Educational Psychology

  Concept 1: Metacognitive Development in Secondary Students Summary:  In chapter 9, Woolfolk covers the aspects and processes of metacognition. After pointing out the definition of the term, "cognition about cognition, or thinking about thinking," (Woolfolk 340), the author goes on to describe the various metacognitive skills. These include planning, evaluating, and monitoring. (Woolfolk 341). After discussing some differences in metacognition between individual people, Woolfolk  touches on how children and teens develop these skills, and what strategies teachers can use to help them in this development.  Reflection:  In this chapter, Woolfolk talks about some questions to ask secondary and/or college students to help them hone their metacognitive skills and "become more self-reflective." (Woolfolk 343). Upon studying these questions, I realized that many of them are queires I pose to my tutoring students, particularly those in the middle or secondary grades. F...

  Concept 1: Positive and Negative Reinforcement Summary:   One of the main topics discussed in Chapter 7 was the use of positive and negative reinforcers within the operant conditioning theory. According to Woolfolk, a reinforcer is "any consequence that strengthens the behavior it follows." (Woolfolk 267) There are thus two ways of reinforcing behavior, which will increase or strengthen the behavior the next time it occurs. Positive reinforcement "occurs when the behavior or response leads to the appearance or presentation of a new stimulus" and negative reinforcement occurs when "the consequence that strengthens a behavior is the removal (subtraction) of a stimulus." (Woolfolk 268). The author also points out that there is a clear difference between punishment and negative reinforcement: "the 'negative' in negative reinforcement does not imply that the behavior being reinforced is necessarily negative or bad. The meaning is closer to that o...

 Concept 1: Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences Summary: In chapter 4, Woolfolk discusses a few different theories of intelligence, as well as describing how it is and has been measured. Specifically, she describes Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences. According to the text, psychologist Howard Gardner came up with a new way to theorize intelligence while working with both gifted students and those who were recovering from brain injuries. He realized that there may be more than one type of intelligence as he saw that different children had some abilities but were struggling with others - at times, the brain injury patients could do things that the gifted children could not, such as verbal tasks (Woolfolk 126). This led him to create his Theory of Multiple Intelligences. The theory is made up of eight or nine separate abilities, including Logical-Mathematical, Linguistic, Musical, Spatial, Interpersonal, Naturalist, Bodily-Kinesthetic, and Existential. (Woolfolk 12...

  Concept 1: What Makes a Good Teacher? Summary:  In Chapter 1, Woolfolk discusses the difference teachers can make in the lives of their students, as well as different types of research that go into the study of educational psychology. She displays through several studies that having a caring, supportive teacher-student relationship leads to better academic and behavioral outcomes. For example, when Woolfolk describes the experiment done by Roorda which reviewed 99 studies conducted worldwide that focused on the connections between student engagement and teacher-student relationships. According to the text, in the studies, "Positive teacher relationships predicted positive student engagement at every grade, but the relationships were especially for students who were at risk academically and for older students." (Woolfolk 8). Since it has been proven that having effective teachers improves students' performance, the next question Woolfolk tackles is "What makes good ...