My First Post, Chapter 2

This is my first post for my educational psychology course.  I am excited about the course thus far.  Last week I had a migraine and have been a little slow to get going, but I know now that I've broken the ice and created the blog I am going to get really into it.

Chapter 2 in our textbook, Essentials of Educational Psychology, was an interesting introduction to the course (although I did read chapter 1 before the course started).  I didn't have much previous knowledge of theorists besides Pavlov.  I'm really interested in Constructivism, which I chose as the theory I am going to concentrate on and talk about in class each week.  I've found a lot of interesting articles relating Constructivism to education.  I will try to post some of the articles here.  I like the idea that people create, rather than absorb, knowledge from their observations and experiences.  I find that students grasp the material so much better when they can build new ideas from their previous knowledge.  I think this is true partially because having previous knowledge of a subject gives you confidence.

I really liked all the information about memory in chapter 2.  Our brains have limited capacity in how much information they can retain.    Therefore, learners must be selective about what they focus on and learn.  Effective learners know how to focus their attention on the important details and ignore the rest.  I liked how they referred to learning new information and then recalling it later as "storage" and "retrieval."  I started to think of memories like packages and the various parts of our brain that work together as little mail room workers, sorting the packages, storing the packages away, and then retrieving the important packages when called upon to do so.  Maybe this is a silly analogy, but I find that having a visual reference always helps me.