Information Processing Post 1

· Discuss one question or confusion that you have from the reading (you should comment on these within others' posts).

On the third page of the chapter it says “individuals are unable to process two verbal tasks or two auditory tasks at the same time.” This puzzles me because I never thought about it like that, and it is hard for me to believe that is true. Can’t individuals listen to music and have a conversation with someone at the same time? Wouldn’t that be two auditory tasks? I know that the book says a person cannot process two auditory/verbal tasks at the same time, but maybe I’m just not understanding what exactly they mean by this because I am highly doubting the validity of the above statement.

· According to Information Processing Theory, what is learning? From your definition, what are some implications for teaching?

According to the Information Processing Theory, learning is all about memory. The theorists in this theory are more focused on internal mental processes that occur as learners. In this theory learning involves sensory memory, working/short term memory and long term memory. In order for students to learn they have to rehearse (using maintenance or elaborative rehearsal) to put information in the short term memory, then a student has to be able to encode it, store it in the short term memory and be able to retrieve it later when the information is needed again. Some implications for teaching from my definition of information processing theory, is that teachers would need to teach based on mastery learning, and giving frequent tests/quizzes to make sure students have the important information in their short term/working memory, but then eventually because of so much rehearsal with the information, it can be moved to the long term memory. Not all students learn my mastery learning though, some students have test anxiety and cannot perform well on tests even if they study a lot and clearly know the material before they are given a test. Mastery learning can be good because teachers give the students feedback fairly often because in my understanding of mastery learning, teachers teach a concept, and then after a while they test the concept, give feedback and then test the concept again (and again) until the concept is mastered. Another implication is some students simply have more trouble than others remembering important information. This also depends on how important a subject is to a particular student. For example, if a student loves science then they mostly likely can remember the scientific method rather easily, versus the student who hates science, and will have difficulty remembering the scientific method simply because it does not matter to them or the student feels it is irrelevant in their life. The number of times everybody has to rehearse information varies between person to person, and the number of ways someone has to rehearse the information also greatly varies from person to person, therefore this can be hard for teachers to be able to teach and give students enough time to learn information.

· Refering to the model of memory below, describe a scenario of how a child might learn SOMETHING (as usual, you fill in this part) in detail. Make sure you trace through each stage and element of the model.

For this scenario, the student is going to learn how to correctly say the word TENGO in Spanish,(FYI tengo means I have). For this scenario, the student is a freshman in high school who has never taken Spanish, or any other language before. Their whole family only speaks English, and the student has never spent a lot of time around anyone who speaks Spanish, and therefore she has no idea how the Spanish language is spoken. First, for input, as the teacher I would say “yo tengo” (I have) and ask her to repeat it after me. I would tell her that the phrase means “I have” after the first time of us both saying it. The first time the student says it, she is going to lose the pronunciation of the word almost right away, within 2-3 seconds after she says it. From here, I would want to move the teaching onto trying to get this word into working memory. I would have the student do this several times, because this is using sensory memory, which only lasts 2-3 seconds, therefore this would need to be rehearsed multiple times. I could help the student do this by using maintenance rehearsal and simply repeating the word after me many times. Also I could have her say “yo tengo” and then write the words down. Next I could use chunking, the words “yo tengo” really mean nothing special to this student yet, but maybe if I add something onto the words, it might. For example, I could have the student say “yo tengo tacos” and this is meaningful to the student because tacos are her favorite food, and tengo and tacos both start with the letter T. By now, the student has encoded the word because she has changed the form in which she originally heard it, so now she has something to remember TENGO by because of tacos, which is her favorite food. The next day when the student returns to Spanish class I would ask her what was the phrase she learned from yesterday and she should be able to retrieve from her mind how to pronounce and write “yo tengo” with little problem. When the student does this with little to no difficulty, then it is in the long term memory.