Educational Psychology: Learning, Cognition, and Strategies

Posted on Nov 12, 2024 in Psychology and Sociology

1. Purpose and Content of Educational Psychology

A) Purpose of Study

Educational psychology examines student characteristics and factors that influence the teaching-learning process. Teachers organize and structure learning experiences to achieve desired changes, providing meaningful and engaging learning opportunities.

The object of study of educational psychology (and the teacher’s competence) is to know:

• What to teach: Curriculum content, procedural and attitudinal skills.
• How to teach: Learning procedures and strategies for effective communication of experiences and content.
• Where to develop the teaching-learning process: Primarily in the classroom. (Explain teacher’s role as an expert)

B) Core Study Areas of Educational Psychology

These areas form the basis of the subject syllabus:

1. Learning: Different learning models (constructive, humanist, etc.) and processes and strategies for knowledge acquisition.
2. Cognitive and Social Development of Students: Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, Bandura’s social cognitive theory, and Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory.
3. Individual Differences: Factors influencing learning (skills, intelligence, exceptionality, high-risk students, personality, cognitive styles, and intellectual styles).
4. The Social Dimension of the Classroom: Teacher-student interaction, peer interaction, organization of learning activities, teacher expectations, and their influence on academic performance.
5. Content and Instructional Design: Curriculum components (content, temporality, dynamics), and evaluation methods.

2. Difference Between Gifted, Talented, and Precocious

• Gifted: High intellectual capacity, high performance, high levels of creativity, and persistence in tasks.
• Talented: Extraordinary skills and expertise in specific areas (art, music, sports, theater).
• Precocious: Exceptional evolutionary development, not necessarily intellectual (e.g., exhibiting behaviors earlier than peers).

3. Characteristics of the Gifted

• Easy understanding and retention of learned information.
• Strong memory for details.
• Large and advanced vocabulary.
• Quick understanding of relationships and abstract ideas.
• Enjoys problem-solving.
• High concentration levels.
• Independent production.
• Enthusiastic reader.
• Tendency towards obsession.
• Easily bored by repetition or routine.
• Enterprising and risk-taking.
• Good sense of humor.
• High expectations for self and others.
• Strong sense of justice.
• Leadership qualities.
• High self-awareness.

4. Process of Identifying Gifted Children

Identifying gifted students is crucial to provide appropriate educational support and prevent underachievement. Formal and informal tests are used to gather comprehensive information:

Formal Testing

1. Intelligence tests (e.g., BADyG or STAT).
2. Curricular competency assessments.
3. Creativity tests (e.g., Torrance TTCT, CREA, or PIC).
4. Assessments of specific skills (self-concept, motivation, personality, learning styles).

Informal Tests

(Detailed explanation in question 18)

1. Observation Scale for Parents

Rationale:

• Parents are often the first to recognize their child’s special abilities.
• They are the most significant mentors in their children’s lives.
• Parental love and expectations are essential for child development.
• They provide valuable insights and guidance to their children.

Utilizes a Likert scale with 32 items, assessing language, learning, psychomotor skills, motivation, personality, and creativity.

2. Questionnaire for Teachers

Rationale:

• Teachers spend significant time with the child.
• They interact with diverse students, gaining a broad understanding of their characteristics and potential.
• They observe students in various situations, including learning pace, preferred activities, and physical abilities.
• Like parents, they have a long-term relationship with students, witnessing their development.

Employs a Likert scale with 24 items, focusing on Renzulli’s three characteristics of giftedness: high capacity, commitment to task, and creativity.

3. Peer Nomination

Rationale:

• Peers are adept at recognizing superior skills in gifted children.
• They share various experiences with the child in and out of the classroom.
• They provide unique and complementary information compared to parents and teachers.

Consists of 12 questions, ensuring simplicity, clarity, relevance, and age-appropriateness.

5. Torrance Test of Creative Thinking

Assesses creativity in children and adolescents through four components: fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration.

Includes two subtests (each with forms A and B) for individual or group administration.

1. Verbal Test

Evaluates imagination through language use. Consists of 7 subtests:

1. Asking questions about stimuli (e.g., an object).
2. Imagining reasons to support ideas related to the stimuli.
3. Imagining consequences.
4. Improving an object.
5. Thinking of new uses for an object.
6. Asking original questions.
7. Imagining real situations.

2. Figural Test

Assesses imagination through design. Consists of 3 subtests:

1. Composing a picture.
2. Completing a picture.
3. Creating different designs using parallel lines.

6. Renzulli’s Enrichment Triad Model

This program addresses three components of intelligence:

1. Transactions: Skills for acquiring and processing information.
2. Content: Different ways of perceiving and learning.
3. Products: Results of mental operations leading to learning.

It fosters creative skill development from early instructional levels, considering students’ developmental stages and knowledge. Activities broaden children’s perspectives, providing basic skills related to creative production. Five manuals encourage divergent thinking in primary school children, each with 24 creativity activities at two levels of complexity. Teachers act as mediators for meaningful learning, following these principles:

• Present tasks in an interesting and challenging way.
• Design activities based on meaningful learning principles.
• Promote the transfer of learned skills to real-life situations.
• Create a flexible environment where all ideas are valued and analyzed.

7. Enrichment Curriculum

Offers additional and complementary experiences to the mainstream curriculum, tailored to students’ needs, interests, and abilities. It provides teachers with a model for fostering higher-thinking skills. Advantages include heterogeneous grouping, diverse learning opportunities, teacher-led adjustments, and targeted support. Disadvantages include the extra work involved in designing and implementing individualized programs.

8. Basic Usage of the Portfolio

A portfolio collects data from various assessment instruments, providing a comprehensive view of student performance, effort, progress, and achievements. It assesses skills, knowledge, attitudes, and work habits, promoting self-knowledge, self-reflection, and self-evaluation.

9. Process, Strategy, and Technique

1. Strategies: Deliberate and planned processes to achieve a goal, influenced by intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Strategies involve selecting and applying tactics, choosing a plan, and acquiring and controlling information.
2. Learning Processes: Mental operations involved in learning (e.g., attention, comprehension, acquisition, organization).
3. Techniques or Skills: Actions or activities used to implement a strategy, enabling specific tasks. Techniques are subordinate to strategies and are automatic in nature.

11. What is Meaningful Learning?

Meaningful learning, linked to constructivism, involves actively constructing knowledge by organizing, interpreting, and assimilating new information with prior knowledge. Students play an active role, becoming the protagonists of their learning, while teachers act as facilitators and guides.

12. Define Three Types of Intelligence According to Gardner

• Linguistic Intelligence: Ability to manage and structure the meanings and functions of words and language.
• Logical-Mathematical Intelligence: Ability to perform calculations, quantify, consider propositions, and test hypotheses.
• Visual-Spatial Intelligence: Ability to accurately perceive the visual and spatial world.

Other Intelligences:

• Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence: Ability to control body movements and handle objects skillfully.
• Musical Intelligence: Ability to appreciate, discriminate, transform, and express musical forms, and sensitivity to rhythm, pitch, and timbre.
• Interpersonal Intelligence: Ability to understand and respond appropriately to the moods, temperaments, motivations, and desires of others.
• Intrapersonal Intelligence: Ability to access one’s feelings, discern emotions, and reflect on thought processes.
• Naturalist Intelligence: Ability to understand the natural world and work effectively in it, using observation and hypothesis testing skills.

13. Contributions of Cognitivism to Educational Psychology

Cognitive psychology has advanced our understanding of learning processes and the roles of students and teachers. While behaviorism focuses on environmental factors, cognitivism emphasizes the importance of cognitive processes and the student’s active role in constructing knowledge. It highlights the active and creative nature of cognition and studies the cognitive processes involved in school learning. Cognitivism views the learner as an active constructor of knowledge, focusing on how we learn, remember, organize new information, and develop creativity.

17. How to Favor Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom

The approach involves four phases:

1. Identify Children’s Strengths: Observe and record children’s performance in different areas of knowledge using structured observation and activities related to the eight intelligences.
2. Place Children in Different Learning Areas: Implement a”cognitive curriculu” with diverse tasks and projects that cater to different intelligences. Recognize that all children possess each intelligence but at varying developmental levels influenced by heredity and environment.
3. Promote Strengths and Respect Diversity: Acknowledge individual differences and utilize the diversity of talents to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing. Provide support to enhance and develop strengths.
4. Capitalize on Strengths to Develop Other Areas (Transfer): Teach children to apply knowledge and skills learned in one area to other domains. This can be achieved through discovery learning, adapting teaching styles to individual strengths, and leveraging preferred areas to engage students in other activities.

18. Informal Tests in Identifying Students with High Abilities

Informal tests gather information from parents, teachers, and peers to identify exceptional abilities in students. This information is then compared with formal test results. Trained professionals should administer these tests.

Three types of informal tests are used:

1. Parent observation scales.
2. Teacher observation scales.
3. Peer nominations.

Parents provide valuable insights into cognitive, linguistic, psychological, creative, and learning characteristics through their close relationship with their children. However, potential biases include heightened parental awareness or concerns about the school’s focus on identification rather than support.

Teachers use observation checklists and analyze student reasoning and responses to identify giftedness. However, challenges arise as gifted characteristics may not always be consistently displayed. The advantage is that teachers can tailor their approach once they recognize a student’s abilities.

Peers are effective in identifying superior skills due to their shared experiences and unique perspectives. However, age and maturity should be considered to ensure accurate assessments, as younger children may base their judgments on personal feelings.

19. Characteristics and Functions of Learning Strategies

Characteristics

1. Strategies involve a set of processes or mental operations.
2. These processes are initiated deliberately and are goal-oriented.
3. Processes are scheduled and planned to achieve a specific objective.
4. Strategies are used to control cognitive activity.
5. There is a coordination of strategies across different phases of the learning process.

Functions

1. Improve learning performance.
2. Promote autonomous learning by encouraging student involvement in the learning process.
3. Enhance students’ ability to learn how to learn through systematic and continuous use.
4. Facilitate easier, faster, and higher-quality learning through appropriate techniques.

The functions of strategies depend on student learning goals and the optimization of cognitive processes.

20. Contributions of Behaviorism to Educational Psychology

Behaviorism shifted the focus from the mind to observable behavior, arguing that consciousness cannot be scientifically studied. It emphasized the study of behavior through external observation. Behaviorism contributed to learning theories, particularly stimulus-response (S-R) theories, where learning is seen as the result of associations between stimuli and responses through conditioning (both classical and operant).

21. Difference Between Behaviorism and Cognitivism

22. Observational Learning

Observational learning (also known as vicarious or social learning) is a type of indirect learning where the learner observes and/or imitates the behavior of a model. According to Bandura, anything that can be learned directly can also be learned through observation, which can be more efficient. Observational learning involves four processes: attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation/reinforcement.

23. Rimm and Beltran Test

This questionnaire measures creativity in primary school children, identifying skills and traits associated with creative ability. Different versions cater to specific age groups. Students simply answer “Yes” or “No” to the questions. In addition to creativity, the test can reveal personality characteristics.

24. How to Assess Creativity

Assessing creativity involves considering various measures: classroom work and production, student initiative, originality, creativity in tasks and problem-solving, and classical creativity tests. The Beltran and Rimm creativity questionnaire (discussed in the previous question) and the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking are commonly used. The Torrance test assesses fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration through verbal and figural tasks. Other factors to consider when assessing creativity include:

1. The complementary nature of different evaluation methods.
2. The limitations of single measures (e.g., a creativity test may not be valid for measuring artistic or musical creativity).
3. The use of alternative assessment methods (e.g., drawings, stories, narratives).
4. The need to create classroom environments that encourage initiative, originality, and creativity.

25. Objectives of the PEI (Integrated Educational Program)

The PEI aims to improve cognitive functioning by developing basic processes involved in information processing stages. It also includes training in metacognitive strategies. Teachers encourage the use of metacognitive components by asking students to explain what functions they use in problem-solving, how they use them, and why they use them.

26. Classification and Assessment of Learning Strategies

1. Selection Strategy

Relates new information to prior knowledge, identifying relevant information and discarding irrelevant details to simplify processing. Techniques include emphasizing, summarizing, extracting main ideas, and outlining.

a) Emphasizing: Highlighting key ideas in a text or activity.

b) Summarizing: Capturing essential ideas and reducing the length of the material. Teaching hierarchical summarizing involves explaining its purpose, demonstrating how to create a summary, preparing students to work with summaries, reducing support, and providing group feedback.

c) Extracting Main Ideas: Selecting the most important ideas from a text. Teaching this skill involves presenting the skill, providing examples, direct instruction, guided practice, and independent practice.

d) Outlining: Similar to summarizing, capturing essential ideas and reducing text length.

2. Repetition Strategy

Retains information in short-term memory for a specific time. Two forms of repetition exist:

a) Maintenance Repetition: Keeping information active in short-term memory.

b) Elaborative Repetition: Establishing meaningful connections between new and prior information.

3. Organization Strategy

Combines, groups, or interrelates selected content in a coherent and meaningful way. It addresses two situations: 1) abundant information, 2) establishing relationships between unrelated elements. Techniques include sorting, knowledge networks, and top-level structures.

4. Elaboration Strategy

Relates new knowledge to existing knowledge to enhance retention. Techniques include:

1. Elaborative Interrogation: Asking “why” questions about facts or ideas.
2. Analogies: Explaining abstract concepts using simple examples.
3. Mnemonics: Associating learning materials with images or semantic elements. Common mnemonics include the method of loci, the pegword method, the keyword method, and the link method.

5. Supporting Strategies

• Intrinsic Motivation: Techniques include challenge, curiosity, and control.
• Attitudes: Positive learning climate, sense of security, and personal satisfaction.
• Anxiety Control: Student’s self-regulation of learning-related anxiety.

6. Metacognitive Strategies

Metacognition involves planning, using strategies, reviewing, and controlling learning. Understanding learning processes enables students to direct and adapt their learning effectively. Main components include:

Knowledge. Planning. Control of learning. Regulation. Evaluation.

Assessment of Strategies

Common evaluation methods include:

1. Observation: Gathering information about cognitive processes used during task execution.
2. Interview: Understanding student strategies in cognitive tasks or learning situations.
3. Self-reports: Students describe their own cognitive processes orally or in writing.
4. Inventory: Using existing inventories or scales to assess strategy use (note that there are ongoing discussions about the validity and reliability of these instruments).

27. ACRA Inventories

The ACRA (Acquisition, Consolidation, Retrieval, and Support) inventories, developed by Gallego and Roman, assess strategic behavior in adolescents. Four subscales evaluate the use of these strategies in educational contexts. The scales are published by TEA and are based on information processing theory.

29. Metacognitive Learning Strategies

Metacognition involves students’ judgments about their own cognitive abilities, tasks, and how to approach them. Knowledge of cognitive strategies can influence performance. Main components include:

1. Knowledge: Understanding the processes and skills needed for planning and learning.
2. Control of Learning: Knowing how and when to use strategies to achieve learning goals. This involves self-regulatory actions.
3. Planning: Reflection before the learning process.
4. Regulation: Self-direction of knowledge, monitoring progress and achievements.
5. Evaluation: Assessing the effectiveness of the learning process.