STUFF I CANT RETAIN Flashcards
- What evidence regarding the human cerebellum has been found to the concept of neuroplasticity and practice? (1 point)
(Hutchinson et al, 2003) found that the cerebellum (movement control) is bigger in professional keyboard players, and correlates with hours of practise
- What’s the problem with defining expertise based on peer-review? (1 point)
What defines an expert may be vague or subjective (e.g. expert artist)
Perceived expertise may not mean real expertise (e.g. wine critic experiment)
Experts are often defined or decided by other experts (defined by peer-review)
- What criticisms have been made of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule? (2 points)
1 This is based on the violinists completing an “AVERAGE” of 10,000 hours -there was considerable variability
2 Depends on the competition – e.g. due to lack of competition Steeve Faloon became the best in the world in only 200 hours – its more about how many you do relative to those you are competing against
- What is the capacity of working memory according to Miller, (1956) and according to Cowan (2001)? (1 point)
According to Miller – 7 items plus or minus 2
According to Cowan – only 4
- How does chunking improve performance in a skill? (1 point)
It reduces the cognitive load, as the chunks take up less working memory than if they were not chunked.
- What did de Groot (1948) discover about expert chess players’ thinking processes during a match? (1 point)
De Groot (1946/1978) found that chess experts determined the best move without an extensive search (unlike computers and novices).
- What are mental representations and how do better mental representations give experts their advantage? (1 point)
Mental representations are patterns or chunks of information (e.g. facts, rules, images, relationships) held in the long term memory
They allow large amounts of information to be processed quickly, avoiding working memory limits.
- Describe six strategies that could be used to foster the circumstances that encourage thinking in education, according to Willingham (2009). (3 points)
- appropriate difficulty
- Organise everything around questions - this drives curiosity
- avoid overloading working memory (as per cognitive load theory)
- Time the presentation of questions - not too early (before they have the necessary knowledge) and not too late (after they have been told the answer)
- Accept and act on variation in student ability/preparation/prior knowledge.
- Use change to regain attention.
- Describe the principles of story-telling (Willingham, 2009). (2 points)
Story-telling principles – four C’s
Causality
(joining elements with causal links instead of an unrelated list)
Conflict
(some element of struggle, between characters or situations)
Complications
(sufficient nuance to avoid boredom)
Character
(could be conceptual, abstract, or inferred)
- Kim (1999) manipulated level of inference required when reading some text. What did they find? (1 point)
im (1999) found that people rated text, which required medium-difficulty inferences to be made, as more interesting than texts, where a harder or easier level of inference was required.
Speaks to the principle of NOT TOO HARD, NOT TOO EASY cognitive load
- Why might it be the case that students have to learn shallow knowledge before they can grasp deep knowledge (Willingham, 2009)? (2 points)
The shallow knowledge (e.g. lists, definitions) may provide the chunking needed to get to grips with the deep knowledge (e.g. underlying abstract principles).
- Describe three strategies that may help students understand complex content. (3 points)
- use an incremental approach, gradually building from easy to harder material
- provide multiple familiar concrete applications that can be compared to help extract the underlying principles (provide examples)
- get students to generate questions about content because this has also been found to aid understanding
- Describe the three condition testing effect experiment conducted by Roediger & Karpicke (2006) (methods, results, conclusions). (3 points)
Methods: asked participants to memorize a scientific passage by:
1. Repeated study (they read the text four times, no test; labelled SSSS on graph);
2. Single test (they read the text three times, one recall test: SSST); OR
3. Repeated test (they read the text once – then were tested on their recall three times: STTT).
Results: Then they were tested after 5 mins and after 1 week. Repeated study was best after 5 mins; but repeated testing was 50% higher than repeated study after 1 week.
Conclusions: Testing aids memory (the TESTING EFFECT)
- Describe the 4 condition experiment by Karpicke & Roediger (2008), comparing testing and presentation methods of learning (methods, results). (2 points)
Methods: compared four combinations of testing and presentation (see figure) for foreign language vocabulary (Swahili)
1, Continue to present and test items, 2. drop correct items and test others, 3. Continue presenting, no testing 4. Drop correct items, no testing
Results: Initially, all groups performed the same.
BUT the groups that involved testing were much better after 1 week (also, no advantage to dropping successfully learned words to allow more time on unlearned words).
- What are the limitations of the Pegword system? (1 point)
- You need to put in a lot of work to remember the pegwords reliably enough.
- it’s harder to use for abstract, hard to visualize words (“morality”) than easy to visualize words (“car”).
- Describe the method of remembering names (with your own example) that was demonstrated by Morris et al. (1978) to lead to 80% correct recall. (1 point)
Step 1: Search for an imageable substitute for the person’s name. Jo Brown = Joey (baby kangaroo) + Brown (colour).
Step 2: Select some prominent feature of the person’s face – and link that feature with the name substitute (e.g. baby kangaroo or JOEY nestled in my eyebrows, which are BROWN in colour).
This method led to 80% recall (Morris et al., 1978).
