned material, remind students to perform a certain task or operation, suggest the use of certain memory techniques, and explain why a particular learning tactic did or did not work.

The result is that the students of these teachers performed better on memory tasks at the end of the year than did the students of so-called "low mnemonic" teachers.

David Johnson and Roger Johnson (1998, 2009a), who have been researching the effects of cooperative learning for more than 25 years, make a basic observation about the relevance of cooperative learning to the goals of multicultural education programs: students cannot learn everything they need to know about cultural diversity from reading books and articles.

The results for the student team learning programs have been the most consistently positive.

Unlike summative assessment, which is a one-time event conducted only after instruction is finished, formative evaluation has a more dynamic, ongoing, interactive relationship with teaching.

The results of formative assessments affect instruction, which affects subsequent performance, and so on.

Good boy nice girl orientation

The right action is one that would be carried out by someone whose behavior is likely to please or impress others.

Time-out is an effective means of reducing or eliminating undesired behaviors, particularly those that are aggressive or disruptive, for both students who do and who do not have a disability.

The rules for the procedure should be clearly explained, and after being sentenced to time-out (which should last no more than five minutes), a child should be given reinforcement for agreeable, helpful behavior—for example, "Thank you for collecting all the playground balls so nicely, Tommy."

I am engaging in metacognition . . . if I notice that I am having more trouble learning A than B; if it strikes me that I should double-check C before accepting it as a fact; if it occurs to me that I had better scrutinize each and every alternative in any multiple-choice type task situation before deciding which is the best one; if I become aware that I am not sure what the experimenter really wants me to do; if I sense that I had better make a note of D because I may forget it; if I think to ask someone about E to see if I have it right. Such examples could be multiplied endlessly.

The second part of metacognition, metacognitive skills, refers to such activities as analyzing an assignment, setting a goal, drawing up plans for achieving one or more goals, keeping track of progress, and evaluating how well the goal has been achieved.

Problem finding does not come readily to most people, possibly because schools emphasize solving well-structured problems and possibly because most people have a natural tendency to assume that things work as well as they can. Like any other cognitive process, however, problem recognition can improve with instruction and practice. Students can be sensitized in a number of ways to the absence or flaws and shortcomings of products, procedures, rules, or whatever else. We will make some specific suggestions about improving problem recognition and the other problem-solving processes a bit later in Suggestions for Teaching: Teaching Problem-Solving Techniques.

The second step in the problem-solving process is perhaps the most critical.

Describe the various components and processes that make up the multi-store model of information processing.

The sensory register holds information in its original form for one to three seconds, during which time we may recognize and attend to it further.

It is called the sensory register because the information it stores is thought to be encoded in the same form in which it is originally perceived—that is, as raw sensory data.

The sensory register might be compared to an unending series of instant-camera snapshots or videotape segments, each lasting from one to three seconds before fading away.

Although most children grow rapidly during the middle school years, girls grow more quickly and begin puberty earlier than boys. Early versus late maturation in boys and girls may affect subsequent personality development.

The social behavior of middle school children is increasingly influenced by peer group norms and the development of interpersonal reasoning. Children are now capable of understanding why they behave as they do toward others and vice versa. Because the peer group is the primary source for rules of acceptable behavior, conformity and concern about what peers think reach a peak during the middle school years.

Centration

The strong tendency to focus attention on only one characteristic of an object or aspect of a problem or event at a time.

Like Sternberg's work, Gardner's theory cautions us against focusing on the results of IQ tests to the exclusion of other worthwhile behaviors.

The student who wrote such interesting stories as a child may grow up to be a college professor who excels at writing journal articles and textbooks or a noted politician or a successful business leader (Hatch, 1997).

Although each of these techniques can be used with any group of students and for almost any purpose, they are so well suited to the goals of multicultural education that the phrase "culturally responsive teaching" has been used to describe them.

The students may be similar in age or separated by one or more years.

When invited to raise questions, the students wanted to know such things as why women fought in the war, how it was that nobody knew they were women, why the North and South went to war, and why soldiers would walk into enemy gunfire.

The students were assigned to groups based on the similarity of the questions they raised and were told to seek answers from library resources, the Internet, and interviews with war veterans. The teachers used the subsequent reports each group made to the class and the discussions that followed to ensure that such standards-related issues as the different groups involved in the war and the nature of slavery were introduced and discussed.

The vagueness of educational goals stimulated psychologists to specify educational outcomes as specific, clearly stated objectives and to organize objectives as taxonomies in each of three domains: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor.

The taxonomy for the cognitive domain that Bloom and several associates prepared is composed of six levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

The taxonomy for the affective domain that Krathwohl and several associates prepared is composed of five levels: receiving, responding, valuing, organization, and characterization by a value or value complex.

The taxonomy for the psychomotor domain that Simpson prepared is composed of seven levels: perception, set, guided response, mechanism, complex or overt response, adaptation, and origination.

Given the basic constructivist premise that all meaningful learning is constructed and that everyone uses a slightly different set of filters with which to build his or her view of reality, what we refer to as knowledge is actually a consensus of slightly different points of view. Thus, another element of a constructivist approach to teaching is to help students understand that different views of the same phenomena exist and that they can often be reconciled to produce a broader understanding.

The technique of cooperative learning is an effective way to expose students to peers who may have different views about the "right" way to do something or the "truth" of some matter and help them forge a broader understanding that is acceptable to all members of the group. In the last major section of this chapter, we describe cooperative learning in considerable detail.

Cognitive organization

The tendency to systematize and combine processes into coherent general systems.

The fostering conditions that constructivists typically mention include a cognitive apprenticeship between student and teacher, a use of realistic problems and conditions, and an emphasis on multiple perspectives.

The third condition that fosters constructivism is students' viewing ideas and problems from multiple perspectives.

Instead of presenting an aversive stimulus, time-out temporarily removes the opportunity to receive positive reinforcement (Photo 7-2).

The time-out procedure recommended by behavior modification enthusiasts involves weakening an undesirable form of behavior (such as shoving on the playground) by temporarily removing positive reinforcement (by having the misbehaving student remain in a corner of the classroom for five minutes while the rest of the class continues to enjoy another activity).

Because constructivism is strongly student-centered and emphasizes high-level outcomes, it is sometimes perceived as being incompatible with the need for teachers to prepare students for high-stakes tests that are based on state learning standards. But through the use of guided experiences, teachers can do both.

The trick is to embed standards in learning experiences that students care about. Geoffrey Caine, Renate Nummela Caine, and Carol McClintic (2002) describe how this was done for eighth-grade classes studying the U.S. Civil War.

Empirical learning

The way in which young children acquire spontaneous concepts.

In line with humanistic theory, the first goal of every school year is the development of safe and trusting relationships among students and between the students and the teacher. This goal is accomplished by having pairs of students interview each other and then introduce the other student to the class; by having students interview the teacher; and by using cooperative games.

Then the teachers, who act as coordinators of the students' efforts, train students to ask meaningful and insightful questions.

The use of multimedia tools is related to such information-processing concepts as meaningful learning, the dual coding of information, the use of visual imagery, and elaborative rehearsal.

There are clear advantages to hypermedia, such as the richness of the network of ideas, the compact storage of information, the rapid nonlinear access to information, the flexible use of information, and learner control over the system.

When consequences weaken a preceding behavior, punishment and extinction have occurred.

There are two forms of reinforcement and two forms of punishment that we describe next along with several related principles.

Women who choose a career in math or science are likely to be those who do well in science classes, are encouraged to pursue math or science careers by parents or teachers, and have respected models available to emulate.

These consistent differences in responses to male and female students when there is no sound educational reason for them are the essence of gender bias.

Even so, adolescents who have people in their families and neighborhoods who support them and who have opportunities for meaningful and productive participation in school and community activities are better able to overcome the effects of exposure to violence (Jain & Cohen, 2013).

These experiences accumulate and make school learning more familiar and easy than it would otherwise be.

Researchers disagree about the strength of the negative effects of corporal punishment, partly because of differences in how corporal punishment is defined.

These experiences are initially recorded in the sensory register (SR), the first memory store.

Girls who strongly identified with the stereotypical female gender role were more likely than androgynous females (those who exhibit behaviors that are characteristic of both gender roles) to suppress their true thoughts when interacting with their teachers and male classmates.

These findings have major implications for the way in which teachers address female students, particularly those who have adopted a strong feminine gender role, and for the use of constructivist approaches to teaching

Learning

These processes are two sides of the coin for equilibration to occur disequilibrium must already have occured.

However, students from some ethnic groups, such as Mexican Americans, are more likely to have been taught to value cooperative relationships and family loyalty.

These students may thus prefer group projects; they may also respond more positively to praise that emphasizes family pride rather than individual glory (Bennett, 2011).

Recognize that the groups we and others describe with a general label are frequently made up of subgroups with somewhat different characteristics.

These subgroups, in fact, may use different labels to refer to themselves. Among Native Americans, for example, Navajos differ from the Hopi in physical appearance, dress, and hairstyle. Individuals who are called Hispanic may trace their ancestry to one of a dozen or more countries and often refer to themselves as either Chicano, Latino, Mexicano, of Mexican descent, or of Spanish descent (Okagaki, 2006; P. Schmidt, 2003). One teacher, despite 18 years' experience, found herself ill prepared to teach children on a Chippewa-Cree reservation partly because she knew relatively little about the history, culture, and community in which she taught (Starnes, 2006). Learn as much as you can about the subgroups your students come from, and keep these specific qualities in mind as you teach.

Traditional intelligence tests measure a relatively small sample of cognitive skills that can change over time as additional knowledge and skills are acquired.

They do not measure other characteristics that make significant contributions to academic and life success.

Although the students worked in pairs, they did so at their own computers and interacted by means of a chat facility and a shared draft of the essay that each one could edit.

They were supplied with such computer-based resources as excerpts from textbooks, interpretations of historians, photos, tables, and interviews.

An introductory event was then used to spark students' interest in the topic. They were read a story about a woman who disguised herself as a man, enlisted in the Union Army, and worked as a coal handler on a canal boat.

They were then shown a short segment from the motion picture Gettysburg in which Confederate soldiers marched directly into cannon and rifle fire. The last part of the introduction involved telling students that more than 400 women disguised themselves as men and participated in the war and that the 51,000 soldiers who were killed during the three-day battle of Gettysburg exceeded the number of U.S. soldiers who were killed during the entire Vietnam War.

Erikson psychological development individuals in identity diffusion avoid

Thinking about jobs roles values

Formative assessment requires both teacher and student to learn

Thinking back to Moss and Brookhart's view of formative assessment, it is critical that assessment informs learning of both teachers and students.

For preschool and Kindergarten, explain the impact of gender roles and theory of mind.

This accomplishment concerns the ability of children around the age of four to be aware of the difference between thinking about something and experiencing it.

For example, the mock store assessment mentioned earlier could follow an instructional activity in which students practiced making change.

This close relationship between assessment and instruction is not automatic, however; the teacher must deliberately establish it.

Of the 35 countries where boys outscored girls, the United States had the sixth largest difference, which was about 20 points.

This difference appears to persist throughout the life span

As we will see later in this chapter (and in Chapter 15 as well), summative assessment is not only legitimate; it is necessary.

This final grade is your summative assessment of learning.

Because traditional theories of intelligence and their associated IQ tests view intelligence as being composed of a relatively small set of cognitive skills that relate best to academic success (Canivez, 2008), and because the results of such tests are used primarily to place students in special programs, contemporary theorists have proposed broader conceptions of intelligence that have more useful implications for classroom instruction.

This has been attributed to such factors as increased levels of education, improved nutrition, smaller family size, and technological developments (meaning increased television viewing, computer use, and video game use) (Flynn, 1998, 2011; Greenfield, 2009).

The effect of cooperative learning in its various forms (such as STAD, Learning Together, Teams-Games-Tournaments, and Team-Assisted Individualization) on achievement has been extensively studied.

This means that students exposed to cooperative learning scored anywhere from 10 to 25 percentile ranks higher than students taught conventionally.

The following Suggestions for Teaching will give you some ideas for combating the damaging effects of teacher expectancies, as well as other problems often faced by low-SES and minority students.

This phenomenon has been extensively studied since it was first proposed in 1968 and is typically referred to as the teacher expectancy effect.

Not a particularly hard task, but it does require you to focus your attention on the people in the white shirts.

This phenomenon is called inattentional blindness and explains why people who text and drive or talk on a cell phone while driving are more likely to have an accident than people who focus entirely on their driving.

A public performance is given only after an acceptable degree of mastery is attained (Bennett, 2011; Morrison, 2009).

This practice is not as unique to American Indian culture as it might seem at first glance.

One of the first learning style dimensions to be investigated was reflectivity-impulsivity.

This preference for doing things in a particular way is often referred to as a learning (or cognitive) style.

From the multitude of sights, sounds, smells, and other stimuli impinging on us at a given moment, we notice and record in the sensory register only a fraction.

This selective focusing on a portion of the information currently stored in the sensory register is what we call attention.

Four criteria are widely used to evaluate standardized tests: reliability, validity, normed excellence, and examinee appropriateness.

This stability in test performance is known as reliability.

They gathered information from books, the Internet, and architects about the memorials, drew computer models of them, created a timeline of construction, and researched the contributions of Jefferson and others to the writing of the U.S. Constitution.

This was followed by a field trip to Washington, D.C., and a presentation of their work to community members.

The opponents of inclusion often cite cases of special-needs students disrupting the normal flow of instruction or of teachers being inadequately prepared to assist learners with special needs.

Those in favor of inclusion have seen their arguments prevail. For the 2009-2010 school year, about 95 percent of students served by IDEA were enrolled in regular schools, and 59 percent of those spent most of their days in regular classes.

Vygotsky cognitive development strongly influenced by

Those more intellectually advanced

Conservation

Those that test their ability to recognize that certain properties stay the same despite a change in appearance or position.

Motivational processes

Those who rate their capabilities as higher than average can be expected to work harder and longer to achieve a goal than those who feel less capable. This difference should be particularly noticeable when individuals experience frustrations (poor-quality instruction, for example) and setbacks (such as a serious illness).

Those with high levels of self-efficacy more often expect a positive outcome.

Those with lower levels of self-efficacy are more likely to expect a disappointing outcome, tend to use simpler learning skills, and are likely to give up more quickly when tasks demand greater cognitive efforts.

In some cases, encourage students to arrive at conclusions already reached by others.

Thousands of books provide detailed answers to such questions as, "What is human about human beings? How did they get that way? How can they be made more so?" But constructivists believe that answers mean more when they are constructed by the individual, not supplied ready-made by others. As you look over lesson plans, therefore, you might try to put together some questions for students to answer by engaging in discussion rather than by reading or listening to what others have already discovered. In searching for such topics, you might take into account the techniques that Bruner described. Here is a list of those techniques, together with an example of each one. Keep in mind that students often acquire a deeper understanding of ideas and issues when they have had appropriate previous experience.

A critical constructivist view focuses on cultural misconceptions and how they affect interactions in the learning environment.

Three conditions that support constructivism are a cognitive apprenticeship between teacher and student, the use of realistic learning tasks (situated learning), and exposure to multiple perspectives.

Describe the historical antecedents that are based on the assumption that homogeneous classrooms yield better educational outcomes.

Three early attempts at dealing with student variability were age-graded classrooms, ability grouping, and special class placement. Age-graded classrooms grouped students who were roughly the same age. Ability grouping sorted nondisabled students into separate classes according to mental ability test scores. Special class placement was used to separate nondisabled students from those with mental and physical disabilities.

Among certain American Indian, Latino, and Asian cultures, however, averting one's eyes is a sign of deference to and respect for the other person, whereas looking at someone directly while being corrected is a sign of defiance.

Thus an Asian American, Latino, or American Indian student who looks down or away when being questioned or corrected about something is not necessarily trying to hide guilt or ignorance or to communicate lack of interest (Bennett, 2011; Castagno & Brayboy, 2008; Pewewardy, 2002).

One reason for its popularity was that Terman, following the 1912 suggestion of a German psychologist named William Stern, expressed a child's level of performance as a global figure called an intelligence quotient (IQ).

Thus predictions about job success, marital bliss, happiness in life, or anything else made on the basis of an IQ score are attempts to make the test do something for which it was not designed.

Cooperative learning is a generally effective instructional tactic that is likely to be particularly useful with Latino, Black, and American Indian students.

Thus these students may be more prepared than other individuals to work productively as part of a group by carrying out their own responsibilities, as well as helping others do the same.

Near transfer refers to situations in which the knowledge domains are highly similar, the settings in which the original learning and transfer tasks occur are basically the same, and the elapsed time between the two tasks is relatively short.

Thus, using math skills one acquired over the past several weeks to solve the problems at the end of the current chapter in a textbook is an example of near transfer.

Second, because the way we represent the problem determines the amount and type of solution-relevant information we recall from long-term memory, some representations are better than others. For obvious reasons, problem-solving researchers often refer to this process as problem representation or problem framing.

To achieve an optimal understanding of a problem, an individual needs two things: a high degree of knowledge of the subject matter (facts, concepts, and principles) on which the problem is based and familiarity with that particular type of problem.

Interference from other material

To be a student means having to cope with a constant stream of learning material.

Classroom assessment can be made easier through the use of such technological products and formats as electronic gradebooks, simulation programs, and digital portfolios.

To be sure that the number of various types of items on a test is consistent with your instructional objectives, prepare a table of specifications.

To maintain consistency when scoring exams, teachers should use a scoring key for selected-response and short-answer items and a rubric for essay items.

To develop skill in writing essay questions, make up a few formative quizzes that will not count toward a grade. Experiment with phrasing questions that require students to reveal that they either know or don't know the answer. Prepare your key as you write the questions. When the time comes to grade papers, simply make a yes or no decision about the correctness of each answer. With a felt-tip pen, make a bold check over each satisfactory answer on an exam, and tally the number of checks when you have read all the answers. (Counting up to 8 or 10 is obviously a lot quicker and easier than adding together various numbers of points for 8 or 10 answers.) Once you have developed skill in writing and evaluating short-essay questions that can be graded plus or minus, prepare and use summative exams. If you decide to use this type of exam, guard against the temptation to write items that measure only knowledge. Use a table of specifications, or otherwise take steps to write at least some questions that measure skills at the higher levels of the taxonomy for the cognitive domain.

Direct learning experiences toward feelings of success in an effort to encourage an orientation toward achievement, high self-esteem, and a strong sense of self-efficacy and academic self-concept.

To feel successful, an individual must first establish goals that are neither so low as to be unfulfilling nor so high as to be impossible and then be able to achieve them at an acceptable level.

Because the typical classroom contains 25 or more students who may exhibit several styles, teachers must be flexible and learn to use a variety of teaching and assessment methods so that, at some point, every student's style is addressed (recall our discussion of the teacher-as-artist earlier in the book).

To give the impulsive style its place in the sun, you might schedule speed drills or question-and-answer sessions covering previously learned basic material.

In preparation for student/parent-teacher conferences, students were asked to select samples of their work to share with parents and reflect on what they could do now that they could not do earlier in the school year.

To help second-grade students choose and carry out a research topic, the teacher asked them to answer three questions: Am I interested in this topic? Can I find books about this topic? Can I read the books by myself, or will I need help from a friend or an adult?

You can think of reliability as the extent to which test scores are free of measurement errors that arise from such factors as test anxiety, motivation, correct guesses, and vaguely worded items, thereby producing a consistent performance over the course of a test or over repeated assessments of the same characteristic.

To illustrate the importance of reliability, imagine that you wish to form cooperative learning groups for mathematics.

Construct validity: how accurately a test measures a theoretical attribute

To illustrate the nature of construct validity, we will use a hypothetical theory of intelligence called the Perfectly Valid theory.

To improve organization, suggest that students use a notebook to keep a record of homework assignments, a checklist of materials needed for class, and a list of books and materials they need to take home for studying and homework.

To improve general awareness of the learning process, emphasize the importance of thinking about the factors that could affect one's performance on a particular task, of forming a plan before actually starting to work, and of monitoring the effectiveness of learning activities.

Some computer programs offer a systematic step-by-step procedure that emphasizes only one specific idea per step or frame. They also offer immediate feedback. These characteristics closely fit the needs of children with intellectual disability. You might look for computer programs in the subject or subjects you teach or develop your own materials, perhaps in the form of a workbook of some kind.

To improve students' memory for and comprehension of information, teach memorization skills and how to relate new information to existing knowledge schemes to improve long-term storage and retrieval. Also, make frequent use of simple, concrete analogies and examples to explain and illustrate complex, abstract ideas.

Finally, recent research suggests that, although students display learning style preferences, they can learn through a variety of instructional tasks

To motivate students with a legislative style, for example, have them describe what might have happened if a famous historical figure had acted differently than he or she did.

The process of recognition involves noting key features of a stimulus and relating them to already-stored information.

To the degree that an object's defining features are ambiguous (as when one observes an unfamiliar breed of dog from a great distance) or that a learner lacks relevant prior knowledge (as many young children do), recognition and more meaningful processing will suffer.

Another technique, response cost, is similar to time-out in that it involves the removal of a stimulus.

Token economies—especially when combined with classroom rules, appropriate delivery of reinforcers, and response cost (a concept we describe a bit later in the chapter)—are effective in reducing such disruptive classroom behaviors as talking out of turn, being out of one's seat, fighting, and being off-task.

Moreover, the technique is flexible enough to incorporate the techniques of token economies and shaping.

Toward that end, techniques such as shaping, token economies, and contingency contracts are likely to be very useful.

Because they were designed to predict academic success, intelligence tests predict that outcome better than they predict other outcomes, such as job success, marital happiness, or life satisfaction.

Traditional intelligence tests seem to measure a general intellectual factor and a factor specific to the particular test being taken.

Describe learning situations in which the different kinds of positive transfer would be supported.

Transfer of learning occurs when students apply knowledge and skills learned at one point in time and in a particular context to similar but different problems and tasks at a later point in time.

Middle school years psychosocial development

Transition from industry vs. inferiority to identity vs. role confusion. Growing independence leads to initial thoughts about identity. There is greater concern about appearance and gender roles than about occupational choice.

Primary grade years cognitive development

Transition from preoperational to concrete operational stage. Students gradually acquire the ability to solve problems by generalizing from concrete experiences.

Middle school years moral development

Transition to morality of cooperation, conventional level. There is increasing willingness to think of rules as flexible mutual agreements, yet "official" rules are still likely to be obeyed out of respect for authority or out of a desire to impress others.

Remember that, in addition to being a skilled teacher, you are also a human being who may at times react subjectively to students.

Try to control the influence of such factors as name, ethnic background, gender, physical characteristics, knowledge of siblings or parents, grades, and test scores. If you think you can be honest with yourself, you might attempt to describe your prejudices so that you will be in a position to guard against them. (Do you tend to be annoyed when you read descriptions of the exploits of members of a particular religious or ethnic group, for example?) Try to think of a student independently of his or her siblings and parents.

Multiple disabilities

Two or more impairments (such as mental retardation-blindness and mental retardation-orthopedic, but not deaf-blindness) that cause such severe educational problems that a child's needs cannot be adequately met by programs designed solely for one of the impairments.

Researchers suggest that if teachers want to teach their students SRL skills, they should embed their instruction in classroom tasks that are meaningful and that both illustrate and require students to use those skills. One such task, which Judy Randi and Lynn Corno (2000) describe in detail, is to analyze a story about a hero who has to undertake a dangerous journey and rely on personal resources to accomplish a goal. This is often called a journey tale.

Two well-known examples from Greek literature are the Odyssey and Jason and the Argonauts. The students are then asked to draw parallels between the self-regulatory skills used by the story's hero and their own journeys as learners.

Negative reinforcement

Type of stimulus: Aversive Action: Remove Effect on behavior: Strengthen

Positive reinforcement

Type of stimulus: Desirable Action: Present Effect on behavior: Strengthen

Erikson psychological development individuals in moratorium

Uncertain about identity

Role confusion

Uncertainty as to what behaviors others will react to favorably

Erikson psychological development Students sense of industry hampered by

Unhealthy competition for grades

Piaget cognitive development sequence of stages

Uniform across cultures but rate of development varies

We have at least two reasons for recommending the teaching of rehearsal. One is that maintenance rehearsal is a useful tactic for keeping a relatively small amount of information active in short-term memory. The other is that maintenance rehearsal is one of a few tactics that young children can learn to use. If you do decide to teach rehearsal, we have two suggestions. First, remind young children that rehearsal is something that learners consciously decide to do when they want to remember things. Second, remind students to rehearse no more than seven items (or chunks) at a time.

Upper elementary grade students (fourth, fifth, and sixth graders) can be taught advanced forms of maintenance rehearsal, such as cumulative rehearsal, and forms of elaborative rehearsal, such as rehearsing sets of items that form homogeneous categories. As with younger students, provide several opportunities each week to practice these skills.

Use a variety of instructional tactics, such as group work, lecture, textbook reading, worksheets, whole-class instruction, and hands-on activities.

Use a variety of instructional techniques to help educationally disadvantaged students master both basic and higher-order knowledge and skills.

Suggestions for Teaching Motivating Students to Learn

Use behavioral techniques to help students exert themselves and work toward remote goals.

-Recognize students who demonstrate progress rather than focusing just on students who have achieved the highest grades. -Provide students with opportunities to choose what projects they will do, what electives they will take, and for how long they wish to study a particular subject rather than having these decisions made exclusively by administrators and teachers.

Use cooperative-learning methods.

For reasons to be discussed shortly, you may choose not to list all of the categories in the taxonomy for all subjects or at all grade levels. Tables of specifications that you draw up for your own use therefore may contain fewer headings across the top of the page than the table illustrated in Figure 14-3.

Use formative assessments to promote mastery of instructional objectives.

The way you moderate student contributions may not only determine how successful the discussion will be but may also influence how students feel about themselves and each other. Jacob Kounin (1970) points out that when a teacher first names a student and then asks a question, the rest of the class may tend to turn its attention to other things. The same tendency to tune out may occur if a teacher follows a set pattern of calling on students (for example, by going around a circle). To keep all the students on their toes, you might ask questions first and then, in an unpredictable sequence, call on those who volunteer to speak, frequently switching from one part of the room to another. Guard against the temptation to call primarily on students you expect to give good or provocative answers. Repeatedly ignoring students who may be a bit inarticulate or unimaginative may cause them and their classmates to conclude that you think they are incompetent. These students may then lose interest in and totally ignore what is taking place.

Use guided experiences to satisfy both constructivist principles and state learning standards.

In an effort to help teachers administer praise more effectively, Brophy drew up the guidelines for effective praise listed in Table 11-1.

Use other forms of positive reinforcement.

Traditional written tests have been criticized over the years for being culturally biased.

Use the full range of assessments (written tests, performance assessments, checklists, rating scales) available to you.

-Have students pair off and ask each other questions to prepare for an exam. Do the same with difficult-to-learn material by suggesting that pairs cooperate—for example, in developing mnemonic devices or preparing flashcards—to help each other master information. -Organize an end-of-unit extravaganza in which individuals and groups first present or display projects and then celebrate by having refreshments.

Useful

Students with learning disabilities account for more than half of all students with disabilities. They have a disorder in one or more of such basic psychological processes as perception, attention, memory, and metacognition, which leads to learning problems not attributable to other causes.

Using a discrepancy between a student's IQ score (average or above) and standardized achievement test score (one or more standard deviations below the mean) as a primary indicator of a learning disability does not appear to be useful.

For instance, many gifted and talented students will seek out private alternative schools where their particular abilities are more highly prized.

Using stories from their basal reader, students in the experimental (triarchic) group completed classroom and homework tasks that emphasized the use of analytical, creative, and practical abilities.

Far transfer occurs when the knowledge domains and settings are judged to be dissimilar and the time between the original learning and transfer tasks is relatively long.

Using those same skills several years later to determine which of several investment options is most likely to produce the highest rate of return is an example of far transfer.

Sally loaned $7 to Betty. But Sally borrowed $15 from Estella and $32 from Joan. Moreover, Joan owes $3 to Estella and $7 to Betty. One day the women got together at Betty's house to straighten out their accounts. Which woman left with $18 more than she came with?

Verbal reasoning problems that describe transactions can take the form of a flow diagram, as shown here. From the diagram, it is clear that Estella left with $18 more than she came with.

By combining multimedia and hypermedia capabilities, researchers and designers have developed rich, complex virtual environments in which multiple learners can engage in individual or collaborative learning experiences.

Virtual environments provide rich content and context that can support collaborative learning.

Using technology to promote cognitive development

Virtual learning environments can introduce disequilibrium promote exploration and visual representations of abstract ideas and help students construct knowledge

Explain the various forms of ability grouping, the findings from evaluation studies, and the practices that are suggested by the research.

Virtually all elementary schools and most middle and high schools use some form of ability grouping. At the middle and high school levels, the term tracking is commonly used.

Structured practice involves the greatest degree of teacher assistance.

Visual displays, such as overhead transparencies, are commonly used during structured practice as a way to illustrate and help students recall the components of a lesson.

For Vygotsky, social interactions between children and more intellectually advanced individuals, such as peers, older siblings, and adults, are primarily responsible for advances in cognitive development, provided those interactions are based on mediation of external behaviors into internal signs.

Vygotsky believed that cognitive development is aided by explicitly teaching students how to use cognitive tools to acquire basic concepts and by teaching within a student's zone of proximal development.

Explain how Lev Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of cognitive development connects social interaction in classrooms to the cognitive capacities of learners.

Vygotsky believed that cognitive development is shaped by both the interactions children have with others, particularly adults, and historical cultural forces. Parents and teachers help children acquire those psychological tools (such as language skills, concepts, and procedures) that their culture has come to value.

Zone of proximal development

Vygotsky referred to the difference between what a child can do on his own and what can be accomplished with some assistance.

Many psychologists believe the information in long-term memory is organized in the form of schemata. A schema is a generalized abstract structure of information. When schemata are absent or crudely formed, learning and recall problems occur.

We forget some of what we learned for one or more of the following reasons: inadequate consolidation, nonmeaningful learning, few opportunities for retrieval, interference from other material, and lack of retrieval cues.

Cultural-historical activity theory evolved from the social constructivism of Vygotsky.

We look briefly through the three lenses: cognitive, social, and critical constructivism.

Their students had greater gains in English and math than the students of other teachers (Poplin, Rivera, Durish, et al., 2011).

We need to add a last word about homework as a way to promote achievement. The amount of homework assigned to students over the past 15 years has increased, largely because of the need for increasing numbers of students to achieve state-mandated standards and comply with the provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Educators believed that increasing the amount of homework assigned to students would lead to higher grades and test scores. Does it? Not surprisingly, the main conclusion to be drawn from the research literature is that it depends on the student's grade level and how the homework is structured. Compared with peers who did no homework, there was a small benefit for late primary and elementary grade students and only a modest benefit for middle school students.

At the same time, they acquire the content knowledge in math, science, language arts, and social studies that is specified in their state learning standards.

We will describe Quest Atlantis in more detail in Chapter 10, "Constructivist Learning Theory, Problem Solving, and Transfer," but it is mentioned here as an example of how students can engage information across a variety of content areas.

The literature on problem solving mentions quite a few solution strategies. Because these solution strategies are very general—they can apply to different kinds of problems in different content areas and offer only a general approach to solving a problem—they are referred to as heuristics (Martinez, 1998).

We will discuss seven heuristics that we think are particularly useful.

Regardless of which method is used to assess reliability, the goal is to create two rankings of scores and see how similar the rankings are.

Well-constructed standardized tests should have correlation coefficients of about .95 for split-half reliability, .90 for test-retest reliability, and .85 for alternate-form reliability.

Remember that a student's test score reflects the extent to which the content of that test has been mastered at about the time the test was taken. A student may have strengths and weaknesses not measured by a particular test, and because of changes in such characteristics as interests, motives, and cognitive skills, test scores can change, sometimes dramatically. The younger the student is and the longer the interval is between testings (on the same test), the greater is the likelihood that a test score will change significantly.

What a test score means depends on the nature of the test. If your students took an intelligence test or a scholastic aptitude test, point out that such tests measure the current status of those cognitive skills that most closely relate to academic success. Also mention that IQ scores are judged to be below average, average, or above average on the basis of how they compare with the scores of a norm group.

Because the transfer task is similar in one or more respects to the practice task and tends to occur in similar settings, low-road transfer is similar to specific and near transfer.

What was once a reflection of high-road transfer becomes low-road transfer.

It does suggest that there is more information in long-term memory than we can get to on a given occasion.

What you will learn shortly is that quite a bit of what is stored in long-term memory is different from how it was first learned.

Give students feedback first, then their grades.

What's the first thing most students do when a teacher hands back a test or paper? In all likelihood, they look for the grade. Then they may look briefly at any comments the teacher made, or they may ignore them altogether. You probably did the same thing—which is too bad because those comments help shape future learning activities (the assessment as learning concept that we mentioned earlier). If you want your students to actually read and think about your feedback, here's an unusual way to accomplish that goal. Using your scoring rubric, provide feedback about why various aspects of the student's response (such as organization, grammar, clarity) were either done well or could stand some improvement. Then, give each part a letter or numerical grade. But instead of putting an overall grade on the front of the exam or paper, record it in your gradebook. Now, here's where it gets interesting. Tell your students that if they want to know their overall grade they have to read your comments and send you either an e-mail or a handwritten note telling you what grade they think they earned based on your comments. If they don't respond or just make superficial comments, they have to wait until report cards come out to learn their grade.

Their claim is that, unless both students and teachers are learning from the process, formative assessment is not occurring in the classroom.

Whatever is happening might be "something like" formative assessment, but formative assessment requires that the teacher and students are learning with the intention to improve student achievement.

Disequilibrium

When a student's understanding of the world does not match her or his experience.

Like IQ scores, these styles tend to be fairly stable, but they can change in response to environmental demands.

When faced with a task for which there is no ready solution or a question for which the answer is uncertain, the impulsive student responds more quickly than students who are more reflective.

Explain the distinction between norm-referenced and criterion-referenced grading.

When grades are determined according to a norm-referenced system, each student's level of performance is compared with the performance of a group of similar students. A norm-referenced scheme is used by those who feel that external criteria for determining the adequacy of performance are unavailable.

When an individual learns to make a particular response to a particular stimulus and then makes the same or a similar response in a slightly different situation, generalization has occurred.

When inappropriate generalizations occur, as in the preceding example, they can be essentially extinguished through discrimination training.

In school, the notes that field-dependent students take are more likely to reflect the structure and sequence of ideas as presented by the teacher or textbook author, whereas the notes of field-independent students are more likely to reflect their own ideas about structure and sequence.

When reading, field-independent students are more likely than field-dependent students to analyze the structure of the story.

The researchers also found that students who had prior experience with cooperative learning, whether or not they received specific, supplementary training in how to productively ask questions and provide assistance to a classmate, scored higher on the math task than students who had no prior exposure to cooperative learning.

When researchers attempt to explain the widespread positive effects that are typically found among studies of cooperative learning, they usually cite one or more of the following explanations.

"Well, Keesha, I'm sure a gardener might sometimes need to find the area of a circle, but can you give a more specific example? If you can't think of one right away, put up your hand as soon as you can describe a specific situation in which it would help to know the area of a circular patch of lawn or soil."

When selecting students to speak in class, use techniques likely to sustain steady but nonthreatening attention. At the same time, guard against the temptation to call primarily on bright, articulate, assertive students.

During guided practice, students work at their own desks on problems of the type explained and demonstrated by the teacher.

When students can correctly solve at least 85 percent of the problems given to them during guided practice, they are deemed ready for independent practice.

Present Information in Learnable Amounts and Over Realistic Time Periods

When students struggle to master the information they are expected to learn, the problem sometimes arises simply from an excess of information being presented to them at once—that is, from too great an external demand. At other times, the student's working (short-term) memory is strained because of the nature of the task itself: for instance, if the task has several components that all have to be monitored. By taking the nature of the task into consideration, you can judge how much information to expect your students to learn in a given time.

In the low-instructional-support condition, students were given a variety of materials and objects and worked in small groups to conduct experiments. The teacher's major role in the low-support condition was to provide support for the process of investigation.

When tested on their understanding of the concepts of density and buoyancy, both groups significantly outscored an uninstructed control group. But one year later, the high-support group demonstrated a better grasp of these concepts than did the low-support group.

The more precisely and completely goals are described at the beginning of a unit, the easier and more efficient assessment (and teaching) will be. The use of a clear outline will help ensure an adequate sample of the most significant kinds of behavior.

When the time comes to assess the abilities of your students, you can't possibly observe and evaluate all relevant behavior. You can't listen to more than a few pages of reading by each first grader, for example, or ask high school seniors to answer questions on everything discussed in several chapters of a text.

In addition to prior knowledge, construction of ideas is aided by multiple perspectives, self-regulation, and authentic tasks

When we look through the constructivist frame, our view is directed toward the key concepts of prior knowledge, multiple perspectives, self-regulation, and authentic learning.

Predictive validity: how well a test score predicts later performance

When you are estimating the content validity of a test, you should pay attention not only to how well the questions measure what they are supposed to measure but also to whether they are appropriate in terms of level of difficulty and of the vocabulary and characteristics of your students.

As we noted earlier in this chapter, self-observation or self-monitoring is an important SRL skill that plays a role at several points in the learning process. Self-regulating students are very proficient at monitoring their progress in meeting goals, the effectiveness of their learning strategies and tactics, and the quality of their achievements. They do this by comparing their performance both to internal standards and external feedback. Once you have explained and demonstrated self-monitoring, give students structured opportunities to practice this skill and provide feedback.

When you think of feedback, you probably think of teachers giving students information about how well they performed on a recent project, performance, or exam.

In addition to relying on our own knowledge and experience to solve problems, we can draw on the knowledge and experience of friends, colleagues, and experts. The main purpose of soliciting the views of others about solutions to problems and positions on issues is to identify the reasons and evidence those people offer in support of their positions. This skill of asking questions and analyzing responses is quite useful in debates and classroom discussions of controversial issues.

When you think that you understand the nature of a problem or issue and possess sufficient relevant information, you are ready to attempt a solution. The first step is to consider which of several alternative approaches is likely to be most effective.

For reasons illustrated by behavioral theorists' experiments with different reinforcement schedules, students are more likely to work steadily if they are reinforced at frequent intervals. If you set goals that are too demanding or remote, lack of reinforcement during the early stages of a unit may derail students, even if they started out with good intentions.

Whenever you ask students to work toward a demanding or remote goal, try to set up a series of short-term goals.

According to Sternberg's theory, this person would be less intelligent.

Where a mismatch exists and the individual cannot adapt to the values of the majority, the intelligent person explores ways to make the values of others more consistent with his or her own values and skills.

This is known as Type I punishment, or presentation punishment, and relies on such time-honored responses as scolding, paddling, ridiculing, or making a student write 500 times "I will not chew gum in class."

Whether punishment is effective and ethical are important issues, particularly for educators, and we will discuss them later in this chapter.

The classroom assessments that teachers devise are among the most powerful influences on the quality of students' learning, largely due to their effect on self-efficacy, interest, and the types of learning strategies that students construct.

Whether these assessments have positive or negative effects on students depends on how they are constructed and the purpose for which they are primarily intended.

Sternberg has proposed a theory of mental self-government that is modeled after the structure and functions of civil government and contains 13 learning styles.

While research has demonstrated that learning styles exist, it has not been conclusively shown that matching instruction to a student's style produces higher achievement.

Like a variable interval schedule, this schedule tends to eliminate irregularities in response rate, thereby producing a more consistent rate.

With a VI schedule, the length of time between reinforcements is essentially random but averages out to a predetermined interval.

A sample contract from Wlodkowski is presented here, with a description of each element in brackets. Date ____________

Within the next two weeks, I will learn to multiply correctly single-digit numbers ranging between 5 and 9, for example, 5*6 [What the student will learn] When I feel prepared, I will ask to take a mastery test containing 50 problems from this range of multiplication facts. [How the student can demonstrate learning]

The first question that students ask themselves when they take a new course, encounter a new topic, or are asked to learn a new skill is, "Why do I have to learn this?" We suspect you've asked yourself this question many times and not gotten a satisfactory answer. So, at the beginning of each lesson, tell students what you want them to accomplish, why you think it's important that they learn this knowledge or skill, and how you are going to assess their learning. If you intend to use paper-and-pencil tests, tell them what content areas will be covered, what kinds of questions you will include (in terms of whatever taxonomies you use to generate your objectives), and how many of each type of question will be on the test.

Without this information, students will be unable to formulate a rational approach to learning and studying because they will be forced to guess about these features. They may, for example, take your general directive to "learn this material for the test" as a cue to memorize, when you expected them to be able to explain ideas in their own words. If you intend to use performance measures, tell students the conditions under which they will have to perform and what criteria you will use to judge their performance.

Study worked examples. This approach may strike you as so obvious that it hardly merits attention, but it is worth mentioning for two reasons. First, obvious solution strategies are the ones that are most often overlooked. Second, it is a very effective solution strategy. The beneficial effect is thought to be due to the learners' acquisition of a general problem schema. To get the most out of this heuristic, use multiple examples and different formats for each problem type and encourage learners to explain to themselves the problem-solving strategy illustrated by the examples.

Work on a simpler version of the problem. This is another common and very effective approach. Geometry offers a particularly clear example of working on a simpler problem. If you are having difficulty solving a problem of solid geometry (which involves three dimensions), work out a similar problem in plane geometry (two dimensions) and then apply the solution to the three-dimensional example. Architects and engineers employ this approach when they construct scaled-down models of bridges, buildings, experimental aircraft, and the like. Scientists do the same thing by creating laboratory simulations of real-world phenomena.

(e.g., "Why do we eat breakfast?" "Who decided which foods would be breakfast foods?" "Do people in all cultures eat the same foods for breakfast?") that flow from two general questions: "What questions and concerns do you have about yourself?" and "What questions and concerns do you have about the world?"

Working in small groups, students examine their own questions as well as those of their classmates, identify common questions that will be the subject of a large group discussion, and write their questions on large sheets that are posted on a wall and viewed by the other students in class.

So when we try to figure out how to compose a sentence, solve a math problem, recall a scientific formula, or suppress emotions and thoughts that might interfere with achieving a goal, those activities take place in working memory.

Working memory is increasingly being viewed as a critical component in our information-processing system.

Provide examples of the different methods by which student learning can be assessed.

Written tests are used to measure how much knowledge people have about some topic. Test items can be classified as selected response (multiple-choice, true-false, matching) and constructed response (short-answer and essay).

Prompting and positive reinforcement are basic learning principles that will be discussed in Chapter 7, "Behavioral Learning Theory: Operant Conditioning." Essentially, a prompt is a stimulus that draws out a desired response, and positive reinforcement involves giving the student a positive reinforcer (something the student wants) immediately after a desired behavior. The aim is to get the student to behave that way again. Typical reinforcers are verbal praise, stickers, and small prizes.

You can set up a cooperative task or activity: "Marc, I would like you to help Carol and Raquel paint the scenery for next week's play. You can paint the trees and flowers, Carol will paint the grass, and Raquel will do the people." After several minutes, say something like, "That's good work. I am really pleased at how well the three of you are working together." Similar comments can be made at intervals as the interaction continues.

If time is limited and if only one topic is to be covered, ask students to form a circle and have an all-class discussion.

You may sometimes wish to have the entire class discuss a topic. Such discussions are most likely to be successful if all students have eye contact with one another. The simplest way to achieve this is to have students sit in a circle. Next, invite responses to the question you have posed. As students make remarks, serve more as a moderator than as a leader. Try to keep the discussion on the topic, but avoid directing it toward a specific predetermined end result. If one or more students tend to dominate the discussion, say something like, "Kim and Carlos have given us their ideas. Now I'd like to hear from the rest of you." If an aggressive student attacks or belittles something that a classmate says, respond with something like, "It's good to believe in a point of view, but let's be friendly as we listen to other opinions. This is supposed to be a discussion, not an argument or a debate."

Use group contingency-management techniques.

You may want to reward the entire class when the aggressive student behaves appropriately for a certain period of time. Such rewards, which may be free time, special classroom events, or certain privileges, should make the aggressive student the hero and foster better peer relationships.

As you prepare class presentations or encounter bits of information that students seem to have difficulty learning, ask yourself if a mnemonic device would be useful. You might write up a list of the devices discussed earlier and refer to it often. Part of the value of mnemonic devices is that they make learning easier. They are also fun to make up and use. Moreover, rhymes, acronyms, and acrostics can be constructed rather quickly.

You might consider setting aside about 30 minutes two or three times a week to teach mnemonics. First, explain how rhyme, acronym, and acrostic mnemonics work, and then provide examples of each.

Be willing and prepared to defend the evaluations you make.

You will probably get few complaints if you have a detailed key and can explain to the class when exams are returned how each answer was graded. To a direct challenge about a specific answer to an essay or short-essay question, you might respond by showing complainers an answer that received full credit and inviting them to compare it with their own. Perhaps the best way to provide feedback about responses to multiple-choice questions is to prepare a feedback booklet. As you write each multiple-choice question, also write a brief explanation as to why you feel the answer is correct and why the distractors are incorrect. If you follow this policy (which takes less time than you might expect), you can often improve the questions as you write your defense of the answer. If you go a step further (described in the next point), you can obtain information to use in improving questions after they have been answered. This is a good policy to follow with any exam, multiple choice or otherwise.

According to the dual coding theory , concrete material (such as pictures of familiar objects) and concrete words (such as horse, bottle, water) are remembered better than

abstract words (such as deduction, justice, theory) because the former can be encoded in two ways—as images and as verbal labels—whereas abstract words are encoded only verbally.

Most classifications of disturbed behavior focus on

aggressive behavior or withdrawn behavior.

Students who work hard who feel they are being stretched yet who succeed more often than not are more likely to enjoy learning and to

approach future tasks with increased innovation than are students whose works routine and consistently at a low level of difficulty.

In such cases, you can make evaluations more systematic and accurate by using rating scales and checklists and by

attempting to equate (or at least take into account) the difficulty level of the performance to be rated.

Aspects of American Indian culture also call for flexibility in

instructional formats and processes.

Once the behavior has been learned, however, positive reinforcement can be employed on a

noncontinuous, or intermittent, basis to perpetuate that behavior.

This background will allow the person to recognize important elements (words, phrases, and numbers) in the problem statement and

patterns of relationships among the problem elements.

The same is true for

positive and negative reinforcement.

If you have ever been caught exceeding the speed limit and been fined at least $50, you can probably attest to the

power of response cost as a modifier of behavior.

Students from different ethnic groups also may respond differently to such other nonverbal forms of communication as

proximity (physical closeness to others), gestures, and touching.

Because of the challenges presented by inclusion, teachers often

question the practice.

The regular classroom teacher's responsibilities under IDEA may include participation in

referral, assessment, preparation of the IEP, and implementation of the IEP.

In the next section, we further describe self-efficacy and its

relationship to self-regulation.

To increase the probability that students will use such techniques themselves, teach them how to make outlines before they write essays, and

show them how to create concept maps, graphs, flowcharts, and tables after they have read a section of text.

A current example is the use of standardized achievement test scores to evaluate

the quality of classroom instruction.

Digital environments have been shown to have a beneficial effect on students' motivation to learn because

they make learning interesting and meaningful.

Students who choose performance-avoidance goals are motivated to avoid the possibility of failure so as not to appear less capable than others;

they may also engage in self-handicapping behaviors so that they have an excuse for poor performance.

Because so much has been written about the use of cooperative-learning techniques and their demonstrated effectiveness in raising motivation and learning,

we discuss this recommendation in more detail next.

Ability Grouping

• Ability grouping assumes intelligence is inherited, reflected in IQ, and unchangeable and that instruction will be superior • No research support for between-class ability grouping • Joplin Plan and within-class ability grouping for math and science produce moderate increases in learning • Between-class ability grouping negatively influences teaching goals and methods • Joplin Plan and within-class ability grouping may allow more focused instruction

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)

• Before placement, student must be given complete, valid, and appropriate evaluation • IEP must include objectives, services to be provided, criteria for determining achievement • Students with disabilities must be educated in least restrictive environment • Inclusion policy aims to keep students with disabilities in regular classrooms for the entire day • Students with learning disabilities, speech impairments, intellectual disability, or emotional disturbance are most likely to be served under IDEA • Multidisciplinary assessment team determines whether student needs special services • Classroom teacher, parents, and several specialists prepare IEP

Elementary school (Grades 4-5; 9-10 years)

• Boys are slightly better at sports-related motor skills; girls are better at flexibility, balance, rhythmic motor skills • Peer group norms for behavior begin to replace adult norms • Self-image becomes more generalized and stable; is based primarily on comparisons with peers • Delinquents have few friends, are easily distracted, are not interested in schoolwork, lack basic skills • Elementary grade students reason logically but concretely

Ethnicity and social class

• Culture: how a group of people perceives, believes, thinks, behaves • Ethnic group members differ in verbal and nonverbal communication patterns • Ethnic group members may hold different values • Poverty rates are higher for ethnic families of color than for Whites • Children of color often score lower on tests, drop out of school sooner • Achievement gap between low-SES minority students and White students can be due to living conditions, family environment, characteristics of the student, and classroom environment

Gender differences and gender bias

• Evidence that boys score higher on tests of visual-spatial ability and math reasoning and that girls score higher on tests of memory and language skills is being called into question • Gender bias can affect course selection, career choice, and class participation of male and female students • Academic success, encouragement, and models influence women to choose careers in science, math • Females and males have equal access to computers, but differences in anxiety still exist

High school (Grades 9-12; 14-17 years)

• Factors related to initiation of sexual activity vary by gender, race • Parents influence values, plans; peers influence immediate status • Girls are more likely than boys to experience anxiety about friendships • Depression is most common among females, students of color • Depression and unstable family situations place adolescents at risk for suicide • Political thinking becomes more abstract, less authoritarian, more knowledgeable

Students Who Are Gifted and Talented

• Gifted and talented students show high performance in one or more areas • Students of color are underrepresented in gifted classes because of overreliance on test scores • Gifted and talented students differ from their nongifted peers intellectually and emotionally • Separate classes for gifted and talented students aid achievement but may lower academic self-concept of some students

Middle schools (Grades 6-8; 11-13 years)

• Girls' growth spurt occurs earlier, and so they look older than boys of the same age • Early-maturing boys are likely to draw favorable responses • Late-maturing boys may feel inadequate • Early-maturing girls may suffer low self-esteem • Late-maturing girls are likely to be popular and carefree • Average age of puberty: girls, eleven; boys, fourteen • Discussion of controversial issues may be difficult because of a strong desire to conform to peer norms • Teenagers experience different degrees of emotional turmoil • The environment of middle schools does not meet the needs of adolescents, leading to lower levels of learning • Self-efficacy beliefs for academic and social tasks become strong influences on behavior

The nature and measurement of intelligence

• Intelligence test scores are most closely related to school success, not job success, marital happiness, or life happiness • IQ scores can change with experience, training • Intelligence involves more than what intelligence tests measure • Individuals with a high level of a particular intelligence may use it in different ways • Factors other than high levels of a particular intelligence influence interests, college major, career choice

Learning styles

• Learning styles are preferences for dealing with intellectual tasks in a particular way • Impulsive students prefer quick action; reflective students prefer to collect and analyze information before acting • Field-independent students prefer their own structure; field- dependent students prefer to work within the existing structure • Legislative style prefers to create and plan; executive style prefers to follow explicit rules; judicial style prefers to evaluate and judge • Teachers should use various instructional methods to engage all styles of learning at one time or another • Teachers should use various test formats to expand students' repertoire of learning styles and measure accurately what students have learned

Ethnicity and social class continued

• Low-SES children are more likely to live in a stressful environment that interferes with studying • Classroom atmosphere, teachers' approaches are connected with achievement levels of low-SES students • Teacher expectancy effect: students behave in ways that are consistent with expectations that teachers communicate • Strong effect of teacher expectancy on achievement, participation • Teacher expectancies are influenced by social class, ethnic background, achievement, attractiveness, gender

Multicultural Education Programs

• Multicultural programs aim to promote respect for diversity, reduction of ethnocentrism and stereotypes, improved learning • Multicultural education can be approached in different ways • Peer tutoring improves achievement • Cooperative learning fosters better understanding among ethnically diverse students • Multicultural understanding can be promoted by electronically linking students from different cultural backgrounds

Primary grades (1-3rd; 6-8 years)

• Primary grade children have difficulty focusing on small print • Accident rate peaks in third grade because of confidence in physical skills • Rigid interpretation of rules in primary grades • To encourage industry, use praise, avoid criticism • Awareness of cognitive processes begins to emerge

Students with Intellectual Disability (formerly called Mental Retardation)

• Students with intellectual disability may frustrate easily, lack confidence and self-esteem • Students with intellectual disability tend to oversimplify, have difficulty generalizing • Give students with intellectual disability short assignments that can be completed quickly

Students with Learning Disabilities

• Students with learning disabilities have problems with perception, attention, memory, metacognition • Symptoms of ADHD include inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity • Help students with learning disabilities to reduce distractions, attend to important information

Students with Emotional Disturbance

• The term behavior disorder focuses on behavior that needs to be changed, objective assessment • Students with behavior disorders tend to be either aggressive or withdrawn • Foster interpersonal contact among withdrawn students • Use techniques to forestall aggressive or antisocial behavior

Bilingual Education

• Transition programs focus on a rapid shift to English proficiency • Maintenance programs focus on maintaining native- language competence • Two-way bilingual education programs feature instruction in both languages • Bilingual education programs produce moderate learning gains

Using Technology to Assist Exceptional Students

• Universal design for learning (UDL) treats diversity as a strength in learning environments • Federal legislation has led to the development of various assistive technologies