Lindsay Wipf

Educational psychology

Kim

04/27/16

Educational Psychology Final Paper

I believe learning is the act of taking away new information from experiences. Many

concepts and theorists from this class will change and shape my teaching. The main four areas

that I believe will affect my teaching are thinking in relation to learning, experiences/assistance

in relation to learning, multiple intelligences in relation to learning, and memory in relation to

learning.

Thinking in relation to learning is a concept studied and written about mainly by Piaget.

Piaget believed there were three stages a person goes through in terms of what they can

understand and process in learning. These three stages are sensorimotor, preoperational, and

concrete operational. Depending on what stage a student is in, they are able to understand

hypothetical situations, need concrete explanations, or have to touch and feel to learn. With a

connection to my classroom someday, I want to be very aware of what activities and learning

experiences I use. Since my major is early child education and elementary education, I could be

teaching students in the sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, or concrete operational stage. I

find it very important to set up my classroom in a way that accommodates these different stages.

If I am teaching an infant class, I would have many different objects and colors all around my

classroom at a level where the infants can reach them and experience them through their senses

and motor skills. If I am teaching elementary school, I would like to have activities where my
students can see and directly apply the information I am teaching them since that is the way their

brains work best at that stage generally.

Experiences and assistance in relation to learning is the next concept that I believe will

really affect my learning. This is a concept mainly talked about by Vygotsky and is very

insightful for teaching. Two major concepts out of his theory that have really affected me and my

future teaching career are zone of proximal development and scaffolding. The zone of proximal

development is finding the area in which a student is being challenged but not overwhelmed by

new tasks and experiences. Scaffolding is assistance offered to a student to help them learn that

is slowly taken away as they develop. I want to create experiences in my classroom where

students are learning in that zone of proximal development and also set up assistance so they can

learn without feeling so overwhelmed they give up. I plan to steadily increase the difficulty of

tasks as well as slowly take away the assistance I have provided. An example would be having

commonly misspelled words up on the board for part of the year, then slowly taking them down

so the children can sound out or remember how to spell those words.

The next concept I will apply is multiple intelligences in relation to learning. This is

something that Gardner has a lot to say about. He believed that intelligence has many forms and

is not able to be properly measured through an IQ test alone. I love all the kinds of intelligence

he researched and came up with. My goals when using this in my classroom will be to use a

variety of activities and assessments to be able to get a better understanding of my students

strengths and progress. I would like to do teaching that involves the outdoors, so naturalistic

intelligence, and teaching that involves working with group but also self-assessing, intrapersonal,

and interpersonal intelligence. These are just a few examples, however I would really like to use

all the intelligences.

 The last concept that has a major impact on how I plan to teach is memory in terms of

learning. There is a working memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. The

translation and access between all of these is really important in having students be able to

actually learn and use what they learn. I want to take the knowledge I learned about memory and

make sure my teaching involves my students with being authentic and meaningful so they can

remember what they have learned. I also want to be cross contextual so the students can apply

learning outside of the classroom. All of these strategies help the information to be stored in

long-term memory to be accessed later.

Through these four concepts and many more, I hope to have students who are able to take

away and apply new information from not only my teaching but also their experiences inside and

outside my classroom.