UTC Akademic Education Site

Posts Tagged ‘learning’

Brenda Geier K-12 Reading Specialist – The research tells us that with the support of parents, caregivers, and early childhood educators, as well as exposure to a literacy-rich environment, children progress from emergent to conventional reading. By interacting through reading aloud and conversation, children are exposed to learning early. It is very important to read aloud to children and provide opportunities for them to talk about the stories that they hear. As Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, and Wilkinson (1985) state, “The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children, especially during the preschool years”. It helps them develop oral language, cognitive skills, and concepts of print and phonemic awareness.

Children read to develop background knowledge about a range of topics and build a large vocabulary, which aids them in later comprehension and development of reading strategies. They also watch how others read and therefore become familiar with the reading process. They are constantly learning.

Still, many enter elementary school without a strong background in literacy. These are the children who are most at risk of developing reading problems. To provide high chances of success, teachers should be involved in professional development to learn more about child development as it relates to literacy acquisition.

At age 3-4, children begin to “read” their favorite books by themselves. They begin to use “mock handwriting” (Clay, 1975). Around age 5, in kindergarten, most children are considered emergent readers. They make rapid growth in literacy skills if they are exposed to literacy-rich environments (Burns, Griffin, & Snow, 1999). Children may try to recall what has been written or use a picture created with the text to reread instead of using the letter clues (Kamberelis & Sulzby, 1988; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Although they are beginning to apply phonetic knowledge to create invented spellings, there is a lapse in time before they use phonetic clues to read what they write.

For those parents who choose to home-school their children, an enormous advantage exists to teach children phonetic knowledge, sight words and decoding before they enter school. This learning advantage gives them power with text that most will not be equipped with.

Most children will become early readers during the first grade. They commonly look at beginning and ending letters in order to decode unfamiliar words (Clay, 1991; Pinnell, 1996b; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). They know a small number of sight words.

By second grade, they are transitional readers, able to read unknown text with more independence. They use meaning, grammatical, and letter cues more fully and use pictures in a limited way while reading (Clay, 1991; International Reading Association & National Association for the Education of Young Children, 1998; Pinnell, 1996b; Snow, burns, & Griffin, 1998). Transitional spellers can apply spelling rules, patterns, and other strategies to put words on paper.

By the third grade, children are typically fluent readers. They can read for meaning while focusing less on decoding. They may use transitional and phonetic spellings to spell infrequently used words.

The child’s concept of words changes as the child’s literacy development evolves. Children construct their own knowledge thus the difference between how an adult understands reading and writing and how a child understands reading and writing.

Children progress through several categories of phonological skills from rhyming to blending. The most difficult task involves the complete segmentation of phonemes and manipulation of them to form new words (Griffith & Olson, 1992; Hall & Moats, 1999). If we begin teaching our children how to segment and manipulate phonemes at the pre-school age, they will have the tools necessary to spell correctly, understand the meaning of words and be able to write and read complete sentences with ease.

Screen and assessment are crucial tools to determine children’s literacy needs. Data helps teachers identify children who are developing at a less than normal pace and are in need of intervention. The earlier, the better to find these children. Throughout kindergarten and first grade, children can be screened for phonemic awareness, alphabetic knowledge, and an understanding of basic language concepts (Texas Education Agency, 1997a). Performance based assessments, such as observational records of reading and writing, developmental benchmarks, and portfolios can also be used to inform daily teaching (Allington & Cunningham, 1996; Burns, Griffin, & Snow, 1999; international Reading Association & National Association for the Education of Young Children, 1998; Slegers, 1996).

Teachers, parents and caregivers need to understand and support children’s emergent literacy and, in later years, children’s transition to conventional reading and writing. Teachers, administrators, and specialists must understand the developmental nature of emergent literacy and early conventional literacy and ensure that the curriculum and instructional materials are appropriate. Parents need to be educated in child development and support sharing and exploring literacy with their children. The literacy program needs to support children’s social, emotional, aesthetic, maturational, and cognitive needs. The reading program must be balanced and include quality literature, writing opportunities, development of phonemic awareness and alphabetic knowledge.

Read the rest of this entry »

The word “cognition” is defined as “the act of knowing” or “knowledge.” Cognitive skills therefore refer to those skills that make it possible for us to know.

It should be noted that there is nothing that any human being knows, or can do, that he has not learned. This of course excludes natural body functions, such as breathing, as well as the reflexes, for example the involuntary closing of the eye when an object approaches it. But apart from that a human being knows nothing, or cannot do anything, that he has not learned. Therefore, all cognitive skills must be TAUGHT, of which the following cognitive skills are the most important:

CONCENTRATION

Paying attention must be distinguished from concentration. Paying attention is a body function, and therefore does not need to be taught. However, paying attention as such is a function that is quite useless for the act of learning, because it is only a fleeting occurrence. Attention usually shifts very quickly from one object or one thing to the next. The child must first be taught to focus his attention on something and to keep his attention focused on this something for some length of time. When a person focuses his attention for any length of time, we refer to it as concentration.

Concentration rests on two legs. First, it is an act of will and cannot take place automatically. Second, it is also a cognitive skill, and therefore has to be taught.

Although learning disability specialists acknowledge that “the ability to concentrate and attend to a task for a prolonged period of time is essential for the student to receive necessary information and complete certain academic activities,” it seems that the ability to concentrate is regarded as a “fafrotsky” — a word coined by Ivan T. Sanderson, and standing for “things that FAll FROm The SKY.” Concentration must be taught, after which one’s proficiency can be constantly improved by regular and sustained practice.

PERCEPTION

The terms “processing” and “perception” are often used interchangeably.

Before one can learn anything, perception must take place, i.e. one has to become aware of it through one of the senses. Usually one has to hear or see it. Subsequently one has to interpret whatever one has seen or heard. In essence then, perception means interpretation. Of course, lack of experience may cause a person to misinterpret what he has seen or heard. In other words, perception represents our apprehension of a present situation in terms of our past experiences, or, as stated by the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): “We see things not as they are but as we are.”

The following situation will illustrate how perception correlates with previous experience:

Suppose a person parked his car and walks away from it while continuing to look back at it. As he goes further and further away from his car, it will appear to him as if his car is gradually getting smaller and smaller. In such a situation none of us, however, would gasp in horror and cry out, “My car is shrinking!” Although the sensory perception is that the car is shrinking rapidly, we do not interpret that the car is changing size. Through past experiences we have learned that objects do not grow or shrink as we walk toward or away from them. You have learned that their actual size remains constant, despite the illusion. Even when one is five blocks away from one’s car and it seems no larger than one’s fingernail, one would interpret it as that it is still one’s car and that it hasn’t actually changed size. This learned perception is known as size constancy.

Pygmies, however, who live deep in the rain forests of tropical Africa, are not often exposed to wide vistas and distant horizons, and therefore do not have sufficient opportunities to learn size constancy. One Pygmy, removed from his usual environment, was convinced he was seeing a swarm of insects when he was actually looking at a herd of buffalo at a great distance. When driven toward the animals he was frightened to see the insects “grow” into buffalo and was sure that some form of witchcraft had been at work.

A person needs to INTERPRET sensory phenomena, and this can only be done on the basis of past experience of the same, similar or related phenomena. Perceptual ability, therefore, heavily depends upon the amount of perceptual practice and experience that the subject has already enjoyed. This implies that perception is a cognitive skill that can be improved tremendously through judicious practice and experience.

MEMORY

A variety of memory problems are evidenced in the learning disabled. Some major categories of memory functions wherein these problems lie are:

Receptive memory: This refers to the ability to note the physical features of a given stimulus to be able to recognize it at a later time. The child who has receptive processing difficulties invariably fails to recognize visual or auditory stimuli such as the shapes or sounds associated with the letters of the alphabet, the number system, etc.

Sequential memory: This refers to the ability to recall stimuli in their order of observation or presentation. Many dyslexics have poor visual sequential memory. Naturally this will affect their ability to read and spell correctly. After all, every word consists of letters in a specific sequence. In order to read one has to perceive the letters in sequence, and also remember what word is represented by that sequence of letters. By simply changing the sequence of the letters in “name” it can become “mean” or “amen”. Some also have poor auditory sequential memory, and therefore may be unable to repeat longer words orally without getting the syllables in the wrong order, for example words like “preliminary” and “statistical”.

Rote memory: This refers to the ability to learn certain information as a habit pattern. The child who has problems in this area is unable to recall with ease those responses which should have been automatic, such as the alphabet, the number system, multiplication tables, spelling rules, grammatical rules, etc.

Short-term memory: Short-term memory lasts from a few seconds to a minute; the exact amount of time may vary somewhat. When you are trying to recall a telephone number that was heard a few seconds earlier, the name of a person who has just been introduced, or the substance of the remarks just made by a teacher in class, you are calling on short-term memory. You need this kind of memory to retain ideas and thoughts when writing a letter, since you must be able to keep the last sentence in mind as you compose the next. You also need this kind of memory when you work on problems. Suppose a problem required that we first add two numbers together (step 1: add 15 + 27) and next divide the sum (step 2: divide sum by 2). If we did this problem in our heads, we would need to retain the result of step 1 (42) momentarily, while we apply the next step (divide by 2). Some space in our short-term memory is necessary to retain the results of step 1.

Long-term memory: This refers to the ability to retrieve information of things learned in the past.

Until the learning disabled develop adequate skills in recalling information, they will continue to face each learning situation as though it is a new one. No real progress can be attained by either the child or the teacher when the same ground has to be covered over and over because the child has forgotten. It would appear that the most critical need that the learning disabled have is to be helped to develop an effective processing system for remembering, because without it their performance will always remain at a level much below what their capabilities indicate.

Strangely, though, while memory is universally considered a prerequisite skill to successful learning, attempts to delineate its process in the learning disabled are few, and fewer still are methods to systematically improve it.

LOGICAL THINKING

In his book “Brain Building” Dr. Karl Albrecht states that logical thinking is not a magical process or a matter of genetic endowment, but a learned mental process. It is the process in which one uses reasoning consistently to come to a conclusion. Problems or situations that involve logical thinking call for structure, for relationships between facts, and for chains of reasoning that “make sense.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Your computer can be used as a creative tool in your quest to learn a foreign language. Some innovative ideas can turn your language education into an entertaining, truly memorable experience.

* Audio Modification

Many companies produce software packages that enable you to transform your voice (or someone else’s). You can make your voice feminine, masculine, or robotic. It can be raised to a high pitch or lowered to bass tones.

So how does this help you learn a new language?

Many foreign languages (French and German, for example) assign gender to nouns. When learning new vocabulary, why not record feminine nouns in a female voice, masculine nouns in a male voice, and neuter nouns in a robotic voice? This approach can also be used with other types of vocabulary learning. Perhaps you could record a list of German dative verbs in a woman’s voice and a list of German accusative verbs in a male voice. You can even take audio files that have been recorded by other people and make them more interesting by morphing voices or adding sound effects.

An internet search for ‘voice cloaking’ or ‘voice modification software’ will provide numerous resources to choose from.

* Don’t Just Print

If you own a color printer you can spice up your vocabulary lists with bursts of color – perhaps feminine nouns in red, masculine nouns in blue, and neuter in dark grey. You might want to highlight irregular verbs in another color – or perhaps apply bold or italics to make them stand out on the page. Experiment with various fonts and weights.
Read the rest of this entry »

More than likely, when you learned how to add, you started on the right and moved to the left. If you were adding whole numbers, you added the ones, “carried” if necessary, and repeated for the tens, hundreds and so on. This works well on paper, and it is the most efficient paper and pencil method; however, adding in the other direction has several desirable advantages: the left to right method promotes a better understanding of place value, it can be done mentally with much greater ease, and it does not require that numbers be lined up in a column. Students can learn left to right addition, so they have another method to choose from when presented with addition problems.

Left to right addition involves adding the largest place values first. As you move from left to right, you keep a cumulative total, so it is simply a number of smaller addition problems. To give you an idea of how it works and what it sounds like, consider the example, 677 + 938.

Begin by adding the left most place values. In the example this is 600 plus 900 equals 1500. Add the values in the next place, one at a time, to the previous sum, and keep track of the new sum each time. In the example, 1500 + 70 is 1570, 1570 + 30 is 1600. For students who are more proficient at this algorithm, they don’t necessarily think “plus 70″ or “add 30.” Their thought process, if said out loud might sound like, “600, 1500, 1570, 1600, . . .” Continue adding the values in each subsequent place until finished. The final steps in the example are 1600 + 7 is 1607, 1607 plus 8 is 1615. The sum is 1615.
Read the rest of this entry »