Six Stages of Communication Process free essay sample

To establish yourself as an effective communicator, you must first establish credibility. †¢In the business arena, this involves displaying knowledge of the subject, the audience and the context in which the message is delivered. Stage 2: Message †¢Written, oral, and non-verbal communications are affected by the sender’s tone, method of organization, validity of the argument, what is communicated and what is left out, as well as your individual style of communicating Stage 2: Message Messages also have intellectual and emotional components, with intellect allowing us the ability to reason and emotion allowing us to present motivational appeals, ultimately changing minds and actions. Stage 3: Channel †¢Messages are conveyed through channels †¢These messages are delivered to an audience. No doubt, you have in mind the actions or reactions you hope your message prompts from this audience. †¢Keep in mind, your audience also enters into the communication process with ideas and feelings that will undoubtedly influence their understanding of your message and their response. We will write a custom essay sample on Six Stages of Communication Process or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Stage Four: Receiver †¢To be a successful communicator, you should consider these before delivering your message, acting appropriately. Stage Five: Feedback †¢Your audience will provide you with feedback: –Verbal and nonverbal reactions to your communicated message. Pay close attention to this feedback, as it is crucial to ensuring the audience understood your message. Stage Six: Content †¢The situation in which your message is delivered is the context. †¢This may include the surrounding environment or broader culture –corporate culture –international cultures To deliver your messages effectively, you must commit to breaking down the barriers that exist in each of these six stages of the communication process. We will learn about these â€Å"Communication Barriers† in Week Two.

Biography of Numa Pompilius, Roman King

Biography of Numa Pompilius, Roman King Numa Pompilius (c. 753–673 BCE) was the second king of Rome. He is credited with establishing a number of notable institutions, including the temple of Janus. Numas predecessor was Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome. Fast Facts: Numa Pompilius Known For: According to legend, Numa was the second king of Rome.Born: c. 753 BCEDied: c. 673 BCE Early Life According to ancient scholars, Numa Pompilius was born on the very day that Rome was founded- April 21, 753 BCE. Little else is known about his early life. Some 37 years after the founding of Rome, Romulus- the kingdoms first ruler- disappeared in a thunderstorm. The patricians, the Roman nobility, were suspected of having murdered him until Julius Proculus informed the people that he had had a vision of Romulus, who said that he had been taken up to join the gods and was to be worshiped under the name Quirinus. Rise to Power There was considerable unrest between the original Romans and the Sabines- who had joined them after the city was founded- over who would be the next king. For the time being, it was arranged that the senators should each rule with the kings powers for a period of 12 hours until some more permanent solution could be found. Eventually, they decided that the Romans and Sabines should each elect a king from the other group, i.e., the Romans would elect a Sabine and the Sabines a Roman. The Romans were to choose first, and their choice was the Sabine Numa Pompilius. The Sabines agreed to accept Numa as the king without bothering to elect anyone else, and a deputation from both Romans and Sabines went off to tell Numa of his election. Numa did not even live in Rome; he resided in a nearby town called Cures. He was the son-in-law of Tatius, a Sabine who had ruled Rome as joint king with Romulus for a period of five years. After Numas wife died, he had become something of a recluse and was believed to have been taken by a nymph or nature spirit as a lover. When the delegation from Rome came, Numa refused the position of king at first but was later talked into accepting it by his father and Marcius, a relative, and some of the local people from Cures. They argued that left to themselves the Romans would continue to be just as warlike as they had been under Romulus and it would be better if the Romans had a more peace-loving king who could moderate their bellicosity or, if that proved to be impossible, at least direct it away from Cures and the other Sabine communities. Kingship Having agreed to accept the position, Numa left for Rome, where his election as king was confirmed by the people. Before he finally accepted, however, he insisted on watching the sky for a sign in the flight of birds that his kingship would be acceptable to the gods. Numas first act as king was to dismiss the guards Romulus had always kept around. To achieve his aim of making the Romans less bellicose, he diverted the peoples attention by leading religious spetacles- processions and sacrifices- and by terrifying them with accounts of strange sights and sounds, which were supposedly signs from the gods. Numa instituted priests (flamines) of Mars, of Jupiter, and of Romulus under his heavenly name of Quirinus. He also added other orders of priests: the pontifices, the salii, and the fetiales, and the vestals. The pontifices were responsible for public sacrifices and funerals. The salii were responsible for the safety of a shield which had allegedly fallen from the sky and was paraded around the city each year accompanied by the salii dancing in armor. The fetiales were peacemakers. Until they agreed that it was a just war, no war could be declared. Originally Numa instituted two vestals, but he later increased the number to four. The main duty of the vestals, or vestal virgins, was to keep the sacred flame alight and to prepare the mixture of grain and salt used in public sacrifices. Reforms Numa distributed the land conquered by Romulus to poor citizens, hoping that an agricultural way of life would make the Romans more peaceful. He would inspect the farms himself, promoting those whose farms looked well cared for and admonishing those whose farms showed signs of laziness. People still thought of themselves first as original Romans or Sabines, rather than citizens of Rome. To overcome this division, Numa organized the people into guilds based on the occupations of their members. In Romulus time, the calendar had been fixed at 360 days to the year, but the number of days in a month greatly varied. Numa estimated the solar year at 365 days and the lunar year at 354 days. He doubled the difference of eleven days and instituted a leap month of 22 days to come between February and March (which was originally the first month of the year). Numa made January the first month, and he may have added the months of January and February to the calendar as well. The month of January is associated with the god Janus, the doors of whose temple were left open in times of war and closed in times of peace. In Numas reign of 43 years, the doors remained closed, a record for Rome. Death When Numa died at over the age of 80 he left a daughter, Pompilia, who was married to Marcius, the son of the Marcius who had persuaded Numa to accept the throne. Their son, Ancus Marcius, was 5 years old when Numa died, and he later became the fourth king of Rome. Numa was buried under the Janiculum together with his religious books. In 181 BCE, his grave was uncovered in a flood but his coffin was found to be empty. Only the books, which had been buried in a second coffin, remained. They were burnt on the recommendation of the praetor. Legacy Much of the story of Numas life is pure legend. Still, it seems likely that there was a monarchical period in early Rome, with the kings coming from different groups: Romans, Sabines, and Etruscans. It is rather less likely that there were seven kings who reigned in a monarchical period of approximately 250 years. One of the kings may have been a Sabine called Numa Pompilius, though we may doubt that he instituted so many features of the Roman religion and calendar or that his reign was a golden age free from strife and warfare. But that the Romans believed that it was so is a historical fact. The story of Numa was part of the founding myth of Rome. Sources Grandazzi, Alexandre.  The Foundation of Rome: Myth and History. Cornell University Press, 1997.Macgregor, Mary.  The Story of Rome, from the Earliest Times to the Death of Augustus. T. Nelson, 1967.

Accounting coursework Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 1

Accounting - Coursework Example Mr. Joseph, store sales personnel, generated  £ 10,000 revenue for February, 2015. On the other hand, Ms. Gina, another sales personnel assigned to another city branch of the same company, generate  £ 50,000 revenue during the same time period. If the company’s sales benchmark for each store sales employee is  £ 40,000 per month, Mr. Joseph’s sales strategies did not effectively meet the required monthly revenue benchmark. On the other hand, Ms. Gina’s sales strategies effectively met the monthly required revenue benchmark (Chapman, 2011). 1. Business entities strive to generate higher efficiency and effectiveness levels to increase revenues (Chapman, 2011). By performing the same task within lesser time period, the company can sell more products. Taking lesser time to serve each customer’s store needs allows the same sales personnel to serve more customers. Serving more customers will normally lead to more revenues. By reducing work time to the least possible length, the store’s overall revenues will surely increase. 2. Business entities strive to generate higher efficiency and effectiveness levels to maximize expenses (Chapman, 2011). By using lesser salary expense, electricity expense, water, expense, repair expense, marketing expense, and other related business expenses, the company is able to save money. The saved money reduces the loan amount needed by the company for business expansions to other cities or nations. 3. Business entities strive to generate higher efficiency and effectiveness levels to increase net income figures (Chapman, 2011). With lesser time used and with lesser expense amounts, the financial statements of the companies will show that the company’s net income is favouraby higher than when money is unnecessarily wasted on unnecessary electricity, wage, and other production and possibly marketing expenses. The above table 1 evidently indicates United

The Second Amendment in 1776 and Now Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

The Second Amendment in 1776 and Now - Essay Example English common law has recognized the significance of proper arms control for a long time. The founding fathers believed that citizens have a right to own arms when working in the militia. Such right ensures the presence of maximum protection and security since people can defend themselves whenever need arises (Cornell 10). The Supreme Court of the US has upheld the amendment in its three decisions in the years 1876, 1886 as well as in 1939. Therefore, the founding fathers advocated for collective rights interpretation whereby people were allowed to own arms only when in a group such as the militia but not individuals. The founding fathers had in mind the dangers of permitting individual citizens to purchase and own guns in the society. According to them, such permission would promote weapon related violence, and thereby make the society an unsafe place to live in. This collective right interpretation had prevailed in America for over a century, and therefore, it had been recognized and used in three Supreme Court rulings (Cornell 15). However, this meaning remained no-contentious until in 1960 when an additional individual right to bear arms for self-defense was recognized. Therefore, the assertion of the individual right has made Americans to currently consider that the Second Amendment warrants their right to own a gun (Charles 27). The individual rights model has either undercut or blocked passage of laws that regulate purchase and use of guns over the last twenty years. For instance, the assault weapons prohibition of 1994 was permitted to expire after ten years due to intense pressure from gun rights activists and organizations (Doherty 31). Even though the gun’s lobby persistence that the long common laws and traditions have existed supporting an individual’s right to own and use weapons, the English law has regulated guns from the 14th century (Gonzales 45). This is because of the existence of Game Laws that restricted ownership of weapons only to the wealthy people who had substantial income and owned huge lands (Baron 3). Therefore, the middle class as well as peasants were not permitted to own or use weapons such as guns. Currently, gun lobbyists argue that the English Bill of Rights presented to the monarchs by the House of Commons in 1689 guaranteed everyone to own and use weapons (Anderson and Horwitz 35). However, the law restricted the ownership to Protestants who were of the right social class. Further, the Bill of Rights acknowledged the need for the law to regulate weapons. In this regard, the Bill of Rights does not recognize ownership and use of weapons among the middle class as well as the common citizens (Labunski 53). The privilege to possess and use weapons—more so, guns—was left to the wealthy people in the society. In Britain, the law on gun control has been maintained while in the US, there has been growing resistance to regulation of possession and use of guns. The most recent case occurred in March 2007, when the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia recognized the individual rights model (Smith 36). It decided that the ban on handguns since 1976 in Washington D.C. has been in violation of the Second Amendment that guarantees the right of an individual to own and use guns. According to the

Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect Literature review

Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect - Literature review Example All the trading activities are limited to the utilization of RMB as the standard currency. This investment channel has opened up new markets which have not been available to international investors operating in Hong Kong. This channel has expanded the access to investment options which are available to different investors within China. International investors in Hong Kong can be able to access and purchase shares listed in the mainland stock market while operating from their location (Sekine 2014). All these transactions will be facilitated through local stock brokers and agents within the different locations. Previously, the investors within the different regions could only access stock within their market and had to be registered in either Hong Kong or Chinese markets to be able to conduct trade there. Despite the development of a joint stock market investment opportunity which presents significant benefits to trader, there are various restrictions in the trading activities which investors can pursue. These restrictions have occurred as a result of the regulation available within the market. There is need for regulation to be implemented in seeking to ensure there is market control in how trading is conducted. The channel has created formula for defining the eligible investors who will be allowed to conduct trade within the channel that is being developed. Investors from Hong Kong and international investors are allowed to access all types of eligible stocks within the shanghai stock market. This will nevertheless not be the circumstance for investors listed in the shanghai stock exchange. The investors from shanghai who can trade in shares within Hong Kong are only institutional investors and individuals who have RMB 500,000 of investment or cash. Only ‘A’ shares from the Shanghai market are included within the eligible shares which can be traded in the channel. Certain constituent stocks of these ‘A’ shares are also accessible to Hong

Different viewpoints and opinions on education

Different viewpoints and opinions on education Indoctrinational vs. democratic/participatory teaching methods and techniques John Dewey argued that education should use a critical democratic approach to raise student consciousness about values, attitudes and worker responsibilities. He stated that the primary purpose of education in United States was to foster the growth of democratically minded citizens, and Dewey made no distinction in the education of those who would manage the companies and those who would work on the shop floors. Dewey strongly advocated vocational exploration as a means to acquire practical knowledge, apply academic content and examine occupational and societal values. However, he adamantly opposed the use of vocational education as merely trade education as it would overemphasize technical efficiency. If this occurred, and some would argue it has, education would then become an instrument of perpetuating unchanged the existing industrial order of the society, instead of operating as a means of its transformation (Dewey, 1916). Dewey believed that it was educations role to combat soc ial predestination, not contribute to it. In contrast, Charles Prosser and David Snedden advocated an indoctrinational approach for teaching work value and attitudes; students should learn, without question, the ethical standards of dominant society and the professional ethics of the desired professional area (Prosser, 1939). Supporters of this approach believed the primary purpose of public education was the development of human capital for the success of industrial economy. To accomplish this, they argued that scientific management principles, drawn from the industrial sector, were employed in the public school setting, creating a hierarchically structured and production oriented educational system (Spring, 1990). Prossers sixteen theorems of vocational education support this vision of schooling. According to him, vocational educational should replicate the occupational environment (i.e. processes, machinery, tools), emphasize efficiency (e.g. outputs, costs) and teach functioning facts rather than in the mere acquiring of abstract and socially useless knowledge (Prosser Quigley, Vocational education in a democracy, 1949). In the past thirty five years the argument initiated by Dewey, Prosser and Snedden has resurfaced between educational theorists, outside the realm of vocational education, and business leaders concerned about the decline of industrial productivity in industrialized nations. Expanding upon Deweys perspective, these educational theorists have used a socio-political-economic framework to guide their critique. Specifically reproduction theorists have criticized vocational education for transmitting work values and attitudes necessary for a compliant workforce as well as primarily employing indoctrinational pedagogies for work values and attitudes instruction (Bowles Gintis, 1976). Reproduction and critical theorists have argued that the indoctrinational approach is exploitative because it produces attitudes in students that correspond to the type of work in which students will most likely participate upon completion of their formal education (Anyon, 1980); (Giroux, 1983); (Macleod, 1987 ). Another facet of this debate was represented in the report Americas choice: high skills or low wages! which focused on corporate organizational structure and its relationship to worker behaviors (National Center on Education and the Economys Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, 1990). It stated that about 80% of United States companies utilize a pyramidal mass manufacture model that values reliable and compliant workers who perform their tasks almost robot like. This is in contrast to democratically structured organizations that need workers who are adaptable, resourceful, critical and capable of making decisions. While Dewey and critical theorists are concerned primarily with implementing democracy in the schools and the workplace to create a more just and equitable society, the industrial sociological literature has provided evidence that work organizations that employ democratic processes or participatory management also increase worker productivity (Hall, 1987); (J ain, 1980); (Zuboff, 1983). The Commission suggested that, while there is a trend towards companies implementing more participatory management, vocational education needs to teach democratic skills and utilize primarily democratic strategies so that future workers will be prepared to participate in, and assist in transforming companies into high performance organizations. Ineffective learning The nature of work has changed and our understanding of how people learn has also changed. Both developments call into question the organization, goals and pedagogy of our educational system. What makes these developments so powerful is that our new understanding of both work and learning suggest very similar directions for reform. Strengthening the educational system so that it conforms more to the ways people learn will also directly enhance the ability of that system to prepare students for the type of workplaces that are emerging in factories and offices throughout the industrialized world. The following discussion of effective learning emerges from a powerful knowledge base known as cognitive science. From the perspective of cognitive science this discussion purports to underscore two basic points about learning and teaching. First, school routinely and profoundly violates what we know about how people learn effectively and the conditions under which they apply their knowledge appropriately to new situations. Second, these practices seem to permeate all levels and sectors of education and training in developed countries right from elementary grades to corporate training. Mistaken assumption # 1: The educational enterprise assumes that people predictably transfer learning to new situations As a society, we presume that the ultimate point of schooling is to prepare students for effective and responsible functioning outside of school. Accepting this assumption means that we have to confront what is known as the knowledge transfer problem. Knowledge transfer simply means the appropriate use in a new situation of concepts, skills, knowledge and strategies acquired in another. Historically, lower-skilled workers had a very limited need for transfer. Transfer becomes important when you encounter the unfamiliar and non-routine, and lower skilled workers encountered little that was not familiar and did not have the responsibility for handling the non-routine that they did encounter. Goods and services were limited in number, allowing long production runs of the same thing or service and reducing the number of events that have not been previously encountered. Within this limited product or service range, companies organized the work as specialist work workers had responsibility for a narrow range of activity. Supervisors and managers were expected to handle the non-routine events that did occur within this narrow, repetitive world. That is, responsibility for events that required problem solving, judgment, heuristics, analogues, or other mental activities enhanced by the access to knowledge and skills acquired in other situations was detached from lower-skill jobs and vested in middle-skill managerial jobs. However, technological innovations and changed market conditions ushered by globalization and in its wake increased competition means an increased number of non-routine events. Companies in developed countries are gradually shifting from highly specialized and repetitive jobs at lower skill levels toward teams expected to handle a broader range of activities, and they are also increasingly vesting problem-solving, supervisory responsibilities in these teams. Thus, a broader range of workers is being asked to exercise the mental activities enhanced by access to knowledge and skills acquired in other situations. Extensive research, spanning decades, shows that individuals do not predictably transfer knowledge in any of the three situations where transfer should occur. They do not predictably transfer school knowledge to everyday practice (Pea, 1989); (Lave, 1988). They do not predictably transfer sound everyday practice to school endeavors, even when the former seems clearly relevant to the latter. They do not predictably transfer their learning across school subjects. We focus on the first two transfer problems: from school to nonschool and from nonschool to school. Transferring from school to outside of school: This transfer situation is at the heart of schooling. Usually, the major claim for school-type instruction is its generality and power of transfer to situations beyond classroom (Resnick, 1987). The fundamental question is whether knowledge, skills and strategies acquired in formal education in fact get used appropriately in everyday practice. Students in college physics courses designed for physics majors can solve book problems in Newtonian mechanics by rote application of formulae. However, even after instruction, they revert to naÃÆ' ¯ve pre-Newtonian explanations of common physical situations to which their school learning is relevant (diSessa, 1983). Studies of expert radiologists, electronic troubleshooters and lawyers all reveal a syrprising lack of transfer of theoretical principles, processes or skills learned in school to professional practice (Resnick, 1987). For example, Morris and Rouse found that extensive training in electronics and troubleshooting theories provided little knowledge and fewer skills directly applicable to performing electronic troubleshooting (Morris Rouse, 1985) Transferring from outside of school to school: People learn outside of school all the time. The question then is what people do with what they learn outside of school when they move into school. Does sound, everyday practice get transferred to get used in school learning? How does incorrect learning outside school affect correct learning inside school? Dairy workers, although almost errorless in their use of practical arithmetic at work, performed badly in on arithmetic tests with problems like those encountered in their jobs (Scribner Fahrmeir, 1982). Brazilian street vendor children successfully solved 98% of their marketplace transactions, such as calculating total costs and change. When presented with the same transactions in formal arithmetic word problems that provided some descriptive context, the children correctly solved 74% of the problems. Their success rate dropped to 37% when asked to solve the same types of problems when these were presented as mathematical operations without descriptive context (Carraher, Carraher, Schliemann, 1985). Other studies show that training on one version of a logical problem has little, if any, effect on solving an isomorphic version that is represented differently (Hayes Simon, 1977). Teaching children to use general context-independent cognitive strategies has no clear benefits outside the specific domains in which they are taught (Pressley, Snyder, Cariglia-Bull, 1987) Cognitive experts agree that the conditions for transfer are not fully understood. Even though studies cited in previous paragraphs continue to find no evidence of transfer, others identify conditions under which transfer seems to occur (Holyoak, 1985); (Nisbett, Fong, Lehman, Cheng, 1987); (Lehman, Lempert, Nisbett, 1988); (Singley Anderson, 1989). We know that people routinely apply skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic to new situations with some success. These skills are used most effectively in well understood content domains. For example, readers get more out of their reading when they know something about the domain in which they are reading than when they do not. Nonetheless, skills such as reading do let us enter unfamiliar content areas we do use these skills in new situations, and they do help us. At the same time, we also keep finding lack of transfer. We now know that certain practices in school impede learning. More effective learning may not be sufficient for transfer, but poor initial learning will certainly impede it. Mistaken assumption # 2: Learners are best seen as passive vessels into which knowledge is poured In a typical schoolroom or a corporate training session, the teacher or expert faces the learners in the role of knowledge source. The learner is the passive receiver of wisdom a glass into which water is poured. This instructional arrangement comes out of an implicit assumption about the basic purpose of education: the transmission of societys culture from one generation to the next. The concept of transmission implies a one-way flow from the adult members of the society to the societys young, or, from the expert to the novice (Lave, The culture of acquisition and the practice of understanding: Report No. IRL88-0007, 1988). In fact, schooling is often talked about as transmission of canonical knowledge in other words, of an authoritative, structured body of principles, rules and knowledge. Education as canonical transmission thus becomes the conveying of what experts know to be true, rather than a process of inquiry, discovery and wonder. This view of education leads naturally to the student as the receiver of the word, to a lecture mode of teaching, and to the teacher as the controller of the process. This organization of learning, with the teacher as order-giver and the student as order-taker, fits the traditional organization of work for lower-skilled workers in both civilian workplaces and the military. The workers à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ responsibility was à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ to do what he was told [to do by the management] (Callahan, 1962). Ben Hamper, an auto assembly line worker, uses more colorful language: Working the line at G. M. was like being paid to flunk high school for the rest of your life (Marchese, 1991). The assumption that the teacher is the pourer and the student the receptacle has several unfortunate consequences. Passive learning reduces or removes chances for exploration, discovery and invention: Passive learning means that learners do not interact with problems and content and thus do not get the experiential feedback that is key to learning. Students need chances to engage in choice, judgment, control processes and problem formulation; they need chances to commit mistakes. The saying, experience is the best teacher, is borne out by the research you learn what you do. While not sufficient for effective learning, doing is nonetheless necessary. However, schools usually present what is to be learned as a delineated body of knowledge, with the result that students come to regard the subject being studied mathematics, for example as something received, not discovered and as entity to be ingested, rather than a form of activity, argumentation and social discourse. This organization of learning mirrors the traditional organization of work, especially for lower skilled workers. Under the system of industrial management known as scientific management or the Taylor System, each mans task was worked out by the planning department. Each worker received an instruction card which described in minute detail not only what is to be done, but how it is to be done and the exact time allowed for doing it' (Callahan, 1962). This system was highly prescriptive; it left no room for deviation or innovation. Passive learning places control over learning in the teachers, not the learners, hands: Passive learning creates learners dependent on teachers for guidance and feedback, thus undercutting the development of confidence in their own sense making abilities, their initiative and their cognitive executive skills. The example of Brazilian street vendor children may be recalled at this juncture. The researchers found that when the children tried to work school math problems, they did not check the sensibleness of their answers by relating them back to the initial problem. Although virtually errorless in their street math activities, they came with preposterous results for school math problems (Carraher, Carraher, Schliemann, 1985). In a study of supermarket shoppers use of arithmetic, the researchers assessed the shoppers command of structurally similar school math problems. The shoppers spoke with self-deprecation about not having studied math for a long time. Lave clarifies what is happening here. Individuals experience themselves as both subjects and objects in the world. In the supermarket, for example, they see themselves as controlling their activities, interacting with the setting, generating problems in relation [to] the setting, and controlling problem solving processes. In contrast, school à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ create[s] contexts in which children à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ experience themselves as objects, with no control over problems or choice about problem-solving processes (Lave, Cognition in Practice, 1988) in sum, control in the teachers, not the students hands undercuts students trust in their own sense making abilities. As companies have started shifting decision-making power to the shop floor, managers find that workers conditioned to depending on their supervisors telling them what to do are frightened and lack confidence in their ability to solve problems and make decisions. In addition to its effects on confidence, passive learning also undercuts the development of a particular set of higher order cognitive skills called the cognitive self-management, or executive thinking, skills. These are simply the skills that we use to govern our problem-solving attempts. They include goal setting, strategic planning, checking for accurate plan execution, monitoring our progress and evaluating and revising our plans. We now know that those who function as independent and effective learners are people with these skills. However, as Pea has observed, passive learning is disastrous for developing them. Classroom studies of reading, writing, and math and science instruction show that the executive processes for controlling thinking and learning processes are under the teachers control, not the students. These processes seem to get developed when the learning situation is structured to shift control from the teacher to the student, the teacher gradually removing the support that students need initially as they begin to show the ability to work autonomously (Pea, 1989). Passive learning creates motivational and crowd control problems: Jordan describes a Mexican public health training program designed to improve the practice of Mayan midwives. Her analysis spotlights behaviors that American teachers constantly complain about their students (Jordan, 1987). The teaching is organized in a straight didactic material in a mini-lecture format. When these lectures begin, the midwives shift into what Jordan calls their waiting-it-out behavior: they sit impassively, gaze far away, feet dangling, obviously tuned out. This is behavior that one might also observe in other waiting situations, such as when a bus is late or during sermons in church, (p. 3). We see the same behaviors in American third graders. Hass found that students were deeply engaged in team problem-solving during their drill and practice time, but invested little attention or involvement in the teachers instructional sessions. During three weeks of observation, the children did not adopt any of the specific strategies demonstrated by the teacher during general instruction time (Hass, 1988). As teachers know it so well, motivational problems often end up as crowd control problems, as illustrated by the behaviors of different groups of children at a Metropolitan Museum display of Ice Age art and artifacts. Most of the school groups were moved from one exhibit to the next, pausing before each to hear a guides or teachers lecture. Since the children were bunched in front of an exhibit, they could not all hear the lecture, and even when they could, they lacked understanding of the time frames involved or the archaeological significance of bits of bone. Teachers had not set up the museum visit so that students became involved in what they were going to see. Groups were therefore restless and crowd control became the teachers primary concern. One junior high school class behaved very differently, exhibiting a quiet intensity as they moved through the exhibit gallery. They had packets of worksheets with questions about issues and problems that they were expected to solve at the exhibit. Some questions were factual, but most required inference and thought. The students had to figure out for themselves where and what the evidence would be concerning particular questions (Farnham-Diggory, 1990). Motivational and crowd control problems with students have shown up for decades with lower-skilled workers in the forms of high turnover, absenteeism and, in extreme cases, sabotage. Mistaken assumption # 3: Learning is the strengthening of bonds between stimuli and correct responses Based on his animal experiments, the brilliant psychologist Edward Thorndike developed a new theory of learning. As Cremin observed, the theory presumed that learning was the wedding of a specific response to a specific stimulus through a psychological bond in the neural system. The stimulus [S] then regularly called forth the response [R]. the bond between S and R was stamped in by being continually rewarded; an undesired bond was extinguished through punishment or failure (Cremin, 1961). For the purpose of this research, this psychological theory had three major effects. It led to the breakdown of complex ideas and tasks into components, subtasks and items (stimuli) that could be separately trained. It encouraged repetitive training (stamping in). And it led to a focus on the right answer (successful response) and to the counting of correct responses to items and subtasks, a perspective that ended up in psychometrically elegant tests that were considered the scientific way to measure achievement. The result was fractionation: having to learn disconnected subroutines, items and subskills without an understanding of the larger context into which they fit and which gives them meaning. As Farnham-Diggory notes, fractionated instruction maximizes forgetting, inattention and passivity (Farnham-Diggory, 1990). Since children and adults seem to acquire knowledge from active participation in complex and meaningful environments, school programs could hardly have been better designed to prevent a childs natural learning system from operating (p. 146). The phrase a childs natural learning system goes to the heart of why the usual school programs do not meet their own learning objectives well. Human beings even the small child are quintessentially sense-making, problem-solving animals. The word Why is a hallmark of young childrens talk. As a species, we wonder, we are curious and we want to understand. Pechman talks about the child as the meaning maker. Fractionated and decontextualized instruction fails to mobilize this powerful property of human beings in the service of learning (Pechman, 1990). Mistaken assumption # 4: What matters is getting the right answer Bothe the transmission and the behaviorist views of learning place a premium on getting the right answer. A transmission view stresses the ability of the learner to reproduce the Word; a behaviorist view, the ability of the learner to generate the correct response. The end result is the same: students and teachers focus on the right answer, jeopardizing the development of real understanding. The focus plays out in several ways. An instructional focus on the right answer discourages instruction in problem solving: A right answer focus encourages an emphasis on facts. Facts are important, but by themselves constitute an impoverished understanding of a domain; a fact-focus does not help students abilities to think about the domain in different ways. Cognitive analyses of a range of jobs show that being able to generate different solutions to problems that are formally the same is a hallmark of expert performance (Scribner, Head and hand: An action approach to thinking, 1988).Employers and college educators both complain that American high school graduates are limited in their thinking and problem-solving abilities, deficiencies that stem partly from an educational emphasis on facts and right answers. Students resort to veneers of accomplishment: Students respond to a focus on right answers by learning to test right within the school system. They figure out what answers the teacher or the test seems to want, but often at the cost of real learning. These surface achievements have been called the veneer of accomplishment (Lave, Smith, Butler, Problem solving as an everyday practice, 1988). Also, Jordans analysis of a Mayan midwives training program illuminates basic truths about the learning and testing of American students (Jordan, 1987). She found that midwives who had been through the training course saw official health care system as powerful, in that it commanded resources and authority. They came to distinguish good from not good things to say. Specifically, they learned new ways of legitimizing themselves, new ways of presenting themselves as being in league with this powerful system, but with little impact on their daily practice. Although they could converse appropriately with supervisory medical personnel, their new knowledge was not incorporated into their behavioral repertoire. It was verbally, but not behaviorally fixed. Jordan notes that the trainers evaluated their program by asking the midwives to reproduce definitions, lists and abstract concepts. She observes that if these tests measure anything at all, they measure changes in linguistic repertoire and changes in discourse skills [not changes in behavior] (pp. 10-12) The same behaviors show up with Hasss American third graders. He noticed that in mathematics lessons the students got much practice in problem-solving methods that they had brought into the classroom with them methods that were not being taught and were not supposed to be used. The children used these methods to produce right answers, which the teacher took as evidence of their having grasped the formal procedures that she was teaching them. In fact, all that had happened was the appearance of learning. Teachers do not get behind the answers: We end up with appearances of learning because, in their search for right answers, teachers often fail to check behind the answers to insure that students really grasp the principles that they want the students to master. In typical American classrooms the time devoted to a lesson on a particular topic makes it hard to bring to the surface, let along change, the ideas and assumptions that individuals bring to the lesson. Traditional curriculum design is usually based on a conceptual analysis of the subject matter that ignores what is already in the learners head, with the result that students make mistakes that arise from undetected ideas that they brought to the lesson. Or they can play back memorized canonical knowledge and conceptions but return to their own ideas when confronted with unfamiliar questions or non-routine problems. As noted earlier,, students in college physics courses designed for physics majors can solve book problems in Newtonian mechanics by rote application of formulas, but even after instruction revert to naÃÆ' ¯ve pre-Newtonian explanations of common physical situations (Raizen, 1989). Teachers do not focus on how to use student mistakes to help them learn: In their search for right answers, teachers tend to regard student errors as failures rather than as opportunities to strengthen students understanding. American teachers placed little emphasis on the constructive use of errors as a teaching technique, a practice that the researchers attribute to the strong influence of behaviorism in American education. Behaviorism requires teaching conditions that help learners make only correct responses that can be reinforced through praise. Mistaken assumption # 5: To insure their transfer to new situations, skills and knowledge should be acquired independently of their contexts of use This idea is often talked about as decontextualized learning, which simply means learning out of context or meaning. The rationale for decontextualised learning goes back to the presumed conditions for the transfer of learning. As Lave observes, extracting knowledge from the particulars of experience was thought to make that knowledge available for general application in all situations (Lave, Cognition in Practice, 1988). Almost seventy five years ago, John and Evelyn Dewey wrote about the learning costs of decontextualized education. A statement, even of facts, does not reveal the value of the fact, or the sense of its truth of the fact that it is a fact. Where children are fed only on the book knowledge, one fact is as good as another; they have no standards of judgment or belief. Take the child studying weights and measures; he reads in his textbook that eight quarts make a peck, but when he does examples he is apt, as every schoolteacher knows, to substitute four for eight. Evidently the statement as he read it in the book did not stand for anything that goes on outside the book, so it is a matter of accident what figure lodges in his brain, or whether any does. But the grocers boy who has measured out pecks with a quart measure knows. He has made pecks; he would laugh at anybody who suggested that four quarts made a peck. What is the difference in these two cases? The schoolboy has a result without the activity of which it is the result. To the grocers boy the statement has value and truth, for it is the obv ious result of an experience it is a fact. Thus we see that it is a mistake to suppose that practical activities have only or even mainly a utilitarian value in the schoolroom. They are necessary if the pupil is to understand the facts which the teacher wishes him to learn; if his knowledge is to be real, not verbal; if his education is to furnish standards of judgment and comparison. (Dewey Dewey, Schools of tomorrow, 1915) Get over the traditional distinctions between head and hand The indictment of traditionally organized learning was coming out of a powerful research base, cognitive science. At the heart of this research was the presumption that intelligence and expertise are built out of interaction with the environment, not in isolation from it. It thus challenged the traditionally held distinctions between: Head and hand Academic and vocational education Knowing and doing Abstract and applied Education and training School-based and work-based learning Recent EU policy indicates a reassessment both of the relationship between work and education and the role of work experience in academic and vocational programs, on the basis that globalization is generating the need for new learning relationships between education and work which will support lifelong learning (European Commission, 1995). Thus, in the case of work experience in both general and vocational education, it is now envisaged that it could fulfill an important new role, providing an opportunity for those young people in full-time education and training to develop their understanding about changes in the world of work, to enhance their key skills and to make closer links between their formal programs of study and the world of work (Green, Leney, Wolf, 1999). However, although there has been

What does religion do for us? :: essays research papers

  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  What exactly does religion do for us? Sure, it’s a nice concept that makes one believe in other worldly things. Spirits and angels flood the heads of many children whose parents partake in the average slice and dice of Catholic smorgasbords, but what does it do for their souls? Are they all just workaholics who need a reason to be the way they are, or are they monsters merely extending a strange and open faà §ade in order to gain acceptance in the afterlife? All the same, religion does have its effect on many.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  What we can be sure of is that the preachers believe in what they’re saying. Or do they? The display of onerous, burdensome stages of guilt seem to plague most of the bible passages, but no harm is seen in the acceptance of these. Sure they are all hand-me-downs of rinse cycle lives, but who is the one to blame for all this? Is it God? Or is there one to blame for all of this? What kind of question is to be answered by this cunning display of fortitude? The fact that their focus determines their reality has nothing to do with the audience captivated by the stunning repetition so often spoke, but it often is said that it does. One should believe in such a myth because of its popularity and outright approval.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Could the choir have something to do with why religion is so popular? Do angelic voices seem to enslave mans ideals and shun them to the furthest reaches of space, or is that done himself? One must come to believe in a God he cannot see because of the hymns blissfully sung by the elder women who have retired many years ago and have nothing better to do with their time than go to choir practice. In these extraordinary hymnals, people are told how much God and Jesus love them, and that the soul is free to choose its place. It makes one wonder if they have a soul.