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Contemporary Educational Psychology/Chapter 3: Student Development

 * When I was growing up, for good or for ill, I was provided piano lessons. Daily practice was a staple of my childhood, 365 days a year, along with a home that deliberately kept quiet to facilitate practice. Music—especially the piano—defined a major part of “me,” Kelvin Seifert. Altogether I studied piano for 13 years, from age 4 to the end of high school, with only occasional brief interruptions.

 * At any one time, I witnessed small changes in my skills. I performed a simple piece a bit better than I had the previous week, or I played a bit more of it from memory. There were direct, obvious connections between my skills at one moment and at the moment just before or after. Back then, if you had asked me then what accounted for the changes, I would have stated without hesitation that they were because I was “learning” specific piano pieces.

 * Across broader spans of time, however, I noticed more dramatic changes. I learned much more complex pieces than I had a few years earlier, for example. I played with more “finesse,” sensitivity and polish than when I had as a young child. I was even listening to classical music on the radio some of the time! My musical talent had been transformed since I had begun, and in some sense was not the “same” talent that I had had as a beginner.

 * If you had asked me what accounted for these longer-term changes, I would have had a harder time answering than when asked about the short-term changes. I might have said simply and a bit vaguely that “I have been getting better at piano.” If you ask me the same question now, however, I would say that my music skills had developed, that their development had taken years, and that the changes resulted not just from simply practicing, but also from becoming generally more mature.

Development refers to long-term personal changes that have multiple sources and multiple effects. It is like the difference between my music at fifteen compared to my music at five, rather than the difference between one week and the next. Some human developments are especially broad and take years to unfold fully, like a child’s ever-evolving ability to “read” other people’s emotions and moods. Others are faster and may be more specific or focused, like a child’s increasing ability to solve crossword puzzles. The faster and simpler it is, the more likely we are to call the change “learning” instead of development. It is a matter of degree. When I learned to name the planets of the solar system, for example, I did not need a lot of time, nor did the learning involve a multitude of experiences. So it is probably better to think of that particular experience—learning the names of the planets—as learning rather than of development (Salkind, 2004).

Why Development Matters
Students’ development matters for teachers, but the way it matters depends on the kind of teaching. If you teach a single, “self-contained” grade-level, then the benefits of knowing about development will be less explicit, but just as real, as if you teach many grade levels. Working exclusively with one grade (like, say, a third-grade classroom) highlights differences among students that happen in spite of their similar ages, and obscures similarities that happen because of their having similar ages. Under these conditions it is easy to notice students’ diversity, but somewhat harder to know how much of it comes from differences in their long-term development, as opposed to differences in shorter-term learning or immediate experiences. Yet this knowledge is useful in planning appropriate activities and in holding appropriate expectations about students. What changes can you expect to happen relatively soon simply from your current program of activities, and which ones might not show up this year at all? These are questions that developmental psychology can help to answer.

If you teach multiple grade levels, as often happens to specialists or to teachers in middle school or high school, then your need for developmental knowledge will be more obvious because you will confront wide age differences on a daily basis. As a physical education teacher, for example, you may teach kindergarten children as well as sixth-graders, or seventh-graders as well as twelfth-graders, all in the course of a single day, or even of a single hour. Diversity among your students will therefore be a more explicit mix of the developmental and non-developmental—of complex differences due to age as well as differences due to “other” factors, such as skills or knowledge learned only recently. Nonetheless, your instructional challenge will be the same as the one faced by teachers of single-grade classes: you will want to know what activities and expectations are appropriate for your students. To answer this question, you will need to know something not only about your students, but also about general developmental trends during childhood and adolescence.

Note that developmental trends vary in two important ways. The first, as I indicated already, is in their generality. Some theories or models of development boldly assert that certain changes happen universally—happen, that is, to virtually every person on the planet. For example, a theory might assert that virtually every toddler acquires a spoken language, or that every teenager forms a sense of personal identity. Individuals who do not experience these developments would be very rare as well as significantly disabled, no matter what family, community, or society they belong to. Other theories, however, propose developmental changes that are more limited in scope, claiming only that the changes happen to some people and only under certain conditions. Developing a female gender role, for example, does not happen to everyone, but only to the female part of the population, and the process differs according to the family, community, or society in which a child lives.

The second way that developmental trends vary is in how strictly they are sequenced and hierarchical. In some views about development, changes are thought to happen in a specific order and to build on each other—sort of a “staircase” model of development (Case, 1991). For example, a developmental psychologist (and many of the rest of us, for that matter) might argue that young people must have tangible, hands-on experience with new materials before they can reason about the materials in the abstract. The order cannot be reversed. In other viewpoints, developmental change happens, but not in a uniform sequence or with a common end point; change is more of a “kaleidoscope” than a staircase (Lewis, 1997; Harris, 2006). A person who becomes permanently disabled, for example, may experience complex long-term changes in personal values and priorities. But the changes can in principle happen at any time during life, including childhood, and can take a variety of forms.

Except in the realm of physical development, educational psychologists have tended to emphasize explanations of development that are relatively general, universal and sequential, rather than specific to particular cultures or “merely” kaleidoscopic (see, for examples, Woolfolk, 2006, Chapters 2 and 3 or Slavin, 2005, Chapters 2 and 3ref ). Such models (sometimes called “grand theories”) have the advantages of concisely integrating many features of development, while also describing where “typical” children or adolescents end up in life. The preference for integrative perspectives makes sense given educators’ need to work with and teach large numbers of diverse students both efficiently and effectively. But the approach also risks overgeneralizing or oversimplifying what happens to particular children and youth. It can also confuse what does happen as certain children (like the middle-class ones) develop with what should happen to all children. To understand these risks, imagine any two children of about the same age who have clearly had very different experiences—for example, one child who grows up in poverty and another who grows up financially well-off. In what sense can we say that these two children experience the same underlying developmental changes as they grow up? And how much should they even be expected to? Developmental psychology, and especially the broad theories of it emphasized in educational psychology, highlights the “sameness” or common ground between these two children as they mature, no matter how different they seem on the surface. Developmental knowledge, then, serves as counterpoint or balance to knowledge of the obvious complementary reality of teaching, diversity among students.

Physical Development during the School Years
Although it may be tempting to think that physical development is the concern of physical education specialists, many aspects of it are actually quite relevant to other teachers as well. In first-grade, for example, it is important to know whether children can successfully manipulate a pencil. In later grades, it is important to know how long students can be expected to sit still without discomfort—actually a physical challenge itself. In all grades, it is important to have a sense of students’ health needs related to their age or maturity, if only to know who is likely to become ill with what illness, and what physical activities are reasonable and needed.

Trends in Height and Weight
Typical growth in students’ height and weight are easy to summarize and are shown in Figure 3-1. The figure shows not only the average for each age from preschool through the end of high school, but also the range within which 90% of children fall for each age. At age 6, for example, about when most children begin school, the average boy or girl is about 45 ½ inches tall, but 90% of six year olds are between about 43 and 49 inches tall. Average weight at the same age is about 39 pounds, but ranges between about 35 and 53 pounds. There are two important points to keep in mind about Figure 3-1. The first is that boys and girls are quite similar in height and weight during childhood, but diverge in the early teen-age years, when they reach puberty. For a time (approximately age 10-14), the average girl is taller, but not much heavier, than the average boy. After that the average boy becomes both taller and heavier than the average girl—though there remain individual exceptions (Malina, et al., 2004). The preteen difference can be especially awkward for some children and youth, at least among those who aspire to looking like older teenagers or young adults. For young teens less concerned with “image,” though, the fact that girls are taller may not be especially important, or even noticed (Friedman, 2000).

The second point about Figure 3-1 is that as children get older, individual differences in weight diverge more radically than differences in height. Among 18-year-olds, the heaviest youngsters weigh almost twice as much as the lightest, but the tallest ones are only about 10% taller than the shortest. Nonetheless, both height and weight can be sensitive issues for some teenagers. Society (and therefore teenage peers) tends to favor relatively short women and tall men, as well as a thin body build, especially for girls and women. Yet neither “socially correct” height nor thinness is the destiny for many individuals. Being overweight, in particular, has become a common, serious problem in modern society (Tartamella, et al., 2004), due to the prevalence of diets high in sugar and trans fats and lifestyles low in activity. The educational system has unfortunately contributed to the problem as well, by gradually restricting the number of physical education courses and classes in the past two decades.

Puberty and Its Effects on Students
The most universal physical development in students is puberty, which is the set of changes in early adolescence that bring about sexual maturity. Along with internal changes in reproductive organs are outward changes, such as growth of breasts in girls and of the penis in boys, as well as relatively sudden increases in height and weight. By about age 10 or 11, most children experience increased sexual attraction to others (usually heterosexual, though not always) that can affect social life both in school and elsewhere (McClintock & Herdt, 1996). By the end of high school, more than half of boys and girls report having experienced sexual intercourse at least once—though it is hard to be certain of the proportion because of the personal sensitivity of the information (Rosenbaum, 2006).

In addition to creating obvious physical differences, puberty accentuates gender role differences for at least some teenagers. Girls who excelled at math or science in elementary school may curb some of their enthusiasm for and displays of success at these subjects (Taylor, Gilligan, & Sullivan, 1995; Sadker, 2004). Boys who previously were not especially interested in sports may feel a new need to dedicate themselves to athletics in order to affirm their masculinity in the eyes of others. Individual boys and girls who might have once worked together successfully on class projects may no longer feel comfortable doing so—or alternatively may now want to work together for non-academic rather than academic reasons. Such changes do not affect all youngsters equally, nor affect any one youngster equally on all occasions. An individual student may act like a young adult on one day, but more like a child on the next. In teaching children who are in the midst of puberty (especially early in the process), you will need to respond flexibly and supportively.

Development of Motor Skills
Students’ fundamental motor skills are already developing when they begin kindergarten, but are still not yet perfectly coordinated. Five-year-olds generally can walk satisfactorily for most school-related purposes (if they could not, the schools would have to be organized very differently!). For some fives, running still looks a bit like a hurried walk, but usually it becomes more coordinated within a year or two. Similarly with jumping, throwing and catching: the large majority of children can do these things, though often a bit clumsily, by the time they start school, and most improve their skills noticeably during the early elementary years (Payne & Isaacs, 2005). Figure 3-2 summarizes the changes for two basic skills, throwing and jumping. Assisting these developments is usually the job of physical education specialists, where they exist, or else of classroom teachers when classroom teachers lead their own physical education lessons. Whoever is responsible should also notice if and when a child does not keep more-or-less to this developmental timetable, and arrange for special remediation or other help that may be appropriate. Some common procedures for doing so are described in Chapter 5: Students with Special Educational Needs.

Whether or not physical skills become a special focus of teachers’ concern, however, they can be quite important to students themselves. Whatever their grade level, students who are clumsy are aware of that fact and of its potentially negative effect on peer relationships. In the long term, self-consciousness and poor self-esteem can result for a child who is clumsy, especially if peers (or teachers and parents) place high value on participation in athletics. One research study confirmed, for example, what teachers and coaches sometimes suspect: that losers in athletic competitions tend to become less sociable and are more apt to miss athletic practices than winners (Petlichkoff, 1996).

Health and Illness
By world standards, children and youth in the United States and other developed societies tend to be remarkably healthy, though much depends on how well-off their families are and on how much health care is available to them. Children from middle- and higher-income families experience far fewer serious or life-threatening illnesses than children whose families lack resources. All across the economic spectrum, however, parents and teachers often rightly note that children—especially the youngest ones—get far more minor illnesses than do adults. In 2004, for example, one government survey estimated that children get an average of 6-10 colds per year, but adults get only about 2-4 per year (National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, 2005). The difference probably exists because children’s immune systems are not as fully formed as adults’, while at the same time children are continually exposed to others at school, many of whom may be contagious themselves. An indirect result of children’s frequent illnesses is that teachers (along with airline flight attendants, incidentally) also report more frequent minor illnesses than do adults in general—about five colds per year, for example, instead of just 2-4 (Whelen, et al., 2005). These “simple” illnesses are responsible for many lost days of school, both for students and for teachers, as well as many days when a student is present physically, but functions below par and simultaneously infects classmates. Learning, and often also teaching, therefore suffer because health is suffering.

The problem is not only the prevalence of illness as such (in the United States in winter, approximately one person gets infected with a minor illness every few seconds), but the fact that illnesses are not distributed uniformly among students, schools, or communities. Whether it is a simple cold or something more serious, illness is particularly common where living conditions are crowded, where health care is scarce or unaffordable, and where individuals live with frequent stresses of any kind. Often, but not always, these are the circumstances of poverty. Table 3-1 summarizes these economic effects for a variety of health problems, not just for colds or flu. As students get older and become teenagers, illnesses become less frequent, but other health risks emerge. The most widespread is the consumption of alcohol and the smoking of cigarettes. As of 2004, about 75% of teenagers reported drinking an alcoholic beverage at least occasionally, and 22% reported smoking cigarettes (Center for Disease Control, 2004a). The good news about these figures is that they are part of a small, but steady decline in the frequencies over the past ten years or so. The bad news is that teenagers also show increases in the abuse of some prescription drugs, such as inhalants, that act as stimulants (Johnston, et al., 2006). As with the prevalence of illnesses, the prevalence of drug use is not uniform, with a relatively small fraction of individuals accounting for a disproportionate proportion of usage. One survey, for example, found that a teenager was 3-5 times more likely to smoke or to use alcohol, smoke marijuana, or use drugs if he or she has a sibling who has also indulged these habits (Fagan & Najman, 2005). Siblings, according to the research, seem to be more influential as role models than parents.

Cognitive Development: The Theory of Jean Piaget
Cognition refers to thinking and memory processes, and cognitive development refers to long-term changes in these processes. While cognition has been studied from several different perspectives and in the light of several theories, the one that is both the most widely known among educators and the most frankly "developmental" is the cognitive stage theory of a Swiss psychologist named Jean Piaget. (read more...)

Social Development: Relationships and Personal Motives
Social development refers to the long-term changes in relationships and interactions involving self, peers, and family. It includes both positive changes, such as how friendships develop, and negative changes, such as aggression or bullying...(read more...)

Moral Development: Forming a Sense of Rights and Responsibilities
Morality is a system of beliefs about ethics, about what is right and good compared to what is wrong or bad. Moral development refers to the changes in moral beliefs as a person grows older and gains maturity....(read more...)

Understanding “The Typical Student” versus Understanding Students
In this chapter I have often spoken of students in a generalized way, referring to “the” child, student, or youngster, as if a single typical or average individual exists and develops through single, predictable pathways. As every teacher knows, however, development is not that simple. A class of 25 or 30 students will contain 25 or 30 individuals who will be learning and developing along 25 or 30 distinct pathways. Why then study developmental patterns at all? Because underlying their obvious diversity, students do indeed show important similarities. This chapter has indicated what some of the similarities are and how they relate to the job of teaching. My references to “the” student should not be understood, therefore, as referring to simple-minded stereotypes, but to tendencies around which real, live students often group themselves. Pointing to developmental changes is like pointing to a flock of birds in flight: the flock has a general location, but individual birds also have their own locations and individual flight paths.

As a teacher, I believe that the most helpful approach is to understand development and diversity not separately, but jointly. There are indeed similarities woven among the differences in students, but also differences woven among students’ commonalities. It is best therefore to read this chapter on development together with the next one, which looks squarely at student diversity.


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Contemporary Educational Psychology/Chapter 4: Student Diversity

 * I’ll tell you this: There are some people, and then there are others.

 * --Anna Maude Harris

Anna Harris was my grandmother as well as a schoolteacher from about 1910 to 1930. Her comment, which she used to make about her students, makes a good theme for this chapter—and even for teaching in general. Students do differ in a multitude of ways, both individually and because of memberships in families, communities or cultural groups. Sometimes the differences can make classroom-style teaching more challenging, but other times, as Anna Harris implied, they simply enrich classroom life. To teach students well, we need to understand the important ways that they differ among themselves, and when or how the differences really matter for their education. This chapter offers some of that understanding and suggests how you might use it in order to make learning effective and enjoyable for everyone, including yourself.

For convenience I will make a major distinction between individual differences and group differences among students. As the term implies, individual differences are qualities that are unique; just one person has them at a time. Variation in hair color, for example, is an individual difference; even though some people have nearly the same hair color, no two people are exactly the same. Group differences are qualities shared by members of an identifiable group or community, but not shared by everyone in society. An example is gender role: for better or for worse, one portion of society (the males) is perceived differently and expected to behave a bit differently than another portion of society (the females). Notice that distinguishing between individual and group differences is sometimes convenient, but it is always a bit arbitrary. Individuals with similar, but nonetheless unique qualities sometimes group themselves together for certain purposes, and groups unusually contain a lot of individual diversity within them. If you happen to enjoy playing soccer and have some talent for it (an individual quality), for example, you are more likely than usual to end up as a member of a soccer team or club (a group defined by members’ desire and ability to play soccer). But though everyone on the team may fit a “soccer player’s profile” at some level, the team will probably also contain individuals with varying levels of skill and of motivation. The group, by its very nature, may tend to “hide” these signs of individuality.

To begin, then, I look at several differences normally considered to be individually rather than group based. This discussion will necessarily be incomplete, however, simply because individual differences so numerous and important in teaching that parts of the topic are also contained in later chapters (see also, for example, Chapter 5, "Students with Special Educational Needs" or Chapter 10 and Chapter 11 about assessment of learning). Later sections of the chapter deal with three important forms of group diversity: gender differences, cultural differences, and language differences.

Individual Styles of Learning and Thinking
All of us, including our students, have preferred ways of learning. Teachers often call these differences learning styles, though this term may imply more consistency across situations than is really the case. One student may like to make diagrams to help remember a reading assignment, whereas another student may prefer to write a sketchy outline instead. Yet in many cases the students could in principle reverse the strategies and still learn the material: if coaxed (or perhaps required), the diagram-maker could takes notes for a change and the note-taker could draw diagrams. Both might still learn using the alternate style, even if neither felt as comfortable as with the strategies they prefer.

This reality suggests that a balanced, middle-of-the-road approach may be a teacher’s best response to students’ learning styles. Or to put it another way: it is good to support students’ preferred learning strategies where possible and appropriate, but neither necessary nor desirable to do so all of the time (Loo, 2004; Stahl, 2002). Most of all, it is neither necessary nor possible to classify or label students according to seemingly fixed learning styles and then allow them to learn only according to those styles. A student may prefer to hear new material rather than see it; he may prefer for you to explain something orally, for example, rather than to see it demonstrated in a video. But he may nonetheless tolerate or sometimes even prefer to see it demonstrated. In the long run, in fact, he may learn it best by encountering the material in both ways, regardless of his habitual preferences.

That said, there is evidence that individuals, including students, do differ in how they habitually think. These differences are more specific than learning styles or preferences, and psychologists sometimes call them cognitive styles, meaning typical ways of perceiving and remembering information, and typical ways of solving problems and making decisions (Zhang & Sternberg, 2006). In a style of thinking called field dependence, for example, individuals perceive patterns as a whole rather than focus on the parts of the pattern separately. In a complementary tendency, called field independence, individuals are more inclined to analyze overall patterns into their parts. Cognitive research from the 1940s to the present has found field dependence/independence differences to be somewhat stable for any given person across situations, though not completely so (Witkin, Moore, Goodenough, & Cox, 1977; Zhang & Sternberg, 2005). Someone who is field dependent (perceives globally or “wholistically”) in one situation, that is, tends to a modest extent to perceive things globally or wholistically in other situations. Field dependence and independence can be important understanding students because the styles affect students’ behaviors and preferences in school and classrooms. Field dependent persons tend to work better in groups, it seems, and to prefer “open-ended” fields of study like literature and history. Field independent persons, on the other hand, tend to work better alone and to prefer highly analytic studies like math and science. The differences are only a tendency, however, and there are a lot of students who contradict the trends. As with the broader notion of learning styles, the cognitive styles of field dependence and independence are useful for tailoring instruction to particular students, but their guidance is only approximate. They neither can nor should be used to “lock” students to particular modes of learning or to replace students’ own expressed preferences and choices about curriculum.

Another cognitive style is impulsivity as compared to reflectivity. As the names imply, an impulsive cognitive style is one in which a person reacts quickly, but as a result makes comparatively more errors. A reflective style is the opposite: the person reacts more slowly and therefore makes fewer errors. As you might expect, the reflective style would seem better suited to many academic demands of school. Research has found that this is indeed the case for academic skills that clearly benefit from reflection, such as mathematical problem solving or certain reading tasks (Evans, 2004). Some classroom or school-related skills, however, may actually develop better if a student is relatively impulsive. Being a good partner in a cooperative learning group, for example, may depend partly on responding spontaneously (i.e. just a bit “impulsively”) to others’ suggestions; and being an effective member of an athletic team may depend on not taking time to reflect carefully on every move that you or your team mates make.

There are two major ways to use knowledge of students’ cognitive styles (Pritchard, 2005). The first and the more obvious is to build on students’ existing style strengths and preferences. A student who is field independent and reflective, for example, can be encouraged to explore tasks and activities that are relatively analytic and that require relatively independent work. One who is field dependent and impulsive, on the other hand, can be encouraged and supported to try tasks and activities that are more social or spontaneous. But a second, less obvious way to use knowledge of cognitive styles is to encourage more balance in cognitive styles for students who need it. A student who lacks field independence, for example, my need explicit help in organizing and analyzing key academic tasks (like organizing a lab report in a science class). One who is already highly reflective may need encouragement to try ideas spontaneously, as in a creative writing lesson.

Multiple Intelligences
For nearly a century, educators and psychologists have debated the nature of intelligence, and more specifically whether intelligence is just one broad ability or can take more than one form. Many classical definitions of the concept have tended to define intelligence as a single broad ability that allows a person to solve or complete many sorts of tasks, or at least many academic tasks like reading, knowledge of vocabulary, and the solving of logical problems (Garlick, 2002). There is research evidence of such a global ability, and the idea of general intelligence often fits with society’s everyday beliefs about intelligence. Partly for these reasons, an entire mini-industry has grown up around publishing tests of intelligence, academic ability, and academic achievement. Since these tests affect the work of teachers, I return to discussing them later in this book, in Chapters 10 and 11.

But there are also problems with defining intelligence as one general ability (and the problems, too, are discussed in Chapters 10 and 11). One way of summing up the problems is to say that conceiving of intelligence as something general tends to put it beyond teachers’ influence. When viewed as a single, all-purpose ability, students either have a lot of intelligence or they do not, and strengthening their intelligence becomes a major challenge, or perhaps even an impossible one (Gottfredson, 2004; Lubinski, 2004). This conclusion is troubling to some educators, especially in recent years as testing school achievement has become more common and as students have become more diverse.

But alternate views of intelligence also exist that portray intelligence as having multiple forms, whether the forms are subparts of a single broader ability or are multiple “intelligences” in their own right. For various reasons such this perspective has gained in popularity among teachers in recent years, probably because it reflects many teachers’ beliefs that students cannot simply be rated along a single scale of ability, but are fundamentally diverse (Kohn, 2004).

One of the most prominent of these models is Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner, 1983, 2003). Gardner proposes that there are eight different forms of intelligence, each of which functions independently of the others. (The eight intelligences are summarized in Table 4-1.) Each person has a mix of all eight abilities—more of one but less of another—that helps to constitute that person’s individual cognitive profile. Since most tasks—including most tasks in classrooms— require several forms of intelligence and can be completed in more than one way, it is possible for people with various profiles of talents to succeed on a task equally well. In writing an essay, for example, a student with high interpersonal intelligence but rather average verbal intelligence might use his or her interpersonal strength to get a lot of help and advice from classmates and the teacher. A student with the opposite profile might work well alone, but without the benefit of help from others. Both students might end up with essays that are good, but good for different reasons.

As evidence for the possibility of multiple intelligences, Gardner cites descriptions of individuals with exceptional talent in one form of intelligence (for example, in playing the piano) but who are neither above nor below average in other areas. He also cites descriptions of individuals with brain damage, some of whom lose one particular form of intelligence (like the ability to talk) but retain other forms. In the opinion of many psychologists, however, the evidence for multiple intelligences is not strong enough to give up the “classical” view of general intelligence. Part of the problem is that the evidence for multiple intelligences relies primarily on anecdotes—examples or descriptions of particular individuals who illustrate the model—rather than on more widespread information or data (Eisner, 2004).

Nonetheless, whatever the status of the research evidence, the model itself can be useful as a way for teachers to think about their work. Multiple intelligences suggest the importance of diversifying instruction in order to honor and to respond to diversity in students’ talents and abilities. Viewed like this, whether Gardner’s classification scheme is actually accurate is probably less important than the fact there is (or may be) more than one way to be “smart.” In the end, as with cognitive and learning styles, it may not be important to label students’ talents or intellectual strengths. It may be more important simply to provide important learning and knowledge in several modes or styles ways that draw on more than one possible form of intelligence or skill. A good example of this principle is your own development in learning to teach. It is well and good to read books about teaching (like this one, perhaps), but it is even better to read books and talk with classmates and educators about teaching and get actual experience in classrooms. The combination both invites and requires a wide range of your talents and usually proves more effective than any single type of activity, whatever your profile of cognitive styles or intellectual abilities happens to be.

Gender differences in the classroom
Gender roles are the patterns of behaviors, attitudes, and expectations associated with a particular sex—with being either male or female. For clarity, psychologists sometimes distinguish gender differences, which are related to social roles, from sex differences, which are related only to physiology and anatomy. (read more...)

Differences in cultural expectations and learning styles
A culture is the system of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that constitute the distinctive way of life of a people. Although sometimes the term is also used to refer specifically to the artistic, intellectual and other “high-brow” aspects of life, I use it here more broadly to refer to everything that characterizes a way of life—baseball games as well as symphony concerts, and McDonald’s as well as expensive restaurants. (read more...)
 * Bilingualism: language differences in the classroom
 * Balanced or fluent bilingualism
 * Unbalanced bilingualism
 * Language loss
 * Cultural differences in language use
 * Cultural differences in attitudes and beliefs

Accommodating diversity in practice
Briefly, then, here is what this chapter said: Students differ in a multitude of ways, both individually and as groups. Individually, for example, students have preferred learning styles as well as preferred cognitive or thinking styles. They also have unique cognitive profiles, intelligence or competence that affect how and what they learn most successfully.

In addition to individual diversity, students tend to differ according to behaviors associated with gender, although there are many individual exceptions. Motor abilities as well as motivation and experience with athletics gradually differentiate boys and girls, especially when they reach high school and begin high school. Socially, boys tend to adopt relationships that are more active and wide-ranging than do girls. Academically, girls tend to be a bit more motivated and to receive slightly higher marks in school. Teachers sometimes contribute to gender role differences—perhaps without intending—by paying attention to boys more frequently and more publicly in class, and by distributing praise and criticism in ways differentiated by sex.

Students also differ according to cultures, language, and ethnic groups of their families. Many students are bilingual, with educational consequences that depend on their fluency in each of their two languages. If they have more difficulty with English, then programs that add their first language together with English have proved to be helpful. If they have more difficulty with their first language, they are risk for language loss, and the consequences are also negative even if more hidden from teachers’ views.

In addition to language differences as such, students differ according to how they use language—in taking turns at speaking, in eye contact, social distance, wait time, and the use of questions. Some of these differences stem from cultural differences about self-identity, with non-Anglo culturally sometimes (but not always) supporting a more interdependent view of the self than Anglo culture or the schools. Differences in attitudes and in use of language have several consequences for teachers. In particular—where appropriate—they should consider using cooperative activities, avoid highlighting individuals’ accomplishments or failures, and be patient about students’ learning to be punctual.

Hopefully, therefore, we (KelvinLeeSeifert, Rosemary Sutton and other contributors) have persuaded you—if you ever really needed persuading—that students are indeed diverse. The question that follows from this point is what to do about the diversity. We partially answered that question by making a number of teaching-related suggestions throughout this chapter. But there is obviously more to be said about accommodating diversity—about actually working with students’ differences and making them a resource rather than a burden or challenge. In the rest of this book therefore we offer more suggestions, not only about knowing how different one student can be from another, but also about diversifying teaching to acknowledge this fact. Differences among students are inevitably a challenge during all phases of teaching, from planning instruction, to implementing lessons and activities, to assessing students’ learning after lessons or activities are all finished. In the next chapter, we illustrate this reality by describing how students with disabilities can be included in classroom life—one of the more telling examples of accommodating to diversity.

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Bartending/Cocktails/Sazerac

The Sazerac originated in New Orleans, Louisianna and is based on a combination of Cognac and Peychaud's Bitters.

Ingredients

 * 2 parts Brandy or Rye whiskey
 * 1 dash Peychaud's bitters
 * 1 tsp. simple syrup
 * 1 tsp. absinthe

Garnishes

 * Lemon peel

Glass
Old fashioned glass

Procedure

 * 1) Coat the inside of the glass with a film of absinthe.
 * 2) Stir the rest of the ingredients together in a mixing glass with ice.
 * 3) Strain into the absinthe coated glass.
 * 4) Garnish with lemon peel and serve.

title: Bartending/Cocktails/Sazerac


text:
User talk:Mike storey

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Come introduce yourself at the new users page. If you have any questions, you can ask there or you cancontact me personally on my talk page. Just hit the "+" sign on the top of either page, and enter your question! Urbane  (Talk)   (Contributions)  16:38, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

title: User talk:Mike storey


text:
Contemporary Educational Psychology/Chapter 5: Students with Special Educational Needs

Three People on the Margins

 * The First Person: In 1761 a six-year-old girl was captured from West Africa, given the name Phillis Wheatley, and sold into slavery in the City of Boston. By the time she was 17, Phillis had taught herself to read and write and had developed a special love and talent for poetry. Her owner was a wealthy businessman and sought to improve his reputation by publishing an anthology of her poems. Unfortunately he encountered stiff resistance from publishers because few people at that time believed Africans to be capable of the thought and imagination needed to write poetry. People who heard of her poetry were skeptical and inclined to think that it was faked. Eventually, to save his own reputation, the owner assembled a tribunal of 18 prominent judges—including the governor of Massachusetts and John Hancock, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence—to assess the young woman’s mental capacity. After cross-examining her, the judges finally decided that Ms. Wheatley was, after all, capable of writing poetry (Robinson, 1982).

 * The Second Person: A century later, a child named Helen Keller lost her sight and hearing as a result of illness during infancy. In spite of this misfortune, though, Helen devised a language of gestural signs for communicating with a tutor, and was soon also using Braille to study both French and Latin. At ten she wrote and published a short story. Yet like Ms. Wheatley, Ms. Keller also faced substantial, chronic skepticism about her capacities. Prominent educators accused her of plagiarizing others’ writings and merely “parroting” others’ ideas without understanding them (Keller, 1954; Bogdan, 2006). Eventually, as with Wheatley, a panel was assembled—though this time the members were professional experts about disabilities—to determine whether Ms. Keller was in fact capable of writing what she published. The panel decided that was indeed capable, though only by a slim margin (five judges vs. four).

 * The Third Person: In 1978, Sue Rubin was born with a disability that limited her speech to disordered bursts of sound and occasionally echoing phrases of other people. She was labeled autistic because of her symptoms, and assumed to be profoundly retarded. With support and encouragement from her mother and others, however, Sue eventually learned to type on a keyboard without assistance. She learned to communicate effectively when she was about 13 and was able to go to school. Since then she has made many presentations about autism at conferences and recently co-edited a book about autism, titled Autism: The Myth of the Person Alone (Bogdan, et al., 2005).

One of these individuals experienced racial discrimination and the other two experienced physical disabilities, but notice something important: that all three were defined by society as disabled intellectually. Initially, their achievements were dismissed because of widespread assumptions—whether about race or disability—of their inherent incompetence. All three had to work harder than usual, not only to acquire literacy itself, but also to prove that their literacy was genuine and worthy of respect.

Since the time of Phillis Wheatley, North American society has eliminated slavery and made some progress at reducing certain forms of racism, though much remains to be done. In 1954, for example, the United States Supreme Court ruled that public schools could not be segregated by race, and in doing so recognized, at least legally, the intellectual competence of African-Americans as well as the moral obligation of society to provide all citizens with the best possible education. It has taken longer to recognize legally the rights and competence of persons with disabilities, but events and trends beginning in the 1970s have begun to make it happen. This chapter begins by explaining some of these events and trends, and how they have altered the work of teachers.

Growing Support for People with Disabilities: Legislation and Its Effects
Since the 1970s political and social attitudes have moved increasingly toward including people with disabilities into a wide variety of “regular” activities. In the United States, the shift is illustrated clearly in the Federal legislation that was enacted during this time. The legislation partly stimulated the change in attitudes, but at the same time they partly resulted from the change. Three major laws were passed that guaranteed the rights of persons with disabilities, and of children and students with disabilities in particular. Although the first two affected teachers’ work in the classroom, the third has had the biggest impact on education.

Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Section 504
This law—the first of its kind—required that individuals with disabilities be accommodated in any program or activity that receives Federal funding (PL 93-112, 1973). Although this law was not intended specifically for education, in practice it has protected students’ rights in some extra-curricular activities (for older students) and in some child care or after-school care programs (for younger students). If those programs receive Federal funding of any kind, the programs are not allowed to exclude children or youth with disabilities, and they have to find reasonable ways to accommodate the individuals’ disabilities.

Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (or ADA).
This legislation also prohibited discrimination on the basis of disability, just as Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act had done (PL 101-336, 1990). Although the ADA also applies to all people (not just to students), its provisions are more specific and “stronger” than those of Section 504. In particular, ADA extends to all employment and jobs, not just those receiving Federal funding. It also specifically requires accommodations to be made in public facilities such as buses, restrooms, and telephones. ADA legislation is therefore responsible for some of the “minor” renovations in schools that you may have noticed in recent years, like wheelchair-accessible doors, ramps, and restrooms, and public telephones with volume controls.

Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (or IDEA)
As its name implied this legislation was more focused on education than either Section 504 or ADA. It was first passed in 1975 and has been amended several times since, including most recently in 2004 (PL 108-446, 2004). In its current form, the law guarantees the following rights related to education for anyone with a disability from birth to age 21. The first two influence schooling in general, but the last three affect the work of classroom teachers rather directly:
 * Free, appropriate education: An individual or an individual’s family should not have to pay for education simply because the individual has a disability, and the educational program should be truly educational (i.e. not merely caretaking or “babysitting” of the person).
 * Due process: In case of disagreements between an individual with a disability and the schools or other professionals, there must be procedures for resolving the disagreements that are fair and accessible to all parties—including the person himself or herself or the person’s representative.
 * Fair evaluation of performance in spite of disability: Tests or other evaluations should not assume test-taking skills that a person with a disability cannot reasonably be expected to have, such as holding a pencil, hearing or seeing questions, working quickly, or understanding and speaking orally. Evaluation procedures should be modified to allow for these differences. This provision of the law applies both to evaluations made by teachers and to school-wide or “high-stakes” testing programs.
 * Education in the “least restrictive environment”: Education for someone with a disability should provide as many educational opportunities and options for the person as possible, both in the short term and in the long term. In practice this requirement has meant including students in regular classrooms and school activities as much as possible, though often not totally.
 * An individualized educational program: Given that every disability is unique, instructional planning for a person with a disability should be unique or individualized as well. In practice this provision has led to classroom teachers planning individualized programs jointly with other professionals (like reading specialists, psychologists, or medical personnel) as part of a team.

Considered together, these provisions are both a cause and an effect of basic democratic philosophy. The legislation says, in effect, that all individuals should have access to society in general and to education in particular. Although teachers certainly support this philosophy in broad terms, and many have welcomed the IDEA legislation, others have found the prospect of applying it in classrooms leads to a number of questions and concerns. Some ask, for example, whether a student with a disability will disrupt the class; others, whether the student will interfere with covering the curriculum; still others, whether the student might be teased by classmates. Since these are legitimate concerns, I will return to them at the end of this chapter. First, however, let me clarify exactly how the IDEA legislation affects the work of teachers, and then describe in more detail the major disabilities that you are likely to encounter in students.

Responsibilities of Teachers for Students with Disabilities
The IDEA legislation has affected the work of teachers by creating three new expectations. The first expectation is to provide alternative methods of assessment for students with disabilities; the second is to arrange a learning environment that is as normal or as “least restrictive” as possible; and the third is to participate in creating individual educational plans for students with disabilities.

Alternative Assessments
In the context of students with disabilities, assessment refers to gathering information about a student in order both to identify the strengths of the student, and to decide what special educational support, if any, the student needs. In principle, of course, these are tasks that teachers have for all students: assessment is a major reason why we give tests and assignments, for example, and why we listen carefully to the quality of students’ comments during class discussions. For students with disabilities, however, such traditional or conventional strategies of assessment often seriously underestimate the students’ competence (Koretz & Barton, 2003/2004; Pullin, 2005). Depending on the disability, a student may have trouble with Traditionally, teachers have assumed that all students either have these skills or can learn them with just modest amounts of coaching, encouragement, and will power. For many other students, for example, it may be enough to say something like “Remember to listen to the question carefully!” For students with disabilities, however, a comment like this may not work and may even be insensitive. A student with visual impairment need not be reminded to “look at the page closely" or "at what I am writing on the board”; doing so will not cause the student to see the chalkboard more clearly—though the reminder might increase the student’s anxiety and self-consciousness.
 * 1) holding a pencil,
 * 2) hearing a question clearly,
 * 3) focusing on a picture,
 * 4) marking an answer in time even when he or she knows the answer,
 * 5) concentrating on a task in the presence of other people, or
 * 6) answering a question at the pace needed by the rest of the class.

There are a number of strategies for modifying assessments in ways that attempt to fair and that at the same time recognize how busy teachers usually are. One is to consider supplementing conventional assignments or tests with portfolios, which are collections of a student’s work that demonstrate a student’s development over time, and which usually include some sort of reflective or evaluative comments from the student, the teacher, or both (Carothers & Taylor, 2003; Wesson & King, 1996). Another is to devise a system for observing the student regularly, even if briefly, and informally recording notes about the observations for later consideration and assessment. A third strategy is to recruit help from teacher assistants, who are sometimes present to help a student with a disability; an assistant can often conduct a brief test or activity with the student, and later report on and discuss the results with you.

If you reflect on these strategies, you may realize that they may sometimes create issues about fairness. If a student with a disability demonstrates competence one way but other students demonstrate it another, should they be given similar credit? On the other hand, is it fair for one student to get a lower mark because the student lacks an ability—such as normal hearing—that teachers cannot, in principle, ever teach? These ethical issues are legitimate and important, and I therefore return to them in Chapters 10 and 11, which discuss assessment in much more detail.

Least Restrictive Environment
The IDEA legislation calls for placing students with disabilities in the least restrictive environment (or LRE), defined as the combination of settings that involve the student with regular classrooms and school programs as much as possible. The precise combination is determined by the circumstances of a particular school and of the student. A kindergarten child with a mild cognitive disability, for example, may spend the majority of time in the regular kindergarten, working alongside and playing with non-disabled classmates and relying on a teacher assistant for help where needed. An individual with a similar disability in high school, however, might be assigned primarily to classes specially intended for slow learners, but nonetheless participate in some schoolwide activities alongside non-disabled students. The difference in LREs might reflect teachers’ perceptions of how difficult it is to modify the curriculum in each case; rightly or wrongly, teachers are apt to regard adaptation as more challenging at “higher” grade levels. By the same token, a student with a disability that is strictly physical might spend virtually all his or her time in regular classes throughout the student’s school career; in this case, adjustment of the curriculum would not be an issue.

For you, the policy favoring the least restrictive environment means that if you continue teaching long enough, you will very likely encounter a student with a disability in one or more of your classes, or at least have one in a school-related activity for which you are responsible. It also means that the special educational needs of these students will most often be the “mildest.” Statistically, the most frequent forms of special needs are learning disabilities, which are impairments in specific aspects of learning, and especially of reading. Learning disabilities account for about half of all special educational needs—as much as all other types put together. Somewhat less common are speech and language disorders, cognitive disabilities, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorders (abbreviated ADHD). Because of their frequency and of the likelihood that you will meet students for whom these labels have been considered, I describe them more fully later in this chapter, along with other disability conditions that you will encounter much less frequently.

Individual Educational Plan
The third way that IDEA legislation and current educational approaches affect teachers is by requiring teachers and other professional staff to develop an annual individual educational plan (or IEP) for each student with a disability. The plan is created by a team of individuals who know the student’s strengths and needs; at a minimum it includes one or more classroom teachers, a “resource” or special education teacher, and the student’s parents or guardians. Sometimes, too, the team includes a school administrator (like a vice-principal) or other professionals from outside the school (like a psychologist or physician), depending on the nature of the child’s disability. An IEP can take many forms, but it always describes a student’s current social and academic strengths as well as the student’s social or academic needs. It also specifies educational goals or objectives for the coming year, lists special services to be provided, and describes how progress toward the goals will be assessed at the end of year. Figure 5-1 shows a simple IEP for a student named Sean, a boy having difficulties with reading. IEPs like the one in the figure originally served mainly students in the younger grades, but more recently they have been extended and modified to serve transition planning for adolescents with disabilities who are approaching the end of their public schooling (West, et al., 1999). For these students, the goals of the plan often include activities (like finding employment) to extend beyond schooling as such. If you have a student with an IEP, you can expect two consequences for teaching. The first is that you should expect to make definite, clear plans for the student, and to put the plans in writing. This consequence does not, of course, prevent you from taking advantage of unexpected or spontaneous classroom events as well in order to enrich the curriculum. But it does mean that an educational program for a student with a disability cannot consist only of the unexpected or spontaneous. The second consequence is that you should not expect to construct an educational plan alone, as is commonly done when planning regular classroom programs. When it comes to students with disabilities, expect instead to plan as part of a team. Working with others ensures that everyone who is concerned about the student has a voice. It also makes it possible to improve the quality of IEPs by pooling ideas from many sources—even if, as you might suspect, it also can challenge professionals to communicate clearly and cooperate respectfully with team members in order to serve a student as well as possible.

Categories of Disabilities—and Their Ambiguities
So far I have said a lot about why inclusion has come to be important for teachers, but not much about the actual nature of students’ disabilities. Part of the reason for delaying was because, to put it simply, disabilities are inherently ambiguous. Naming and describing “types” of them implies that disabilities are relatively fixed, stable, and distinct, like different kinds of fruit or vegetables. As many teachers discover, though, the reality is somewhat different. The behavior and qualities of a particular student with a disability can be hard to categorize. The student may be challenged not only by the disability, but also by experiences common to all students, disabled or not Any particular disability, furthermore, poses problems more in some situations than in others. A student with a reading difficulty may have trouble in a language arts class, for example, but not in a physical education class; a student with a hearing impairment may have more trouble “hearing” a topic that he dislikes compared to one that he likes. Because official descriptions of types or categories of disability overlook these complexities, they risk stereotyping the real, live people to whom they are applied (Green, et al., 2005). Even the simplifications might not be a serious problem if the resulting stereotypes were complimentary—most of us would not mind being called a “genius,” for example, even if the description is not always true. Stereotypes about disabilities, however, are usually stigmatizing, not complimentary.

Still, categories of disabilities do serve useful purposes by giving teachers, parents, and other professionals a language or frame of reference for talking about disabilities. They also can help educators when arranging special support services for students, since a student has to “have” an identifiable, nameable need if professionals are to provide help. Educational authorities have therefore continued to use categories (or “labels”) to classify disabilities in spite of expressing continuing concern about whether the practice hurts students’ self-esteem or standing in the eyes of peers (Biklen & Kliewer, 2006). For classroom teachers, the best strategy may be simply to understand how categories of disabilities are defined, while also keeping their limitations in mind and being ready to explain their limitations (tactfully, of course) to parents or others who use the labels inappropriately.

That said, what in fact are the major types of disabilities encountered by teachers? The next sections of this chapter look at them one at a time, beginning the more common ones.

Learning disabilities
A learning disability (or LD) is a specific impairment of academic learning that interferes with a specific aspect of schoolwork and that reduces a student’s academic performance significantly. (read more...)

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (or ADHD) is a problem with sustaining attention and controlling impulses. (read more...)

Intellectual disabilities
An intellectual disability is a significant limitation in a student’s cognitive functioning and daily adaptive behaviors...(read more...)

Behavioral disorders
Behavioral disorders are a diverse group of conditions in which a student chronically performs highly inappropriate behaviors. (read more...)

Physical disabilities and sensory impairments
A few students have serious physical, medical or sensory challenges that interfere with their learning. (read more...)

The value of including students with special needs
I have hinted at it already in this chapter, but it is worth saying again: including students with disabilities in regular classrooms is valuable for everyone concerned. The students with disabilities themselves tend to experience a richer educational environment, both socially and academically. Just as with racial segregation, separate education is not equal education, or at least cannot be counted on to be equal. But classmates of students with disabilities also experience a richer educational environment; they potentially meet a wider range of classmates and to see a wider range of educational purposes in operation. Teachers also experience these benefits, but their programs often benefit in other ways as well. The most notable additional benefit is that many teaching strategies that are good for students with disabilities also turn out to benefit all students—benefits like careful planning of objectives, attention to individual differences among students, and establishment of a positive social atmosphere in the classroom. Later (in Chapter 8 and 9) we will return to these topics because of their importance for high-quality teaching. But at that point we will frame the topics around the needs of all students, whatever their individual qualities.


text:
Contemporary Educational Psychology/Chapter 6: Student Motivation

Motives as Behavior
Sometimes it is useful to think of motivation not as something "inside" a student driving the student’s behavior, but as equivalent to the student’s outward behaviors. This is the perspective of behaviorism, which I discussed in Contemporary Educational Psychology/Chapter 2: The Learning Process as a way to think about the learning process. In its most thorough-going form, behaviorism focuses almost completely on what can be directly seen or heard about a person’s behavior, and has relatively few comments about what may lie behind (or “underneath” or “inside”) the behavior. When it comes to motivation, this perspective means minimizing or even ignoring the distinction between the inner drive or energy of students, and the outward behaviors that express the drive or energy. The two are considered the same, or nearly so.

Equating the inner and the outward might seem to violate common sense. How can a student do something without some sort of feeling or thought to make the action happen? As we will explain, this very question has led to alternative models of motivation that are based on cognitive rather than behaviorist theories of learning. We will explain some of these later in this chapter. Before getting to them, however, we encourage you to consider the advantages of a behaviorist perspective on motivation.

Sometimes the circumstances of teaching limit teachers’ opportunities to distinguish between inner motivation and outward behavior. Certainly teachers see plenty of student behaviors—signs of motivation of some sort. But the multiple demands of teaching can limit the time needed to determine what the behaviors mean. If a student asks a lot of questions during discussions, for example, is he or she is curious about the material itself, or just wanting to look intelligent in front of classmates and the teacher? In a class with many students and a busy agenda, there may not be a lot of time for a teacher to decide between these possibilities. In other cases, the problem may not be limited time as much as communication difficulties with a student. Consider a student who is still learning English, or who belongs to a cultural community that uses patterns of conversation that are unfamiliar to the teacher, or who has a disability that limits the student’s general language skill. In these cases discerning the student’s inner motivations may take more time and effort. It is important to invest the extra time and effort for such students, but while a teacher is doing so, it is also important for her to guide and influence the students’ behavior in constructive directions. That is where behaviorist approaches to motivation can help.

Operant Conditioning as a Way of Motivating
The most common version of the behavioral perspective on motivation is the theory of operant conditioning associated with B. F. Skinner (1938, 1957), which we discussed in Chapter 2. The description in that chapter focused on behavioral learning, but the same operant model can be transformed into an account of motivation. In the operant model, you may recall, a behavior being learned (the “operant”) increases in frequency or likelihood because performing it makes a reinforcement available. To understand this model in terms of motivation, think of the likelihood of response as the motivation and the reinforcement as the motivator. Imagine, for example, that a student learns by operant conditioning to answer questions during class discussions: each time the student answers a question (the operant), the teacher praises (reinforces) this behavior. In addition to thinking of this situation as behavioral learning, however, you can also think of it in terms of motivation: the likelihood of the student answering questions (the motivation) is increasing because of the teacher’s praise (the motivator).

Many concepts from operant conditioning, in fact, can be understood in motivational terms. Another one, for example, is the concept of extinction, which we defined in Chapter 2 as the tendency for learned behaviors to become less likely when reinforcement no longer occurs—a sort of “unlearning,” or at least a decrease in performance of previously learned. The decrease in performance frequency can be thought of as a loss of motivation, and removal of the reinforcement can be thought of as removal of the motivator. Table 6-1 summarizes this way of reframing operant conditioning in terms of motivation, both for the concepts discussed in Chapter 2 and for other additional concepts.

Cautions about Behavioral Perspectives on Motivation
As we mentioned, behaviorist perspectives about motivation do reflect a classroom reality: that teachers sometimes lack time and therefore must focus simply on students’ appropriate outward behavior. But there are nonetheless cautions about adopting this view. An obvious one is the ambiguity of students’ specific behaviors; what looks like a sign of one motive to the teacher may in fact be a sign of some other motive to the student (DeGrandpre, 2000). If a student looks at the teacher intently while she is speaking, does it mean the student is motivated to learn, or only that the student is daydreaming? If a student invariably looks away while the teacher is speaking, does it mean that the student is disrespectful of the teacher, or that student comes from a family or cultural group where avoiding eye contact actually shows more respect for a speaker than direct eye contact?

Another concern about behaviorist perspectives, including operant conditioning, is that it leads teachers to ignore students’ choices and preferences, and to “play God” by making choices on their behalf (Kohn, 1996). According to this criticism, the distinction between “inner” motives and expressions of motives in outward behavior does not disappear just because a teacher (or a psychological theory) chooses to treat a motive and the behavioral expression of a motive as equivalent. Students usually do know what they want or desire, and their wants or desires may not always correspond to what a teacher chooses to reinforce or ignore. This, in a new guise, is once again the issue of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation that we discussed in Chapter 2. Approaches that are exclusively behavioral, it is argued, are not sensitive enough to students’ intrinsic, self-sustaining motivations.

As we pointed out in Chapter 2, there is truth to this allegation if a teacher actually does rely on rewarding behaviors that she alone has chosen, or even if she persists in reinforcing behaviors that students already find motivating without external reinforcement. In those cases reinforcements can backfire: instead of serving as an incentive to desired behavior, reinforcement can become a reminder of the teacher’s power and of students’ lack of control over their own actions. A classic research study of intrinsic motivation illustrated the problem nicely. In the study, researchers rewarded university students for two activities—solving puzzles and writing newspaper headlines—that they already found interesting. Some of the students, however, were paid to do these activities, whereas others were not. Under these conditions, the students who were paid were less likely to engage in the activities following the experiment than were the students who were not paid, even though both groups had been equally interested in the activities to begin with (Deci, 1971). The extrinsic reward of payment, it seemed, interfered with the intrinsic reward of working the puzzles.

Later studies confirmed this effect in numerous situations, though they have also found certain conditions where extrinsic rewards do not reduce intrinsic rewards. Extrinsic rewards are not as harmful, for example, if a person is paid “by the hour” (i.e. by a flat rate) rather than piecemeal (by the number of items completed) (Cameron & Pierce, 1994; Eisenberger & Cameron, 1996). They also are less harmful if the task itself is relatively well-defined (like working math problems or playing solitaire) and high-quality performance is expected at all times. So there are still times and ways when externally determined reinforcements are useful and effective. In general, however, extrinsic rewards do seem to undermine intrinsic motivation often enough that they need to be used selectively and thoughtfully (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 2001). As it happens, help with being selective and thoughtful can be found in the other, more cognitively oriented theories of motivation. These use the goals, interests, and beliefs of students as ways of explaining differences in students’ motives and in how the motives affect engagement with school. We turn to these cognitively oriented theories next, beginning with those focused on students’ goals.

Motives as goals
One way motives vary is by the kind of goals that students set for themselves, and by how the goals support students’ academic achievement. (read more...)

Motives as interests
In addition to holding different kinds of goals—with consequent differences in academic motivation—students show obvious differences in level of interest in the topics and tasks of the classroom. (read more...)

Motives related to attributions
Attributions are perceptions about the causes of success and failure. Suppose that you get a low mark on a test and are wondering what caused the low mark. You can construct various explanations for—make various attributions about (read more...)

Motives as self-efficacy
In addition to being influenced by their goals, interests, and attributions, students’ motives are affected by specific beliefs about the student’s personal capacities. In self-efficacy theory the beliefs become a primary, explicit explanation for motivation (read more...)

Motivation as self-determination
A recent theory of motivation based on the idea of needs is self-determination theory, proposed by the psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan (2000), among others. The theory proposes that understanding motivation requires taking into account three basic human needs...(read more...)

Expectancy x value: effects on students’ motives
As we have explained in this chapter, motivation is affected by several factors, including reinforcement for behavior, but especially also students’ goals, interests, and sense of self-efficacy and self-determination. The factors combine to create two general sources of motivation: students’ expectation of success and the value that students place on a goal. Viewing motivation in this way is often called the expectancy-value model...(read more...)

The bottom line about motivation: sustaining focus on learning
Sooner or later when you teach, there will be situations appropriate for each perspective about motivation described in this chapter. There will be times when focusing exclusively on students’ appropriate behavior (or lack thereof) will be both necessary and sufficient evidence of motivation. But there will be other times when it is important to encourage students’ beliefs that they can accomplish specific tasks, and still other times when providing for students’ underlying needs for competence or social connection is important. Think of these perspectives as alternatives, to be used either singly or in combination when the time is right.

Because of your own values, attitudes, or beliefs, you may find one perspective more personally compatible than another. Even if you settle on favorite ways of motivating students, though, we encourage you to keep the other, less favored approaches in reserve anyway, and to experiment with them. We believe that an eclectic approach to motivation will enrich your teaching the most, and enrich your students’ motivation and learning as well. If there is a single lesson from the concepts about motivation outlined in this chapter, it is this: academic motivation has no single source, and teachers motivate students the best when they assume motivation is complex. The next two chapters look at ways of realizing such “broad-mindedness” in practice, first when you prepare activities and classes and later when you actually teach them.


text:
Contemporary Educational Psychology/Chapter 7: Classroom Management and the Learning Environment

 * An excerpt from a professional journal kept by me (KelvinLeeSeifert) when I was teaching kindergarten:

 * November 14th: Today my student Carol sat in the circle, watching others while we all played Duck, Duck, Goose (in this game, one student is outside the circle, tags another student who then chases the first person around the circle). Carol’s turn had already passed. Apparently she was bored now, because she flopped on her back, smiling broadly, rolling around luxuriously on the floor in the path of the other runners. Several classmates noticed her, smiled or giggled, began flopping down as well. One chaser tripped over a “flopper.”

 * Sit up, Carol,” said I, the ever-vigilant teacher. “You’re in the way.” But no result. I repeated twice more, firmly; then moved to pick her up.

 * Instantly Carol ran to the far side of the gym, still smiling broadly. Then her best friend ran off with her. Now a whole new game was launched, or really two games: “Run-from-the-teacher” and “Enjoy-being-watched-by-everybody.” A lot more exciting, unfortunately, than Duck, Duck, Goose!

 * An excerpt from Kelvin’s same journal several years later, when he was teaching math in high school:

 * March 4th: The same four students sat in the back again today, as usual. They seem to look in every direction except at me, even when I’m explaining material that they need to know. The way they smile and whisper to each other, it seems almost like they are "in love" with each other, though I can’t be sure who loves whom the most. Others—students not part of the foursome—seem to react variously. Some seem annoyed, turn the other way, avoid talking with the group, and so on. But others seem almost envious—as if they want to be part of the "in" group, too, and were impressed with the foursome’s ability to get away with being inattentive and almost rude. Either way, I think a lot of other students are being distracted.

 * Twice during the period today, I happened to notice members of the group passing a note, and then giggling and looking at me. By the end, I had had enough of this sort of thing, so I kept them in briefly after class and asked one of them to read the note. They looked a bit embarrassed and hesitant, but eventually one of them opened the note and read it out loud. “Choose one,” it said. “Mr. Seifert looks 1) old ____, 2) stupid____, or 3)clueless____.”

Kelvin's experiences in managing these very different classrooms taught him what every teacher knows or else quickly learns: management matters a lot. But his experiences also taught that management is about more than correcting the misbehaviors of individuals, more than just "discipline." Classroom management is also about "orchestrating" or coordinating entire sets or sequences of learning activities so that everyone, misbehaving or not, learns as easily and productively as possible. Educators sometimes therefore describe good classroom management as the creation of a positive learning environment, because a term calls attention to the totality of activities and people in a classroom, as well as to their goals and expectations about learning (Jones & Jones, 2007). When Kelvin was teaching, he used both terms almost interchangeably, though in speaking of management he more often was referring to individual students’ behavior and learning, and in using the term learning environment he more often meant the overall “feel” of the class as a whole.

Why classroom management matters
Managing the learning environment is both a major responsibility and an on-going concern for every teacher, even those with years of experience (Good & Brophy, 2002). There are several reasons. In the first place, a lot goes on in classrooms simultaneously, even when students seem to be doing only “one” task together. Twenty-five students may all be working on a sheet of math problems. But look more closely: several may be stuck on a particular problem, but each for different reasons. A few others have worked only the first problem or two and are now chatting quietly with each other instead of continuing. Still others have finished and are wondering what to do next. At any one moment each student needs something different—different information, different hints, different kinds of encouragement. The diversity increases even more if the teacher deliberately assigns multiple activities to different groups or individuals (for example, if some are doing a reading assignment while others do the math problems).

Another reason that managing the environment is challenging is because a teacher can never predict everything that will happen in a class. A well-planned lesson may fall flat on its face, or take less time than you expect, and you find yourself improvising to fill class time. On the other hand an unplanned moment may become a wonderful, sustained exchange among students; so you have to drop previous plans and “go with the flow” of their discussion. Interruptions happen continually: a fire drill, a quick drop-in visit from another teacher or from the principal, a call on the intercom from the office. An activity may turn out well, but also end up rather differently than you intended; you therefore have to decide how, if at all, to adjust the next day to allow for this surprise.

A third reason for the importance of management is that students form opinions and perceptions about your teaching that may coincide neither with your own nor with other students’. What seems to you like encouragement of a shy student may seem to the student herself like “forced participation.” A more eager, outgoing classmate watching your special effort to encourage the shy student, however, may not see you as either encouraging or coercing, but as overlooking or ignoring other students who are already more willing to participate. The variety of perceptions can lead to surprises in students’ responses to you—most often small ones, but occasionally more major.

At the broadest, society-wide level, management challenges teachers because public schooling is not voluntary, and students’ presence in a classroom is therefore not a sign, in and of itself, that they wish to learn. Students’ presence is instead just a sign that an opportunity exists for teachers to motivate students to learn. Many students, of course, do enjoy learning and being in school—but not all. Others do enjoy school, but primarily because teachers have worked hard to make classroom life pleasant and interesting. They become motivated because you have successfully created a positive learning environment and have sustained it through skillful management.

Fortunately it is possible to earn this sort of commitment from students, and this chapter describes some ways of doing so. We begin with some ways of preventing management problems in the first place by increasing students’ focus on learning. The methods include the arrangement of classroom space, the establishment of procedures, routines, and rules, and communicating the importance of learning both to students and to parents. After these prevention oriented discussions, we look at ways of refocusing students when and if their minds or actions do stray from the tasks at hand. As you probably know from your own experience as a student, bringing students back on task can happen in many ways, ways that vary widely in the energy and persistence required of the teacher. We try to indicate some of this diversity, but because of space limitations and because of the richness of classroom life, we cannot describe them all.

Preventing management problems by focusing students on learning
The easiest management problems to solve are ones that do not happen in the first place! You can help to prevent problems even before the first day of school by...(read more...)

Pacing and structuring lessons and activities
One of the best ways to prevent management problems is by pacing and structuring lessons or activities as smoothly and continuously as possible. Reaching this goal depends on...(read more...)

Responding to student misbehavior
So far we have focused on preventing behaviors that are off-task, or inappropriate, or annoying. Our advice has all been pro-active or forward-looking: plan the classroom space thoughtfully, create reasonable procedures and rules, pace lessons and activities appropriately, and communicate the importance of learning clearly. Although we consider these ideas to be important, it would be naïve to imply they are enough to prevent all behavior problems...(read more...)

Keeping management issues in perspective
There are two messages from this chapter. One is that management issues are important, complex, and deserve any teacher’s serious attention. The other is that management strategies exist and can reduce, if not eliminate, management problems when and if they occur. We have explained what some of those strategies are—including some intended to prevent problems from happening and others intended to remedy problems if they do occur.

But there is a third message that this chapter cannot convey by itself: that good classroom management is not an end in itself, but a means for creating a climate where learning happens as fully as possible. During the stress of handling problem behaviors, there is sometimes a risk of losing sight of this idea. Quiet listening is never a goal in itself, for example; it is desirable only because (or when) it allows students to hear the teacher’s instructions or classmates’ spoken comments, or because it allows students to concentrate on their work or assignments better. There may therefore actually be moments when quiet listening is not important to achieve, such as during a “free choice” time in an elementary classroom or during a period of group work in a middle school classroom. As teachers, we need to keep this perspective firmly in mind. Classroom management should serve students’ learning, and not the other way around. The next chapter helps to remind us of that priority, because it discusses ways not just to set the stage for learning, as this chapter has done, but to help students more directly to learn.


text:
Chess Opening Theory/1. e4/1...Nf6/2. Bc4/2...Nxe4/3. Bxf7/3...Kxf7/4. Qh5/4...Kg8/5. Qd5

=Alekhine Defence:Krejcik Variation= White forks the Black king and knight, regaining their lost material.

Black has only one legal move, 5...e6.

Theory table
.

'1.e4 Nf6 2.Bc4 Nxe4 3.Bxf7+ Kxf7 4.Qh5+ Kg8 5.Qd5+'


text:
Operating System Design/File Systems/Allocation

The main idea behind allocation is effective utilization of file space and fast access of the files. There are three types of allocation:
 * 1) contiguous allocation
 * 2) linked allocation
 * 3) indexed allocation

In addition to storing the actual file data on the disk drive, the file system also stores metadata about the files: the name of each file, when it was last edited, exactly where it is on the disk, and what parts of the disk are "free". Free areas are not currently in use by the file data or the metadata, and so available for storing new files. (The places where this metadata is stored are often called "inodes", "chunks", "file allocation tables", etc.)

To keep track of the free space, the file system maintains a free-space list which tracks all the disk blocks which are free. To create a file, the required space is reserved for the file and the corresponding space is removed from the free list linked to each other.

Contiguous allocations
The contiguous allocation method requires each file to occupy a set of contiguous address on the disk. Disk addresses define a linear ordering on the disk. When a file has to be stored on a disk, system search for contiguous set of blocks as required by the file size i.e. system waits till it finds required number of memory blocks in sequence. When space is available system stores the file in the disk and makes an entry in the directory.

The directory entry for a file with contiguous allocation contains

 * 1) Address of starting block
 * 2) Length of the allocation block

With this ordering, accessing block b+1 after block b normally requires no head movement. Contiguous allocation of a file is defined by the disk address and the length of the first block. If the file is n blocks long, and starts at location b, then it occupies blocks b, b+1, b+2, …, b+n-1. The directory entry for each file indicates the address of the starting block and the length of the area allocated for this file.

Linked allocation
In linked allocation, each file is a linked list of disk blocks. The directory contains a pointer to the first and optionally the last block of the file. For example, a file of 5 blocks which starts at block 4, might continue at block 7, then block 16, block 10, and finally block 27. Each block contains a pointer to the next block and the last block contains a NIL pointer. The value -1 may be used for NIL to differentiate it from block 0. With linked allocation, each directory entry has a pointer to the first disk block of the file. This pointer is initialized to nil (the end-of-list pointer value) to signify an empty file. A write to a file removes the first free block and writes to that block. This new block is then linked to the end of the file. To read a file, the pointers are just followed from block to block.

There is no external fragmentation with linked allocation. Any free block can be used to satisfy a request. Notice that there is no need to declare the size of a file when that file is created either. A file can continue to grow as long as there are free blocks. Linked allocation, does have disadvantages, however. The major problem is that it is inefficient to support direct-access; it is effective only for sequential-access files. To find the $$i^{th}$$ block of a file, it must start at the beginning of that file and follow the pointers until the $$i^{th}$$ block is reached. Note that each access to a pointer requires a disk read.

Indexed allocation
Linked allocation does not support random access of files, since each block can only be found from the previous. Indexed allocation solves this problem by bringing all the pointers together into an index block. One disk block is just used to store DBAs (disk block addresses) of a file. Every file is associated with its own index node. If a file is very large then one disk block may not be sufficient to hold all associated DBAs of that file. If a file is very small then some disk block space is wasted as DBAs are less and a single disk block could still hold more DBAs.

This method solves the problem of fragmentation as the blocks can be stored at any location.