Learning how to think and learn

Week 7 Psychology NJ Kang

Attending, concentrating and remembering

Concentration• Better learning related to better con-

centration span• Concentration span parallel to age• Why?

Learning to remember: rehearsal and organization

• 5 yrs: overestimate their own capaci-ties

• 11 yrs: remember more than the younger ones, realistic assessments of one’s own mental abilities.

• Memory is not the product of natural ability but involve learned activity

A) Rehearsal • Is a powerful aid to deliberate memorization

and that the imposition of some structure or meaning on what we seek to memorize also determines the likelihood of successful re-call.

• Is continuous repetition, out loud or under the breath, of what one is trying to hold in mind.

• And younger ones have to learn how to do it (say out loud) and it leads them to success.

Same to adult• Fast rehearsal seems to work well in

their long term memory• Learning rehearsal strategies would

not be maintained without being used.

B) Categorical organization in mem-ory as a strategy

• 11 yr. know how to use this skill in memory strategy

• 5 yrs. Do not seemingly know how to use this skill in their memorizing af-ter even they rehearsed how to cate-gorize the objects.

Memorizing : one activity or many?

• We are dealing with changes in the child’s cognitive skills and not simply with linguis-tic development.

• Learn how to remember needs to have a purpose and own strategy

• Preschooler will keep touching the appro-priate cup from time to time. The child uses his digits to ‘keep hold’ of the infor-mation he has to remember, literally ‘re-mind-ing ‘ himself of it by physical means

Pre-schoolers’ natural history of memory development

• A camera is lost at the third post when they were told that they will take a picture later.

• They went to the third post to find the lost camera.

• They are making intelligent use of past experience to formulate a plan of action – evidence of both memory and reasoning. Piaget, physical action

thought formation

Why? Are they so good?• Multiplicity of intellectual activities

that we commonly (and mistakenly) lump together under headings like memory.

• Not a deliberate memorization but natural and often incidental conse-quence of their activities.

literally ‘re-mind-ing ‘ himself of it by physical means

• How do we use this in the teaching children English?

• Think about teaching parts of an Ele-phant.

Memory and School-ing

Asking vs interactions• They do not achieve when we simply ask

them to memorize.• They achieve more when they are led to

activities or interactions with the material destined to be remembered.

• The child’s active involvement with the material and his concentration on the task at hand helped him to encode or become consciously aware of the objects handled.

How can we use of this capacity to teaching chil-dren English phonics?

How can we link this understanding to Piagetian experiments or theory?

Memory and schooling• Powers of concentration and memory are fostered in

social interaction? Then it should be different from cultures to culture.

• Rehearsal is not a feature of deliberate attempts at memorization by people in non-technological soci-eties.

• These cultures are childlike; non rational or in some other way less developed than in our own.

• It is due to schooling.• So children’s lack of memorization is due to learning

meaningfully by active involvement not by taught.

Paying attention

Paying attention• Children under eight are impulsive in or-

ganizing and interrogating and even anal-izing the unfamiliar and purposeless tasks.

• Paying more attention and complete more complicated tasks when these are more relevant to their own lives and interests and meaningful to them (identifying iden-tical and different pictures vs making puz-zles and model making by looking at the pictures)

Wholes and parts

Wholes and parts: theories of per-ception and understanding

• Relationship between perception and knowledge.

• Child aged below five see the parts not the whole. Lack in synthesizing ability.

• Under seven tend to centre upon either the overall configuration or its parts. Not the both.

• This age group seem not to see these both even though these are meaningful to them .

Parallel to Piaget• Only simple can be traced (shape tracing in

the shape embedded shape in a simpler ver-sion only) but not the complicated one.

• Once the child perceives something in a par-ticular way, he seems unable to review it from a different perspective

• Pre-operational children cannot entertain the idea that an element of any task or situation, whatever its nature, can belong at the same time to two or more categories or classes.

Are young children illog-ical, or limited proces-sors of information?

Are young children illogical, or lim-ited processors of information?

• If the pre-operational children fail more than the older ones due to lack of experiences not of lack of logicali-ties. Then it could be possible to help them to learn how to think logically.

Seriation task (put things into order from small to large)

• This demands intellectual co-ordina-tion of perceptual judgments which, as we have seen, pre-operational children cannot achieve. (understand put sticks in length and compare A>B B>C, so A>C)

• Piaget lack of co-ordination

Bryant (1974) not due to the pre-logical

• Rather, their failure is due to the fact that these sorts of problems overload their mental capacities.

• Incapable of memorizing the relations be-tween the five sticks. is due to lack of con-centration time needed to solve the problem.

• His experiment, used coloured sticks and let them memorize the length of each stick com-pared to others. Then they were able to infer the order of length of the sticks.

Children do not pass pre-operational stage

• In which they were unable to learn or be taught how to reason logically.

• Rather, the argument proceeds, the tasks used are so unfamiliar to chil-dren and make such unusual de-mands that failure is attributable to a lack of relevant experience, not to in-tellectual incompetence.

What is effective instruc-tion?

Question• How can we conceptualize and ana-

lyse the process of instruction in or-der to determine whether or not what is being taught is also being learned?

• It demands sufficient prior knowledge to memorize and recall what is shown and may prove too difficult to assimilate.

ZPD• Gaps between unassisted and assisted

competence.• How can we determine whether or not

instruction is sensitive to a child’s zone of development

• When does it make demands beyond his potential level of comprehension?

• How can we sure that instruction does not underestimate his ability?

Answers (Wood, Wood and Middle-ton, 1978)

What does it mean to be taught well to complete the task on his own?

What should be said or done first?

Levels used to classify teaching in the pyramid task.

1. General verbal encouragement (why don’t you try to put some blocks together?)

2. Specific verbal instruction (can you find the four biggest blocks?)

3. Assists in choice of material (let’s try to put these big ones together)

4. Prepares material for assembly (selecting the blocks and lining them up)

5. Demonstrates an operation (how a set of four blocks fit together, doing several operations herself while the child looks on)

• Too much specific instruction in-creases child’s successful completion of the task, but decreases child’s de-velopment and responsibility for completing the task.

• Too less specific instruction would not help child to complete the task but increases child’s responsibility for competing the task.

Teach children contingently• Making any help given conditional

upon the child’s understanding of previous levels of instruction

• No left the child alone when he was overwhelmed by the task, and also guaranteed him greater scope for ini-tiative when he showed signs of suc-cess.

Verbal instruction only• Failure

Demonstration• Failure • Not understanding what they had

been shown.

Contingent teaching = Scaffolding• Showing + verbal instruction• Get the four next ones’ because previous

instruction involved an element of showing which made such verbal instructions con-textually meaningful.

• by highlighting things they need to take ac-count of in each process.

• Breaks the task down into a sequence of smaller tasks which children can manage to construct the completed assembly.

Piaget theory?• 4 yrs cannot do the tasks (seriation,

conservation) alone maybe

• 7 yrs can do the task alone

• Without being helped ? Then yes.

Contingent teaching• Pacing the amount of help children

are given on the basis of their mo-ment to moment understanding.

• Child understand teacher step back.

• Child don’t understand teacher give more help.

• Nor is he left alone or too directive.

In the school classroom

DIFFICULTBUT

POSSIBLE

four – year olds• Can be taught to do tasks that alone

they will not master until around age seven or eight.

• For them, instruction must be geared to their level of competence.

• When this condition can be and is achieved, young children can be taught and do learn.

Learning and generalization: first thoughts on a thorny issue

Questions• How and why children develop the intelli-

gence to achieve understanding.• What knowledge and experience are they

drawing on and generalizing from in order to understand?

• For Piaget, the schemes of knowing that make possible the understanding and generalization of experience are rooted in actions on the world.

• For Vygotsky and Bruner: social interaction and largely informal teaching.

Language of information processing• The mental activities that are believed to un-

derlie learning and thinking, • and in the experiences that lead to their ac-

quisition and perfection• Vygotsky (can do task by being taught contin-

gently properly) and Piaget (cannot do the task no matter what type of teaching is given) differ

• Vygotsky not only learn to complete the task but also learn the instructional process itself.

Why do some children learn while others don’t.

• Piagetians: many failures to remem-ber and generalize --- premature teaching serves only to inculcate empty procedures or learned tricks.

• Preoperational children can be taught to complete the task but not to gen-eralize the knowledge.

Is more complex issue• Learn one concept can be general-

ized to all the other concepts?• But if we don’t subscribe this issue

then we don’t have to expect them to do this.

Under-standing

One concept

An-other con-cept

Another concept

Another concept ?

Piaget: Horizontal decalage• Gradual extension of competence from task

to task• moving from one to another stages de-

velopment can be done not by once but by gradual development

• this makes clear-cut predictions about when and how children will display logical understanding of different tasks difficult.

• it does not fit the developmental facts of Piaget

Class inclusion• Piaget: do class inclusion understand-

ing number concept 4<6<8 and then, understand the grasp of number con-cepts.

• Lunzer, 1973: knowledge of number helps him to understand class inclusion problems

Bruner’s thought• Teaching of procedures, facts, dates,

formulae and so for the will not en-gender understanding or facilitate generalization unless the child un-derstands the intentions and pur-poses that motivate both the disci-pline and the people who practise and teach it.

The centrality of purposive activity in learning and development

• The roles they (V, B and P) portray for social interaction and instruction are quite different.

• P: cultural universals revealed by com-mon stages of development.

• V & B: find different ways of thinking and construing the world that arise out of cultural knowledge and different ways of socializing and educating children.

Task • Listen to the story and try to teach

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

Midterm• Option 1• Compare theories of Piaget and Vy-

gotsky in terms of how young learners develop their cognitive skills.

• Develop a curriculum for teaching Eng-lish to two particular age groups (1 & 2, 3 & 4, 5, 6 & 7 of young learners) reflecting each theoriest’s views on learning.

Midterm• Option 2• Select 3 Piaget’s experiments and

redo the research explaining under-pinning theories.

• Develop a curriculum and activities that reflect those experiments in teaching English to two particular age groups (1 & 2, 3 & 4, 5, 6 & 7 of young learners)