thepeculiarsblog

Most visible is the manifest curriculum the student is expected to learn. This curriculum includes the reading, mathematics, science, literature, social studies and other school subjects that he or she is taught. The second curriculum is not so clearly visible. This is the latent curriculum which is uniquely taught to and differently learned by each student. This is the curriculum which teaches each student who he is in relation to others. Subject-related affect in a subject or category of learning tasks may be defined behaviorally in terms of whether or not the individual would voluntarily engage in additional learning tasks of this type if free to make such a choice. Subject-related affect is largely a perceptual phenomenon based on the way in which students classify learning tasks and based on the judgements they make of the adequacy of their performance relative to the other students in the school or class they attend. School-related affect is a general disposition to regard the school and school learning in a positive or negative way. If this process of adequate or inadequate appraisals with regard to learning tasks is generalized over a large number of tasks over a number of years, eventually the object of appraisal for the student becomes partially shifted from the school subjects or the school to the self. While mental health and self concept cannot be sharply distinguished, we may think of mental health as concerned more directly with ego development, with reduction in general anxiety and with the ability to take stress and frustration with a minimum of debilitating affect.

Affective entry characteristics are important in determining or influencing the student's achievement. And also affect is a causal link in determining learning and in accounting for educational achievement. Relevant affect is determined by the individual's perceptions about his achievement. In addition, affect helps to determine the extent to which the learner will put forth the necessary effort to learn a specific learning task. It also determines the learner's efforts when he encounter difficulties and frustration in the attempt to learn something. Affective entry characteristics are relatively weak and unformed early in the individual's school learning career but become more structured and effective as the individual accumulates a history of learning. The student interprets evidence and feedback provided in the school as an indication of whether he has learned well or poorly and that he then relates the evidence to what he perceives to be related learning tasks encountered subsequently. Affect which is related to a particular class of learning tasks, such as reading, arithmetic or science and which we have termed subject-related affect; affect which is more general and related to the school and school learning; and finally affect which is about the self as a learner. While affective entry characteristics are likely to become resistant to change after the individual has accumulated a long history of experiences with particular types of learning tasks, there must be a variety of means which may be effective in increasing the effort a student will devote to a particular new learning task. For a new series of learning tasks success on the learning tasks which are early in the series are likely to have more productive consequences than failure on the early tasks followed by success on the later tasks. If students perceive the learning tasks as new and different or as unrelated to previous learning tasks, they are likely to begin with relatively neutral or even positive affective entry characteristics in spite of their previous experiences.
Quality of Instruction is a particular characteristics of the interaction between instruction and students. Some components of the quality of instruction are Cues, Participation and Reinforcement. These are the major characteristics in the instruction. The use of feedback and corrective procedures as one means of ensuring that each student gets as good quality of instruction as he needs. Students can acquire learning procedures which will enable them to learn well under less than ideal qualities of instruction. Quality of instruciton is a causal link in determining learning and in accounting for educational achievement. Quality of instruction at any given time period also determines much of the future history of the learner within the schools as well as in the post-school years.

A cognitive learning task as indicated by the materials of instruction can be analyzed with considerable objectivity by competent judges. This suggests that a learning task can be defined, its elements analyzed and the relations among the elements made explicit. The elements which required little more than knowledge types of learning would be easier for students to learn those requiring comprehension and that the most difficult types of learning would be those involving application and analysis. The different learning tasks do not require each other and they could be learned in many different orders-and could even be learned in random order. What such an order suggests is that there are no necessary relations among the learning tasks and that in terms of cognitive, psychomotor or affective tasks, the learning of one task is not required for the learning of the other tasks in the series.
Explanation for variation in level or rate of achievement on a learning task emphasizes the history of the learner. If all students have the necessary prerequisites for a particular learning task, they would be able to learn it with less variation in level or rate of learning than if the students vary greatly in their attainment of the prerequisites. The prerequisites or cognitive entry behaviors constitute a necessary link between the learners and the accomplishment of the learning task. In other words, there is a repeated cycle of cognitive entry behaviors, learning tasks and achievement which have a long-term determinism over much of the students' school learning-unless the cycle is broken by intervention which alters the cognitive entry behaviors at strategic points in the learning.The task of providing the specific cognitive entry behaviors is much easier to do than that of providing the generalized entry behaviors. In the micro-studies it is evident that specific cognitive entry behaviors are highly alterable, especially in the initial learning tasks in a series.