07/10/2006
Affective Outcomes of School Learning
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.
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07/06/2006
Affective Entry Behaviors and Quality of Instruction
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.
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07/05/2006
A Learning Unit and Cognitive Entry Behaviors
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.
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07/04/2006
Classroom Assessment and Individual Differences in Learners and Learning
In education, assessment is needed for different purposes. There are two kinds of classroom assessment. The first one is Formative Assessment which is ungraded testing used before or during instruction to aid in planning and diagnosis. The second one is Summative Assessment which summarizes students' accomplishments. Learning is supported by frequent testing using cumulative questions that ask students to apply and integrate knowledge. There are two kinds of traditional testing that are Objective Test(multiple-choice, true/false, fill-in and matching items) and Essay Test. Authentic assessment test skills and abilities as they would be applied in real-life situations. Portfolio and Exhibition are the two examples of authentic assessment. Portfolio is a collection of the student's work in an area, showing growth, self-reflection and achievement. Exhibiton is a performance test or demonstration of learning that is public and usually takes an extended time to prepare. Mastery Learning is that most students can attain a high level of learning capability if instruction is approached sensitively and systematically, if students are helped when and where they have learning difficulties, if they are given sufficient time to achieve mastery and if there is some clear criterion of what constitutes mastery. In this model of school learning, the central focus of the research on the effects of particular strategies of teaching-learning rather than on the characteristics of the teacher or the characteristics of the students. One way of approaching a minimal-error system in the process of schooling is likely that a systematic way of identifying and correcting errors in group instruction and individual learning. In this theory, there are three variables which are Cognitive Entry Behaviors, Affective Entry Characteristics and Quality of Instruction. The learning outcomes in this theory are; 1.Level and Type of Achievement 2.Rate of Learning 3.Affective Outcomes. Also there are two basic assumptions in this theory. The first one is that the history of the learner is at the core of school learning. The second one is that modifications are possible in the entry characteristics of the individual, in the instruction for the learner or in both. To conclude, modern societies no longer can content themselves with the selection of talent; they must find the means for developing talent.
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07/03/2006
Time and School Learning and Standardized Testing
In this study, instead of setting a fixed amount of time within each class to learn particular facts and skills, these alternate strategies have set fixed criteira of achievement and provided students with varying amounts of time and help to permit almost everyone to attain mastery of these achievement criteria. However, in either a fixed-time classroom or a variable-time classroom would find that different students spend differing amounts of time directly involved in the learning. In this model, there are two types of time; Elapsed Time and Time-on-task. Learning is a function of time-on-task, other things being equal. Also three variable classes, which are cognitive entry behaviors, affective entry characteristics and quality of instruction, are used in this study.The model states that student characteristics in a given learning envirınment affect the amount of time that a student spends on-tsak which affects the student's achievement. There are two studies related with this paper; Naturalistic Study and Experimental Study. Some of the results of the study are; 1.There exists a high associational relationship between time-on-task and achievement, 2.There is a significant correlation between cognitive entry behaviors and time-on-task, 3. There is relative importance of each of the antecedent variables considered separately on time-on-task and achievement. If equality is a desired goal in education one must complement inequality in entering characteristics with inequality in amounts of elapsed time and help provided. To conclude, initial differences in global, stable characteristics such as intelligence can be overcome by providing all students with relevant, learnable pre-requisite skills and knowledge.
Evaluation is decision making about student performance and about appropriate teaching strategies. Measurement is evaluation put in quantitative terms.Assessment includes measurement, but is broader because it includes all kinds of ways to sample and observe students' skills,knowledge and abilities. In norm-referenced tests, a student's performence is compared to the average performance of others. In criterion-referenced tests, scores are compared to a preestablished standard. The mean(arithmetical average), median(middel score) and mode(most common score) are all measures of central tendency.The standard deviation is the measure of how widely scores vary from the mean. There are different kinds of scores; Percentile Rank, Grade-Equivalent Score and Standard Scores(such as z score and T score). If test results are consistent, that test is raliable. And validity of a test is degree to which a test measures what is intended. There are three types of standardized tests; Achievement Tests, Diagnostic Tests, Aptitude Tests.
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Innocence In Education and Individual Differences in School Achievement
We have been innocents in education till new knowledge, new methods of detecting and measuring phenomena and improved communication made us aware of more about education, so we are no longer innocents about the mistakes which we used to in education. There are seven areas of education where our innocence is being threatened: Individual differences in Learning, School Achievement and Its Effect on Personality, What can be Learned, Manifest and Latent Curriculum, Role of Testing, Education as Part of a Larger Social System. Students differ in the rate at which they can learn-not in the level to which they can achieve or in their basic capacity to learn. In addition, the term "individual differences" is the effect of particular school conditions rather than of basic differences in the capabilities of the students. Repeated success or failure in school over a number of years appears to increase the probability of the student's gaining a positive view of himself and high self-esteem or vice versa. Also the highest students in the inferior school have a more positive view of themselves than the lowest students in the superior school, even though the two groups of students have almost the same level of tested achievement. To conclude, it is the perception of how well one is doing relative to others in the same situation that appears to be a key link between school achievement and personality effects.
Individual differences in school achievement is affected by seven areas which are; Learning Unit, Laboratory and School Learning, Individual Variation, Achievement Variation in School Settings, Entry Behavior, Affective Entry Characteristics and Quality of Instruction. Availability to the learner of requisite entry behavior determines the extent to which a specific learning task can be learned. Affective entry characteristics determine the conditions under which the learner will engage in a learning task. The quality of instruction determines the efficiency with which a learner will accomplish a learning task.
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