Study Of An Instructor 's Fluency Affects Students ' Perceptions Of Amount Of Material Learned

Students who have mixed types of problems than students who had the same type of problems but different questions achieved higher scores on a test. By varying study material, students learn to apply a strategy to a certain type of problem while a different strategy to another problem. This provides proof that the traditional studying methods of studying the same skill repeatedly are not the best method for studying. In addition, college students had to study a list of 40 vocabulary words. College students who studied in two different rooms and another set of college students had to study in the same room for the period the college students studied in different rooms.

According to the author, teacher’s focus on a 80/20 concept which means 80% of their time is spent delivering the direct instruction and the other 20% is spent practicing the given instruction. According to the brain research, this concept should be flipped. Instead of only giving the students 20% time to practice, teachers should instead be spending this amount of time giving instruction and the rest of the time should be spent practicing the skill taught.

An area that I could have improved upon in communication was the speed of the verbal delivery of the teaching session, especially at the beginning, because Quinn and Hughes (2007) advise that this can affect the ability to absorb information and cause loss of attention. The speed of delivery was very important for understanding because the teaching method used in this session was talking, as defined by Jarvis and Gibson (1997), with the majority of the flow of the conversation being from me to the student rather than it being more interactive and involving discussion or demonstration.

Testing oneself before knowing the curriculum is a way of altering and enhancing memory because it helps give one an idea of what the curriculum entails, what should be focused on, when it is most important to listen in class and it is a way of overcoming the “fluency illusions”.

Data from baseline, performance, retention, and transfer sessions was recorded on paper by the learner, and then transferred into Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word for further analysis. Results were put into a formula and answers were plotted on graphs to observe student learner. Standard deviation was also calculated to observe consistency of student learning.

Learning is a hard thing to do in some cases. It is never just an instructor teaching you that particular topic and learning it automatically. Over time I realize there are quirks to think about when learning specific subjects. For example in The Mind at Work, instead of finding research the

Students are often told that the path to success tends to be a lonely one because only they can get themselves there. For the most part that is true, they must be self-motivated and passionate about their future, but along the way they get to meet special people that want to see them to accomplish their goals. From an early age the relationship built between students and teachers has molded and impacted the student’s life. The relationship they have with a teacher can define the attitude that student has with the subject being taught. A lot of emphasis is put on students when they fail a course and they question their effort. Although, the root of the problem is not always the student, but the method the instructor is using to teach the student.

given class correlates to the efforts put in by instructors, and in encouraging teachers to

Precision teaching (PT) has proved to be an effective tool when aiming to teach students material fluently and accurately. Lindsley (1990) showed that students in precision teaching classrooms who were told to keep records of their own academic and non-academic performance and use these records to guide their performance and eventually lead to more academic success due to the visual representation they had. This element of precision teaching is particularly useful as learners who improve this way are susceptible to fluency based procedures which often consist of SAFMEDS or packs of cards similar to this. SAFMEDS are typically used to help students become fluent in definitions and basic concepts, in this experiment they are being used to improve a base of knowledge on research methods within psychology.

Research shows that attributes of the classroom teacher significantly affect how well students learn. Recently it has become clear that the

The primacy/recency effect is a powerful tool that frames how a teacher should make the most out of their time by offering knowledge in a way that uses primetimes and downtimes. There are ideal times to present content during a lesson. I will avoid wasting time for classroom management tasks like, taking attendance or collecting absence notes. After engaging my students, it is important to offer new material while the students are ready. I will avoid asking the students if they know anything about the new topic. The assumption is that most students do not know the content and because this is the time of greatest retention, anything that is said, including incorrect information, is likely to be remembered. Moreover, it is important to be aware

Interactions between teachers and students in regards to teacher talk is one of the most important learning tools used in the classroom. Talk moves are tools for building an environment that serves a range of productive interactional, social and intellectual learning functions in the classroom (Edwards-Groves, 2014). They are enabled and constrained by the “sayings, doings and relatings present in classrooms” and prompt responses from students (Edwards-Groves, 2014, p1). Teacher talk is a large part of how students learn, through models such as ‘Initiate, Respond, Evaluate’ (IRE). The IRE model involved the teacher asking questions and giving appropriate feedback to the student’s response to help them understand the reasons behind their response. The Scaffolding Interaction Cycle (SIC) is another important tool, which involved teachers scaffolding a students’ response to engage higher learning functions. It is important to consider Bull and Anstey’s three-style model, consisting of pedagogy of school, pedagogy of literacy lessons and pedagogy of literacy learning (Anstey and Bull, 1996). Pedagogy of school involves the teacher and the student conversing in a Q&A like manner, or a ‘guess-what’s-in-my-head’ approach taken by the teacher. The pedagogy of literacy lessons involves the students carrying out the teacher’s instructions but not making the connection to what they are learning. There is a time where these styles may be useful, but

Benjamin Bloom, an instructor and university examiner for the Board of Examinations at the University of Chicago, proposed his Mastery Learning Theory in 1976 (1). However, the idea of mastery learning was not authentic to Bloom; the origin of these concepts were found in the writings of Greek philosophers including Aristotle. Bloom’s major contribution to these principles is time as the foundation of mastery learning is the ability for the student to show they have mastered content before progressing to the next unit or area (2). Bloom’s Taxonomy, born from the Mastery of Learning Theory, is a scale used to measure levels of expertise required to achieve a certain outcome; an instructor can quickly evaluate each student’s level of understanding during a lesson. The idea is to give each student the time too show skill in each level of learning, therefore, mastering the lesson. The lesson is broken down into these levels, each building on the last. There have been many contributors to the mastery learning theory and an entire paper could be written solely to list those people and their contributions. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the theory by demonstrating Bloom’s Taxonomy and how it’s use maximizes student learning.

A significant theory to consider when teaching a user or student is cognitive load theory. Cognitive load theory suggests that learning happens best when it is aligned to an individual’s cognitive ability or working memory. Our working memory can only handle a small amount of information or a limited time, by creating schemes we can transfer information from our working memory to our long term memory which can store a lot of information for an indefinite amount of time. There are times when cognitive load is too much for one person, this can happen if too much information is presented or the subject is too complex for the learner. An overabundance of cognitive load can be detrimental to a learner as it does not transfer information to long term memory and can discourage the learner. Every individual has a different cognitive load which means that some people may be able to learn and retain more information than others and vice versa.

Teachers’ beliefs influenced different tasks such as: selecting and presenting learning activities, preparing students for new language and checking their understanding, monitoring students’ learning, giving feedback, among others (Richards & Lockhart, 1994). I agree completely with this perception, because it is something that I have noticed since this course started: in the videos of my classmates, in the classes of my teachers, and in my own classes.