Chapter 3

1. A lot of chapter 3 focuses on attention. For example, they talked about 3 different attention processes. Divided attention – performing two or more tasks simultaneously, selective-attention – you can not follow two conversations going on at the same time, and saccadic eye movements – regulates the way our eyes move in order to obtain information. Another important issue was consciousness which is when people are aware of the outside world.
2. I think that my knowledge of the thinking process is becoming better. Before coming into this course, I didn’t really know what cognition was all about. A lot of these terms I have never even heard of.
3. I would like to learn more about the theories of attention.
4. I can apply this to my own teaching everyday. Seeing what types of attention my students have. Whether it is selective or divided, I am now more aware of how my students react in the classroom. I feel that many of my students are categorized under divided attention. A lot of times they are trying to perform more than one task at a time. For example, a student could be trying to focus on me, take notes, and listen to another student talk. Also, it kind of made me realize a little about myself. For example, having divided attention while driving is probably not a good thing and I need to better myself after reading this!
5. I think it is valid, but I believe all students are different. Where I might have some who are categorized under selective attention, but I do feel for the most part they use their divided attention. The book gave a lot of examples and I liked reading about the “practice makes perfect”. I just wish this was true for all of our students!
6. I think it’s important to know what your student’s attention abilities are.
7. I stated this earlier. We see it everyday in the classroom.
8. I am sure there are other ways to accomplish this that could be better!

I'm looking forward to Chapter 4 -Working memory!!!

1. Chapter 2’s main points were all about perception. For example, it discussed visual, face, and auditory perception. It also talked about the Bottom-up processing and the top-down processing. Where bottom-up emphasizes object recognition and top-down emphasizes how a person's mental processes have an influence on object recognition.
2. I believe chapter 2 gives a lot more information. I have heard of the different perceptions before, but I did not know exactly what they meant. I really enjoyed reading about the feature-analysis approach. I never realized the process we go through to recognize letters of the alphabet.
3. I don't think that there is one thing that I could pick out that I didn't understand. If i didn't get it the first time I read it, I went back and read it again and I used the internet to look up some stuff.
4. In my classroom, I use visual perception a lot. One way is teaching geometry and teaching the different shapes. There are a couple of hands-on activities that I have done where the students had to use materials to draw their shapes. I felt like after doing that, they were able to visually see what a square is or what a triangle is. By doing this, later on when they take the test they can go back and visualize their shapes that they created.
5. The part in the book that talks about visual perception and Gestalt’s psychology relates to this. I do believe it helps because I have had student’s come back and say they would visualize what they did to picture the shape.
6. I think it explains that students need that visualization sometimes. All students learn differently, but this seems to be more effective especially for that chapter.
7. I use this right before I start my geometry unit. It is an opening activity to the chapter.
8. I guess if there was another way to accomplish this I would like to know!! I feel that it works well with my students, it does take up a whole class period, but I feel that it’s beneficial and it’s cheap!!