Post 8

Lower order thinking:
Who is Benjamin Bloom?

Higher order thinking:
Create some activities that can allow children to develop their higher order thinking skills. Explain how you intend to use help children develop their higher order thinking in your classroom.

Post 7

a) What are the essential skills and/or learning outcomes you want your students to know and be able to do that relate to cognitive learning?  Compare and contrast these skills with the essential skills related to constructivism.

I want my students to be able to build on their prior knowledge. I want them to be able to relate things back to things already know and are comfortable with. I also want them to know important methods for retaining information that may not be familiar to them.

Although, constructivism would also emphasize metacognition (thinking about thinking), they are very different in instruction. Constructivism looks at the mind in a different way than cognitivism. A constructivist would say that my students are not building on their prior knowledge, but that they are just changing their schema, or view of the world, with the new knowledge.

Post 5

A) How would you define successful mastery of your lesson objectives from a behavioral view of learning? From a social cognitive view of learning?

Since behaviorism puts emphasizes reinforcement and punishment, I believe that mastery would look like the good behavior continuing without the positive reinforcement and/or the bad behavior continuing to cease without the threat of punishment. For example, in a classroom, a teacher could say "If you do well on the spelling quiz, you get a special sticker on your paper." Now the children have external motivation to do well on the spelling quiz. However, you know that the children have mastered this if they continue to put effort to succeed in spelling even without the promise of a positive reinforcement. 

From a social cognitive view, if a child saw another child get praised for doing a good job on the spelling quiz, and they want to do the same. What I'm not sure about is if mastery occurs when they continue to try to achieve without the observation or they keep observing and keep trying to achieve. I mean, social cognitive is based on observing behavior. So would mastery entail continuous observations? Any thoughts, ya'll?