Week 5: Cognition

Lily Bueno and I read and discussed this week's reading and reading questions. One of the instructional strategies we liked the most was the attention one. children tend to wander off in their little minds very quickly and it is obvious that they will learn more and better if they are paying attention. So planning your lessons in a way that will keep them engaged and also practicing with the how it is that they pay attention will be very helpful during our teaching journey. We also liked the rehearsal/repeat, we definitely agree that repetition can be a great way for important information to stick with our students, after all that is what we do at church right. We repeat the same principles over and over again, and that is how we learn and grow spiritually. We talked about low-road transfer and high-road transfer. Low-road transfer is when someone has repeated that same skill so many times, in other words have practiced it so many times that it eventually comes to them naturally and automatically. An example of that would be a gymnast doing her flips, it takes an enormous amount of practice to have that come automatically to you. Another example of low-road transfer would be a child learning to tie their shoes, it takes a while for them to get it completely to do it without looking for example. High-road transfer means to purposely and consciously apply knowledge and information to different situations. An example of that would be learning to play the card game spider then with one suit, then later playing it with two, and so forth. Another example of high-road transfer would be a child learning operation properties for addition, then later applying the same properties to multiplication. We agreed that the transfer we have seen most used is the high-road transfer. Children first learn letters and their sounds, then they learn words and what those letters sound like put together. We have used algorithms mostly in math to solve problems or anything else like physics or statistics. We have used heuristic to estimate, for example, you need  to know if a sofa is going to fit in the moving truck you've rented, you mentally estimate about how big is your sofa and the truck and if it will fit.