Literacy

So I do not have any child development related news right now. I will do some reading and get back to all of my fans about the issue of adolescent literacy. Since I will be taking part in an adult summer reading program I want to look into adolescents and their reading abilities. I will read a few articles and get back to you on what I find.

Phone conversation

Phone rings. I know its J calling.
Me: Hey
J: Hey, hows it going?
M: Good. How are you?
J: Good. What are you doing?
M: Reading.
J: Reading? Reading for what?
M: Just reading.
J: Oh ok. Sorry I didn't call you back last week. We had a surprise party for....
I just thought it was funny about the why are you reading. It is weird that we actually have time to read since during the semester it is all about papers and research for our classes. We just spent more time talking about our classes next semester and when we can get together to have lunch soon.

Yeah an update!

I have been busy with school work and have not really wanted to update since Bonnie past. But I will update my loyal fans now. I finished with finals last Tuesday, with a really easy final. Last Monday was really stressful because I had to turn in two finals and take a calculus final all in one day. I got to see my friend on Friday and went out to lunch. I have been cleaning my room which is taking a while because it really needed it. And also because it takes 10 times as long to clean as it does to make a mess. Maybe more than 10 times. I was at the store a few weeks back and happened to stumble upon Dryers Limited Edition Cinnamon Ice Cream. I bought some for Robert and have spent my weekends baking apple crisp. I have been baking other things too like these cookies.

Memory development

There is a difference between the information the general public gets and what college students and professors have access to. Magazines about parenting and children give people information about what to do and watch for as children develop, in a very limited way. I am searching for magazines that have any information about any type of memory development and what is present is that these articles just try to calm parents and/or get them to interact more with their children. It does not go in to detail about why and how these cognitive abilities are happening because that can go into way too much detail. I just wish that more scientific information was available and at a more appropriate level so that all parents can learn about how a human being develops. The magazines are a great step to keep parents informed.

Sidenote

I just wanted to say that I don't like when people talk only about football around me and they know I will not participate in the conversation because I don't know anything about football. I hope that people know what there friends want to discuss and will refrain from conversations that people will not take part in.

It's been a while

I hope I haven't been worrying my readers since I haven't updated for almost a month. I have just been on vacation and working on stuff for school so I haven't had much information to put into a post. I am currently learning about memory development, which I will write a paper about in a few weeks. There are a few theories out about it, but there is no one specific one and of course researchers cannot agree which one is best.
Not much has happened lately. I am working on a group project to teach elementary school math and motivation at the same time. I am focusing on attribution theory and problem solving and am trying to not incorporate information processing into it too much. We will see what happens. The presentation is in 2 weeks. Well its getting late so I will try to update in a few days.

Spring Break

So I get a break for a week to relax, well I can't relax the whole time because there are papers due in about a month. I have some interesting information to post about three theories: Piaget, Vygotsky/sociocultural, and Information Processing.

(nature) Piaget’s theory focuses on where knowledge comes from and how it evolves. There are four stages of development: sensorimotor (Birth- 2 years, The ability to act on the world), preoperational (2-6or7 years, in which children have the ability to form internal mental representations), concrete operational (about ages 6 or 7 – 11 or 12 years old, Children in this stage are able perform operations), and formal operational (11 or 12 years and onward. Now have the ability to perform abstract thought, reason abstractly, do systematic problem solving, see own particular reality as one of many imaginable). Three processes are assimilation (the way in which people transform incoming information so that if fits their existing way of thinking), accommodation (the ways in which people adapt their thinking to new experiences), and equilibration (process by which children integrate their many particular pieces of knowledge of the world into a unified whole= Balancing assimilation and accommodation). There are three steps in equilibration: equilibration, disequilibration, and new equilibration, with disequilibration being the time in which you have not yet accommodated new information. It makes the assumption that children actively construct their own reality, are scientific problem solvers, and that development happens in a particular order.

(nurture) Vygotsky’s theory Focuses on how change occurs based on the social world. States that development happens through social interaction. Says that psychological functions happen twice: first in the social arena (intermental) and second within individual (intramental). Also focuses on internalization of socially shared processes, this is what gets the person from step one to step two. Says that cultural tools (traditional and psychological) help form our development. Traditional tools are tools for acting on the environment, like hammers and cups, and psychological tools are used for thinking, remembering and organizing, like language and dictionaries. It makes the assumption that thinking is mediated by cultural tools.

(Mechanics) Information Processing focuses on what develops, how, and at what ages. States that cognition= processing information. It is a gradual change in development, not by stages which contradicts Piaget's theory. Children's’ thinking is like adult thinking. Focuses on how much attention is needed to process information, which can be processed in two ways: automatic and controlled. automatic processes take very little attention while controlled processes take a lot of attention. Controlled has four components 1) mnemonics (memory aids) 2) rehearsal (repeating information) 3)organization (chunking information into 3-7 chunks) and 4) elaboration (schema). Automatization is the process by which we change from controlled to automatic. There are three types of memory: sensory, working, and long-term. It makes the assumption that we have limits on speed and capacity, but we are flexible and adaptable in changing world.

Math again

So I only had one math class today, the calculus one. We were reviewing for the test on Monday. There were a few review questions she gave us that we have not gone over before and we started to go over them but because they are so tedious we left them after we only did a little bit. We gossip a lot in that class, I guess that is what happens when you put five women in the same room with no men. For my other math class I have to find a math problem off the internet for the class to do for Monday. I also have to come up with a new door open problem, The open where you have 1000 students open or close doors that are multiples of of each students number.

Math

In calculus on Monday, we were going over limits and one was Lim X->2 (X² -4)/(X-2), which is indeterminate. but when you graph it it just seems like a straight line, but its not because a point is missing at (2,4). Well some one forgot that zero in the denominator means it is undefined, so I just magically came up with "if zero is UNDEr (the line) it is UNDEfined." So today we moved on to graphing continuous and discontinuous functions. We also worked with pairs of functions that had not just "X"s in them but also "a"s. So that was it for that math class. Not much happened in the other one. At my tables we just went over the hw that was due and tried to give answers without actually having to yell at the professor. She can't hear us very well, so sometimes it gets frustrating.