Introduction
How is your memory? Do you remember what you did 10 years ago, but not what day of the week it is today? Are dates such as anniversaries of relatives important to you? If you are married, they better be!Do you know that when you are intoxicated it is the result of just having added toxins to your blood? Do you that is not good to do over and over and over? Your brain will eventually get even with you for treating it badly.
Some people call misusing of drugs or alcohol as getting stupid. In the long run, they are right. It is very sad and frustrating to me that there are thousands of people out there who would give anything to have a normal functioning brain without learning or other disabilities while others are abusing their gift of a well functioning brain.
Enough of the lecture, now on with more on learning theories.
Thought for Today
Have you given much thought about how people learn? Have you thought about what your children's teachers do behind the scenes to make lessons that are appropriate for all children? Do you realize that your son or daughter might learn differently from their brother or sister, or friends? Educators are faced with this daily.
If no child is to be left behind, it is important to know how to teach all children. Now with the new Common Core standards we still can not leave children behind, and hopefully we will have more children learning to compete in this 21st century and shrinking world. We do not want the USA to be left behind as it appears to be doing when it comes to a labor force ready for today's technology.
What is Cognitive Behavior and Why is it Important?
One way to define Cognitive Behavior is to include the use of behaviors related to intellectual processes such at thinking, reasoning, memorizing and problem solving. It also includes analyzing and applying. (Information retrieved on January 19, 2014 from: http://www.upei.ca/~xliu/measurement/glossary.htm)
However among learning theorists, there is a Behaviorist Theory, and a Cognitive Theory. You can see how it gets confusing. Several people think the behaviors overlap and others prefer to keep them separate studies.
As an educator I just want my students to be successful adults, so I do my best to prepare them for the demands of the future. As you search the WWW, you will find a wealth of information on learning theories and behaviors.
Learning how individual students think, reason, memorize, problem solve, analyze, and apply information is important for those writing curriculum, and very important for those planning lessons based on that curriculum. Remember the people that plan the curriculum (including what must be learned during a year, and what books the school district will use to meet the state and federal standards for learning) are not the people teaching it.
Metagognitive Skills
As students develop learning styles and the ways that they are able to successfully perform cognitive behaviors, they are developing their metagognitive skills. Do individuals have different metagognitive skills? Yes.
There is a blog site, Udemy, and their tagline says that they are "the world's largest destination for online courses". On January 10th of this year Eric James Anderson posted an insightful blog entry titled, Metacognitive Strategies for Expert Learning. I will add the link for this post at the end of this posting.
The courses at Udemy.com are reasonably priced, and I am mentioning this because the quality of this post by Anderson was great for me. I appreciate the fact that Anderson realizes that everyone is allowed to have their own strategy for learning. I need it to be quiet and once in a while can have some instrumental music going in the background, but nothing with lyrics, because then I lose my own thoughts. While others can read and retain the information with either music, television, or sitting in Starbucks with way too much activity for my learning style.
I just want you to know up front that if you go to this blog they will want you as a customer, but it is not all that much hype, and there are excellent articles.
Adults vs Children vs Metacognitive Skills
Adults are the lucky ones because usually by the time they leave high school and hopefully sooner, they know what strategies they need to use to be successful at learning. They are able to set their own learning goals, arrange their times and places that they will devote to the learning process. Now, they even can choose how to pick a college or university that fits with their learning skills. The world is a great place now for people to continue learning with all the great individualized choices.
Children require teachers and parents to help them make the right choices for learning. Some children will not procrastinate but do their school work before other activities such as television, telephone, or video games. Others need parents to be parents and set the rules and emphasize the importance of staying up to date and current with school assignments.
If there was one thing I wish my parents would have done differently it would have been to teach me better time management and organizational skills. Since they both worked and both worked long hours and different schedules, I grew up pretty independent and self guided. It is a good thing that I had friends who were good students, or things could have been a lot different. Still I lacked the organizational skills that would have been beneficial.
Here is the link for the Udemy site (I am not affiliated with them in any way, so do not get any commissions or payment if you visit them from this page). Udemy Site Link If you do create an account they have access to free courses, too.
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