Ch. 6 Case Study Analysis
Post your responses to the following questions on your blog.
Case 1: Mr. West wants his students to truly understand Civil War battles. He engages the help of a local Historical Re-enactment Society and assigns each of his students to the Union or Confederate side. His students join the re-enactors from 7:00am-7:00pm for a full day of activities which include a long march (complete with rudimentary battle gear), setting up camp, cooking over campfires, scouting territory, and engaging in a historically representative battle.
1. After participating in this activity, what do you think the students will remember? How might those memories differ from those students would have if they only read about the Civil War in their textbook? With a hands-on experience such as re-enacting the a day in what life was like for a soldier during the Civil War, students are most likely to remember details of the battle they participated in, detailed information of either the Union or Confederates, and the actual feelings of how soldiers must have felt during this period. To have such a unique experience when studying a topic such as the Civil War, as opposed to just reading about the topic in a book, a teacher would be using cognitive psychology techniques. Engaging the student in class participation, providing the students with material that will actually process to their long-term memory, this will be the effects from a hands-on learning experience. If a teacher just has the students read from a text book, much of that information is lost from the working memory.
2. How does Mr. West’s use of a Civil War re-enactment engage students’ emotions? What is the relationship between emotions and learning? The Civil War re-enactment engages the emotions of students by helping them feel the pain of the Civil War. Carrying the equipment, setting up camp, choosing a side to fight for, and all the work involved. When emotions are placed into learning, an encoding process is placed on the newly learned material to create meaning on that material so that it is easily retrieved.
3. Based on the principles of dual-coding theory, what activities would be effective for Mr. West to use as a follow-up to the re-enactment? Activities that would be effective to use as a follow-up to the re-enactment would be a re-enactment of the following day of a battle. What happened after the fight was over? How were the two sides affected? How many soldiers were lost at battle? These are just a few of the questions that could be answered. As the students would have prior knowledge from the battle, the following day after a battle would be adding to that knowledge.
Case 2: Mr. Dunkin and Mr. Richards, teachers at the same school, are debating in the teacher’s lounge about who provides the best type of organization for the students’ learning. Mr. Dunkin lectures and assigns reading and chapter problems Mondays through Thursdays. On Fridays he gives a short answer exam. In Mr. Richards’ class the students never know what will take place on any given day until they arrive in class and look at a detailed outline of the hour’s activities on the chalkboard. His class engages in mix of role-plays, lecture, videos, group projects and demonstrations. Mr. Richards occasionally gives surprise quizzes and his unit tests can include true/false, multiple choice, short answer, or essay.
4. Who do you think provides better instruction for his students? Support your answer from an information processing perspective. Mr. Richard' instruction provides a better way for students to learn because he is using multiple stimuli to hold the students' attention making use of both their visual and auditory senses. This information is more easily processed in the working memory and less apt to be lost if the students do not know what is to be taught the following day. Mr. Richards is helping to keep the class interested in his subjects by using multiple forms of teaching, getting the students active in the teaching process, which will help move the information from their working memory into their long-term memory.
5. How would you expect the students’ learning outcomes to differ depending on which teacher they had? The students who were to have Mr. Dunkin, will probably lose a majority of the information that they learn in class because their teacher is not using a good method of in-depth processing. Mr. Dunkin is also not going to keep the attention of the students and much of their information in their working memory will get lost before going into their long-term memory. On the other hand. Mr. Richards is using excellent techniques for grabbing the attention of the students. For example, he is creating stimulating lessons, getting the students physically involved,and using a variety of teaching methods. These will all help to stop the process of losing information from the working memory and help process the information into the long-term memory.
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