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Sunday, March 20, 2011

Chapter 10 in Learning and Cognition - Content-Area Learning

I enjoyed how the book divided up learning styles and techniques by different subject matters. By specifically looking at how students comprehend and understand different content areas, educators can determine the best instructional methods for teaching their students. However, I was disappointed that the chapter didn’t focus much time on the importance of cross curricular teaching. I agree that it is important to teach your subject matter but research has shown how it is more important to use combined learning techniques from all subjects. Therefore I don’t believe that mostly one subject has more reasoning than others or one fosters more problem solving skills. What is your opinion?   

7 comments:

  1. I agree with you Jessica. The buzz word that has been used and practiced in education in the last few years has been teaching cross curricular. The more that I teach this way, the better benefit I feel that it holds. It is a way to add to prior knowledge and connect everything together for the students. I feel that by teaching cross curriculum, it fosters reasoning and problem solving skills across the boards. Also by teaching cross curriculum, the students are getting higher order reasoning skills that can transfer in any aspect of education or their lives.

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  2. I agree with you both. Cross curricular teaching makes students operate on the higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy. It makes teaching relevant. Employers want to hire people who can think for themselves. What curricular teaching does is create students who are capable of adapting and doing new things.

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  3. I agree with cross curricular whole heartedly. I do believe "one subject has more reasoning or one fosters more problem solving skills." That is the reason we must teach cross curricular. By teaching cross curricular, we are "leveling out" the differences as well as showing students that subjects are all related.

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  4. You are so right! Students need to realize that all subjects are related in some way. And when a teacher incorporates this in the classroom, the teacher will see success. Students love learning about the relativity one subject has with another.

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  6. During my research I learned that it is important for teachers to work together to meet their students’ needs. Teachers need to realize the importance that each subject area plays in learning another subject. To help children comprehend math story problems, teachs can learn to incorporate some reading strategies into their math lessons. For example, using the read aloud/think aloud strategy as they work through problems, or using prefixes to help with math vocabulary, like bi, quad, penta, tri, octa, etc. The article "But I Teach Math" gives some great ways in which teachers can use content-area strategies in other subject areas to help students learn. You can find the article in the Resident Expert page of our wiki.

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  7. Good points Jessica. It is important for educators to learn about all subject matter because it all most instructional methods can be intertwined with various subjects. I guess the reason it was broken down in the chapter in that manner was to give some detailed information on each subject area so that could be broken down a little further. It’s funny though, I wonder if you were to ask students if they felt math and reading were related, how many would say no? Often times because students are taught subjects separately some never realize that many of the strategies they learn in one subject can be correlated to other subject areas as well.

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