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Answer to #1
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Answer to #2
The humanistic approach focuses on the importance of the teacher's understanding of each student's needs, values, motives, and self- perceptions. In order for students to reach their potential, they need to feel accepted and understood by a teacher who has a genuine interest in them. Teachers who use this approach strive to create supportive and
caring classroom environments. The behavioral approach to instruction, on the other hand, does not recognize the role of attitudes, needs, values, or self-perceptions in the learning process. Rather, it focuses on
implementing the conditions that make it highly likely that a desired response will occur in the presence of a particular stimulus.
Maslow, Rogers, and Combs have all made contributions to the humanistic approach to
instruction. Maslow suggests that in order for students to reach their full potential, their physiological, safety, love, belonging, and esteem needs must first be met. He also suggests that the teacher should not dominate student development, but let it follow its natural course. Rogers suggests that learner-centered teachers should try to establish conditions that allow students to direct their own learning. Combs further added that teachers should not act as leaders, but as guides or facilitators to a process that is already in progress, cognitive development. Together these observations lead to a theory of education that views students as capable of making good choices about learning and teachers as facilitators who are positive toward their students and are sensitive to their needs.
Nel Noddings is a contemporary theorist whose arguments for and description of the caring classroom are consistent with humanistic principles. She believes that students are more motivated and learn more in classrooms that satisfy their physical needs; are clean and maintained; promote meaningful and pleasurable learning experiences; avoid the use of sarcasm, humiliation, and fear as tools to control behavior; capitalize on students' interests; promote the development of character; and teach students how to get along with others.
Answer to #3
The two theories of instruction that are based in cognitive psychology are the information processing/social cognitive approach and the constructivist approach to teaching. While both approaches focus generally on the mind and how it works, the primary focus of the information-processing/social cognitive approach involves implementing those conditions that help students transfer information from outside of themselves (books, worksheets, films, etc.) to inside themselves (the mind). In order for this to occur, information must be attended to, critical features must be noticed, and the student must be able to organize it and make it meaningful so that it will be retrievable from long-term memory.
This approach stresses the need, therefore, for teachers to design lessons around the principles of meaningful learning and to teach students how to learn more effectively. Both the teacher and student take active roles in
this instructional approach, which is characteristic of the cognitive approach in general. Specific methods for enhancing meaningful learning include the need for the teacher to communicate to the students what needs to be learned, why it is important to learn it, and how assessments of learning will be conducted. It is also suggested that attention-getting devices be used to capture student attention. Information not attended to by students will not be available for further processing. Teachers are advised to organize material for presentation to students and to embed it in contexts that are familiar in order to make processing easier and more meaningful. This approach also stresses the need to present information in reasonable amounts because of the limited capacity of working memory. Also, teachers must allow students sufficient time to learn
meaningfully, which means that students need time for distributed practice. Last, teachers need to help students get the information into long-term memory, using elaborative rehearsal, and to prepare to retrieve that information later, by using effective cues. Students often do not know how to learn the required material. Teachers should show students different tactics for processing information and teach them to monitor the effectiveness of those methods. This practice helps develop
metacognitive skills and awareness.
The primary focus of the constructivist approach to teaching involves providing a set of conditions that will lead students to construct views of reality that both make sense to them and address the criteria specified in the objectives. According to this view, people learn best when they create their own understanding of reality, based upon their attitudes, values, existing knowledge, and previous experience. The primary goal of constructivist teaching is to help students discover how to be independent, self-directed learners. The role of social interaction is more important to social constructivists than it is to cognitive constructivists or information-processing theorists. The specific teaching methods suggested by this approach include the use of scaffolded instruction within the learner's zone of proximal development. This practice promotes development by helping the student attain new abilities by providing just enough assistance to foster cognitive growth without creating a dependence on the
teacher. Proponents of this approach also maintain that students need to discover knowledge that relates to how ideas interrelate with one another, how to analyze and frame problems, how to ask appropriate questions, how to recognize when previously learned information is relevant to new material, and how to evaluate the effectiveness of learning strategies and tactics. This approach also stresses the importance of exposing students to multiple perspectives so that they can learn to negotiate the meaning of knowledge and truth with othersthe previously mentioned emphasis on social interaction. Cooperative learning is
one specific instructional method associated with this practice. Constructivists also emphasize the need to present problems and tasks in relevant contexts that apply to real-life so that students acquire useful, rather than inert, knowledge.
Answer to #4
The other levels of the cognitive domain are comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Students need to get beyond the knowledge level to learn how to use these other important learning tools. Learning exclusively at the knowledge level does not help children learn how to relate new ideas to one another, transfer ideas to other areas, synthesize new information with old, or look critically at their own or other people's ideas. In order to foster meaningful learning, teachers must also instruct and assess students above the knowledge level of Bloom's taxonomy.
It is also important to align objectives with instruction and assessment. It would be a wasted
effort to formulate and use objectives to plan for instruction without using those same objectives to plan for the assessment of student achievement. It is not possible to draw conclusions about whether or not students have achieved the objectives if they are not assessed at the same level specified by the objective. Teachers must formulate appropriate test items for paper-and-pencil tests; true-false, multiple-choice, and essay items measure different levels of student learning. Teachers must also determine the type of assessment to usealternative assessments such as portfolios, performances, and projects are frequently the most appropriate assessment tools for higher cognitive outcomes.
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