Chpt. 7: Important skills for learning

I found a lot of useful information in this chapter, but I couldn’t think of many past experiences to draw on. I was first interested in their example of an information processing system. The author’s comment about, how a person learns information to begin with will impact what they will be able to remember later is important to think about. As teachers, this could mean the success or failure of our students. The chapter discussed how elaboration is important. That people use old information to comprehend new information. It will be important for us to provide information to students in an effective way for this information to be easily elaborated on, organized and put into the correct context. My only concern with this is how to do this effectively with the growing diversity in the classroom. I suppose presenting the material in different ways could help each student comprehend the information to its fullest.

It was nice for me to see that it is normal to forget information and that there is a real reason I do. In a classroom we learn so much information that it may be hard to keep all of it in our long term memories. We are all experiencing this type of interference with the overwhelming amount of information we are receiving in this program. Hopefully we will be able to get this information from our working memory to our long term memory. If not, I guess it is a good reason to keep the books and notes. For our future students to be successful it will be imperative to give different opportunities for learning and different situations so ideally, the information will be meaningful to each student.

I did find it interesting to learn about metacognitive knowledge and to do a little research on it (as this is the topic for my presentation). I talk to myself a lot so it was nice to hear that it is a skill that needs to be learned and a skill that could help me become more self aware. Like the self management skills in chapter six, I feel that strategies to develop metacognitive skills are important to use. The article I read regarding metacognitive knowledge gave different strategies on how to teach students these skills. One of the strategies talked about was to model the skills to your students so they can see how effectively to use them. I think being able to regulate your own thinking and learning is essential for students to be successful in the long run.

Finally, it was interesting to read the different opinions about memorization. I have to agree with the comment that if you do not teach memorization strategies to students, you are doing a disservice to them. It was amusing that this was in the same chapter where they discussed the writing strategy for older students using mnemonics to remember DEFENDS. I think it is important to show students how to memorize some things, as long as you don’t have them memorizing information as opposed to understanding it. As the author says, students may turn to memorizing information that they are having trouble understanding or when teachers require exact information. I know that memorization helped me get good grades on my spelling tests!