Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Post 1

After stepping away from the book the main thing that stuck in my head from the Social Cognitive section was the imitator characteristics. In this part of the chapter it talks about three different imitator characteristics. The first one that they talk about is attention. Students must pay attention to the behavior of the teacher so that they can perform the behavior themselves. The second one deals with retention. They must know how to write the word later when they are outside of the classroom. For example the students must pay attention on how to write certain words in cursive. If they don't pay attention to the behavior of the teacher while he his showing the class how to write a word then they wont be able to perform the task later down the road. The third thing that they mention is production. A student may pay attention but most of the time the student cant write the word as neatly and clearly as the teacher can. The final thing is motivation. The imitator must be willing to perform the task they just learned.
I didn't have anything that confused me too much in this chapter. There was one thing that I was curious about though. In the chapter they talked about self-efficacy and what causes high or low self efficacy in a person. Do the four steps that they talk about abide to everything or just when it comes to the classroom?
According to the Social Cognitive Theory Learning can be occur by observing others. Learning may or may not include a behavioral change and personal characteristics are important in learning.
Going to church for several years has a kid effected some things in my life. It taught me that drinking and sex outside of marriage was wrong. So whenever I was tempted by drinking in high school I always walked away easily due to the fact that I was brought up knowing that drinking was bad.

2 comments:

  1. In response to your question, I would say that self-efficacy and the steps that are talked about in the book would abide to just about everything. For example, in baseball if a child has not hit well in the past he would probably not have a very high self-efficacy in the sport. On the other hand, a boy who has hit well in the past and is always getting on base will probably expect to do the same in the future. In step two, they talk about modeling. In my baseball example, if the boy sees other boys doing well on his team he would be likely to have a high self-efficacy because he believes he can do well too. The third step talkes about verbal persuasion. Here, this would be like the coach yelling to the boy in the batter's box, "you can do it!" This would raise the child's self-efficacy when at bat. The last step discusses physiological states. If the boy in our example does not get enough rest the night before a big game he may be fatigued and have lower self-efficacy than normal due to thinking he won't do well because he is tired. This is just one example of how the steps would relate to something outside the classroom.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I like your discussion here of the chapter, but don't understand how the last part of the post fits in with the theory. What models or people were present here? Or, cultural norms? How did they shape learning? I just need some more clarification.

    ReplyDelete