Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
“Terrible,” Kelly responded. “He grilled me, asking me specifically how I would teach
a certain topic, and what I would do in the case of two students disrupting my class. He
treated me like I didn't know anything. Brenna, a friend of mine who teaches there, told me
about him
How was yours?”
“Gosh, I thought mine was good. He asked me the same questions, but I thought he was
just trying to find out how we would think about teaching if he hired us.”
...
Kelly and Lenore interpreted their interviews very differently, Kelly viewing it
as being “grilled” but Lenore feeling as if the interviewer only wanted to examine
her thinking. Kelly's interpretation was influenced by her friend, Brenna, whose
description created a set of expectations in her.
People's perceptions are constructed, and because they are constructed they differ
among students. The arrows to the right of
perception
in Fig. 5.6 are curved to
remind you that peoples' perceptions will vary. And, since the knowledge people
construct depends on what they already know, perceptions also depend on prior
knowledge. This helps us understand why two people who have the same experience
or witness the same event may interpret it very differently.
Accurate perceptions are essential for learning, because our perceptions of what
we see, hear, touch, taste, or smell are what enter working memory, and if these
perceptions are not accurate, the information that is ultimately stored in long-term
memory will also be inaccurate.
The only way we can determine whether we are accurately perceiving what oth-
ers mean is to ask them. This is the source of activities in human relations workshops
where people are taught
perception checking
in the form of questions, such as,
“What I hear you saying is
Is that correct?” While the question does indeed
seem sort of artificial, it is a mechanism for increasing the accuracy of perceptions.
...
Encoding
After people attend to and perceive information and organize it in working mem-
ory it is ready for
encoding
, which is the process of representing information in
long-term memory (Anderson, 2007). This information can be represented either
visually or verbally, when people construct schemas that relate ideas to each
other.
Earlier in the chapter we described
maintenance rehearsal
, which was defined as
the process of retaining information in working memory until it is used or forgot-
ten. However, if rehearsed enough, this information can be transferred to long-term
memory, and this is the strategy learners often use to remember factual informa-
tion, such as specific dates and math facts like 6
54. Teachers commonly use
rehearsal, such as practicing with flash cards, to help their students learn math facts.
Rehearsal is an inefficient encoding strategy, however, because the information in
long-term memory exists in isolation. This was described earlier in the chapter as
rote learning.
In contrast with rote learning, we want the information to be encoded meaning-
fully; we want it to be connected to other information, such as the illustration with
×
9
=
