Back to School

Jacob Clark
9-28-14
Psych
Rutledge
Back To School
These chapters tie into the talk show in a couple different ways. The most prevalent of which, is learning style.
Our education system, granted it is better than most areas of the world, has adopted a rather nasty characteristic. We teach children like we make fast food. Uniform and boring. Every child is treated as the same absent care or interest in what they have a knack for. We are given subjects. Subjects that we must know and be proficient in, or we arent considered “smart”. It is the lack of attention to each student's unique skill set and personalities that i feel condemns a lot of them.
My best example of this is happening in my life right now. I like to think im at least kind of smart. By no means am i a genius, but i'm not an empty shell. However, all my life i have been able to talk and communicate very well. I ask questions and I form relationships with peers and teachers. This, has always been a strength of mine. Now that im in college, I see that those who do the best, have those skills. They can communicate with their professors. However, this leaves many that lack the ability to communicate in the dust. I have seen so many brilliant individuals pull F’s in classes not because they are lazy or ignorant, but because they aren't good communicators.
It is this lack of accommodation that I believe is the downfall of not the education system, but the few it chews up and spits back out. No better than they were when they went it.

Cassandra Rutledge
Back to School
9/30/2014
The chapter is related to this radio show by the way it explains about the cognative and non-cognative way of learning different skills. The cognative skills that we have are always tested in school, but the non-cognative skills are not. The non-cognative skills are just as important to the learning spectrum as the cognative ones are. The radio show talked aout how when someone is raised in a certain household they end up havig different cognative and non-cognative skills then others. For example, if a child is raised in a poor household the stress levels of said child are much higher then that of a household that is well off. The stress levels of said child causes the child to have poor cognative skills, but they end up having non-cognative skills. Some non-cognative skills are not very good like anger and agression, or the inability of self-control. Knowing from former classes that I have been through, the families that sit down with their children, and help them with the flashcards often end with the children knowing far more words then the children whose parents do not sit and show them flashcards. I believe that public education can be improved if the schools would not only test the students over cognative skills, but also test them over their non-cognative skilss as well. The school systems need to offer more classes to help the students with poor cognative skills to become more skillful in their cognative learning skills.
Terms: cognative learning skills, non-cognative learning skills, learning skills

Back to School Blog Response
9-30-14

In this episode, it focused mainly on learning, which was what we discussed in our latest chapter, but I also feel like it tied into many other things we have been talking about in class previously. I feel that it discussed psychological factors that related to learning. For example, they talked about how stress-releasing hormones could be creating problems with cognitive development. Stressful situations presented over and over sends your brain into a more primitive version of it’s usual self. This causes your brain to be in flight or fight mode, which affects your ability to think cognitively. Your brain first and foremost will focus on survival, which can distract you from learning. Some other things that tie together from this chapter, previous chapters, and this episode are attachment to your parents. Earlier we had talked about secure attachment. In this episode, it came up again. Secure attachment with a parent or another adult could reverse the effects of this at home stress.

More recently, it ties greatly into our chapter on learning. Some specific examples are when they talked about the marshmallow test that they gave to children to test self-control and delayed gratification. In this experiment they used positive reinforcement to make children wait to eat their candy so that they could receive a second piece. Also in the introduction they talked extensively about how people believed that teachers were lazy and didn’t do much to help students who were behind. We know though, from reading chapters 6 and 5 that this is not necessarily true. Lots of cognitive development happens when we are young, before we even start school. This is when we learn to talk, walk, and do all that first time stuff. If a child was not stimulated at a young age, there is only so much a teacher can do to help them grow cognitively.

To apply all these discoveries to the life of students, we need to figure out a way to incorporate them into schools. If we went by what our book says about language, intelligence, and learning many things would be changed. For example, in this video they said that not much can be done to improve a child’s intelligence after a certain point, but they said you can always progress their non-cognitive skills such as social skills, character, and personality. These are important and can make a huge impact in someone’s life. They can effect learning as greatly as intelligence. The example that was given was the difference between a GED and a high school diploma. Even though the test results and intelligence is equivalent, the GED students did not do as well as high school graduates because they did not learn non-cognitive skills. To fix this, schools should focus on building the character and social skills of students rather than only worrying about cognitive abilities. This could help many more people exceed. Secondly, if our brains are soaking up the most information while we are young, we should start teaching different languages in elementary instead of in high school. This would be much more beneficial. It would be easier to learn and help children to retain that information more easily. If we took the principles of learning we could make learning a more rewarding experience by producing reinforcement for good behavior and punishments for bad behavior. A lot of this is already implemented but if we took it even farther it would help students to be more motivated to do better in school.

Terms: Learning, Hormones, Cognitive Development, Secure Attachment, Positive Reinforcement, Non-Cognitive Skills, and Punishment.

This radio talk show ties a lot of what we have been learning about in previous chapters such as language and intelligence. One topic they discussed was how hormones related to stress can influence cognitive development. The more stress someone has, the harder it will be for him or her to learn. In chapter six we learned how experience is a key aspect for learning. However, if ones home life is stressful with bad experiences, their learning ability decreases. Some of the comments made in this radio talk show where how poorer students do worse on tests, but in fact stress is holding kids back, not poverty. Which all leads back to having their bad home life experience influence learning. Sensitization can also play a role in ones academic life. From the previous chapter we learned that sensitization takes place when an individual is exposed to a stimulus for a long time, or many times, and then has an increased behavioral response. So if a student is used to seeing their parents struggle with finance and other aspects of life, they will be more likely to struggle in school and give up. They will think that they are biologically doomed and will accept failure. When in reality cognitive skills can be taught, but being stressed refrains the brain from learning those skills. Another term we learned in previous chapters that relates to this talk show was attachment. Towards the end of the show they discussed how parents can help by attaching themselves to their children and their activities. The more involved the parents are in their students lives, the more likely and willing their student will be to succeed.
In today’s world high school is heavily relied on cognitive skills and measured by test scores. Teachers are punished for low tests scores even if they have prepared students to the best of their ability. In reality tests scores only show a tiny ability of how someone will be successful or not. Being successful in life involves both cognitive AND non-cognitive skills. I found it interesting how someone can get the equivalent of four years in high school in just a few months by taking one test to get their GED. In reality these two are no equivalent at all. Experiencing high school for the full four years gives you both types of cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Non-cognitive skills include soft skills, social skill, personality skills, self control, self-regulation, consciousness and many more. All these skills someone with a GED cannot learn because they cannot be measured in a test. Research has proven that someone with a GED is not nearly successful as those with a high school diploma because they lack these skills.
I think our public education system can be improved in multiple ways. The first being not so stressful. At a young age elementary kids have recess at least once a day, but then as they get older they are expected to have class all day long with no breaks. I think school should require a leisure class once a day that is not graded to let the brain rest. Another way is to not have so much pressure on standardized tests. As stated above, tests only measure a tiny bit of success. Students also need to have more one-on-one classes with projects and group work to build their non-cognitive skills. Overall our education system needs to develop a way to balance academic cognitive learning with social and personality non-cognitive skills.

Psychology terms: hormones, cognitive development/skills, non-cognitive skills, sensitization, stimulus, biological, attachment

Alberto Sveum
One of the primary focuses of this addition of This American Life was on the responsibilities of the parents to the children. When a stress-free environment is not exactly available, one key step to adapting is obtaining the skills required to cope with that stress. Not to say it is not important to reduce stress in any home life, but stress has many causes, including some that are not exactly controllable. The discussion of attachment reminds me of the cloth and wire mothers for the monkeys discussed in the chapters. I have personally met many people who could probably pass a GED but never survive in the real world because they falter in their character.

Learning in chapter six was defined as the process of becoming better adapted to an environment through gaining experience. After this podcast, I wonder if school is the appropriate place to be instilling more behavioral traits. Obviously, this occurs a lot in elementary school, but by high school, I believe this aim to improve character has regressed. Even if children learn important “non-cognitive skills,” as the book points out, it is still important to provide occasional reminders or reinforcements of appropriate behavior.

I believe the reinforcement of certain life skills should occur throughout all education. However, this should not become the primary focus of schooling because much will be learned outside of the classroom naturally. I think if it is true that the relationship a child has with their parents really determines much of their life, that in early schooling parents should be actively involved and possibly even required to learn the scientific advantages of their involvement.

To truly raise a child, as the quote suggests, it takes a village. In massive schools, this might not always be possible, and with that being said, I submit that the best learning structure for children, especially at a young age is a smaller, more personal one. If parents are unable to provide much needed life lessons and “non-cognitive skills,” they should have resources made freely available to them to help and guide them. Parenting and schooling go hand in hand; in order to properly educate a child, a better cooperation or even alliance needs to be made between home life and school.

I have definitely found that once you are able to function on a more individual level, through life skills and through a well-formed character, it is easier to learn overall.

Psychological terms: attachment, reinforcement, cognitive development

I think what is very interesting is how insignificant tests are in showing a person’s full potential and success. The textbook mentions that tests are not even a good measure of how well a person understands material. Instead, they are simply a measurement of how well that person is performing at that very moment in time. It has nothing to say with how well they understand the material or how successful they are.
This was also kind of brought up in This American Life with the GED students. While GED students performed just as well as high school graduates on standardized tests, they struggled much more with their success in life. For instance, high school drop outs tended to fail in college, in marriages, and at work despite their equal test scores. Then why is everything about students – from their intellectual level to what school they can get into – determined by test scores after they have been proven to be insignificant? Is it out of mere convenience and efficiency? I do not fully understand. Perhaps it is simply due to physics – once something as massive as the public school system is already in motion, it becomes very difficult to create enough force to alter the motion of that object.
Another thing that was interesting in this was the role that child’s home environment has on their learning. This is something that every single test fails to take into account. Children who struggle with massive loads of stress at home are going to do poorly on things like tests and homework. Not only does it have to do with them not having a proper environment to study, but it also has to do with the actual psychological effects that these stress chemicals assert upon the student’s brain. By constantly being subjected to adrenaline and other stress chemicals, it actual lowers a student’s ability to concentrate on such trivial things as a math equation or essay question. Somehow, in the education system, this needs to be taken into account. We need to stop relying so heavily on test scores and actually acknowledge the fact that these students are not simply sets of data, but living, breathing, human beings.
Not only that, but the parents need to be talked to as well. Perhaps if the parents are shown the studies that prove just how much they influence their child’s future success, they will strive more to help their kids out. The study with the rats was very surprising. There seems to be a very common mindset held throughout America that babying your kids will lead them to be weak and reliant. However, this experiment proved that a strong and nurturing connection with your child will do quite the opposite. Children with a strong connection to their parents will actually flourish and surpass those who left to “tough it out.”
Terms: psychological, adrenaline, stress, experiment

This radio show’s main focus is on learning, as is the chapter that I have read throughout the week. The book has a lot more information and does go in to more detail about the types of learning; for example, classical and operant conditioning are the two ways of learning. The radio show tries to relate learning and discusses the students that have higher levels of stress due to the pressures of advancing their knowledge too fast. At a young age, we are not supposed to be given this much information at once because our brains aren't fully developed. The people on the radio show also discuss cognitive and non-cognitive learning. Cognitive learning skills have always been tested by school districts and measured. However, the non-cognitive learning and skills are not tested in school at all.
An interesting part of the show that made me question the education system was when they were comparing the GED system and the standard school system. The GED system was there to give people the confidence that they were still as well-educated as people who attend regular schools. There was a large side-effect to this though; even though the GED program was cheaper, required less time to complete, and was the equivalent of a high school education, there is evidence of people who received a GED had very different lives compared to people who received a diploma.
Another interesting part of the show was the marshmallow test discussion. The test was to try and figure out how much self-control and delayed pleasure children were able to sustain before receiving another marshmallow. They used forms of positive reinforcement, making the children wait to get another marshmallow after they got the first one. They played voice recording of a child whose mother wanted to test him using the marshmallow test. As a result, the child began to yell and scream “ten minutes” continuously.
In my opinion, the public education system in America need to improve drastically in order to have higher success rates among the students. A very important thing that we should focus on is trying to reduce the stress that is placed on to the students, intentionally or non-intentionally. Elementary schools get to go on field trips, attend recess, and play different games, resulting in lower stress levels. The older we get, the less opportunities we get to reduce our stress. Ultimately, our education system needs to try and incorporate more non-cognitive skills within the school system to create a more balanced level of learning in cognitive and non-cognitive learning to create more success in students overall.
Terminology: Learning, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, stress, cognitive learning/skills, non-cognitive learning/skills, punishment, positive reinforcement

This American Life episode #474 called Back to School had a lot to do with what kind of skills we use to learn. The episode and chapter are related by the ways we learn and how we learn. One thing the radio show focuses on is cognitive development. The reporter Paul Tough claims that we put so much emphasis on cognitive skills such as how well we will do on an IQ or standardized test that we forget about our non-cognitive skills. These skills that we often forget about are just as important. Like what would we do without the skill of communication? The book says learning occurs when synaptic connections in the brain become stronger over time through long-term potentiation. That being said, connections are not made if we aren't able to communicate. Let’s say your learning by watching someone. If you aren’t able to talk with them effectively while observing them you will not get much out of that experience. One thing that stuck out to me when listening to the show was where James Heckman did a study on the GED. The idea that getting your GED consists of studying for maybe a few weeks or months to get a high school education was mind boggling to me. I never really thought about it from that perspective. For a split second I thought to myself why didn’t I drop out and do that? It takes way less time and effort. You go to high school for four years but you can get the same education just by studying for only around thirty-two hours? After that split second I remembered why I would never do that. The relationships and skills you develop prepare you for what is to come later in life. Soft skills, social skills, and other traits are lost during this time if you’re not there to experience them. You learn more about who you are as a person and what you would like to be. As I kept listening there are other consequences too. Even though after you get your GED you are to have the same education as a high school graduate many of these people had many more other issues that were also lacking. These people dropped out for a reason whether it be a rough childhood or stress from their home life, they seem to have it a little tougher. This is where our school system is lacking nowadays. Take for example Kewauna Lerma. She had it pretty rough and we she got switched into what was known as the “retarded” class no one seemed to help her out. They did nothing but eat popcorn and play video games. It seems that school systems today deal with a problem child by putting them in the “slow class.” By doing this I think these children have the feeling that everyone has given up on them. How are they supposed to develop any self-esteem or confidence when everyone around them just puts them down? I personally think our school systems need to put in the little bit of extra effort to help these children out. Teach these students about the non-cognitive skills needed to become a better person. If we do this by using constructive criticism and positive reinforcement I feel, as the rest will come much easier. The psychological terms I used were learning, development, cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills, synaptic connections, and positive reinforcement.

Back to School episode # 474 under This American Life shows how our skills are learned. Both of the episodes are related by the way we learn and how we learn and how our parent can contribute to that no matter the situation. Through cognitive development the audio explained that parent help with the language learning and development of the brain and many other things. Even non cognitive skills are important to a child’s development. 2/3 of kids have a secure attachment they are more likely to graduate high school, be more successful and many other positive things.
The school can improve on language; intelligence and learning by having parents use cognitive ways. Non cognitive helps with self-control. Like Kewauna, she started as a bad child, going to jail and being involved in bad situations but when she was talked to by her mom and grandmother this helped with her development even though she wasn’t a child. This shows that its not to late or someone to change. Parent to child communication is a very strong part to the child’s future and the relationship between both parent and child. For example telling the poor that there is a possibility that they can change where they are then is a way to help or change their thoughts of their future learning because of the challenging of their thoughts of getting out of poverty. For me personally I believe cognitive development was shown for my parent in which improved my way of thinking and intelligence.
Key Terms: Secure Attactment, Cognitve Development, Intellegence, Learning, Non Cognitive.

In this episode of This American Life called Back to School, I noticed they focused on learning and many different aspects of it. One of the primary focuses of this addition was on the responsibilities of the parents to the children. It chapter 6 one thing we learned about is how experience is a huge part of learning. In the podcast It really focused on how if a child has more stress, the hard it will be for them to learn new material. If ones home life is more stressful with bad experiences than their ability to learn will slowly decrease, Its not because they are poor but because they have difficulty stress in their homes which make them unable to focus at home or at school It was very interesting the comments that the were made in they pod cast. I had always been aware that lower income children did not thrive as well in school but I never understood why. It said that it is not because the are poor the do bad on test but because of the stress in their life is holding them back in ways. After listening to the part in The America Life about students finishing high school vs getting a GED I realized that a sensitization plays a huge roll in a persons academic life. If a student is use to seeing their parents fight and have struggle financially they will be more likely to struggle with school and give up. This is shown through students that drop of of high school, go back and get a GED. When they followed up on a few of their lives they realized that they continue the trend of giving of with jobs, relationships and their families, its a reoccurring cycle. When in reality cognitive skills can be taught, but being stressed refrains the brain from learning these vital skills.
I believe that our public school system needs to realized that not every kid comes from the same background, and not every child learns the same way. A way to help decrees the stress in elementary school is they let kids have recess, nap time, and snack time. I wish that they would have kept following thought with that thorough more in upper education. That is the time where stress does get the best of us and we do need that relief, because if we cant get it at home or school we are doomed. Another thing I think they could focus more on non cognitive skills. When in elementary school my school did a good job with those by teaching us the 6 pillars of success and we talked about them, went out in our community and helped and get positive reinforcement when we did something extremely out of the blue and nice. I don't think those are just for elementary but should also be implemented into our middle school and high school years to keep that message reoccurring.

Terms: Learning, Stress, sensitization, positive reinforcement

In the previous chapters that we’ve read, there was one section that both this show and the chapter both talk about which is attachment. There are three different forms of attachment; secure, avoidant, and ambivalent. Each form of attachment shows where children are in their “non-cognitive” development stages. A child who has secure attachment has a strong bond with their caregiver and is more likely to be more confident and succeed more later on in life. A child who has avoid attachment is not close with their caregiver and has less self control than those with secure attachment which may hurt them later on in life. Those who don’t make the connections with their caregivers early on if life may struggle in school and with controlling themselves later on. Another thing that both the book talks about and the show as well is the flight or fight scenario. This happens when the body releases adrenaline hormone in order for the body to spring into action and either fight or run away. In the show they had said that those who encounter 4 or more these fight or flight situations in their younger years are 32% more likely to struggle in school and have a more difficult time with self control. The more your body stresses it is more likely to stay in a constant fight or flight reaction which hinders a child’s ability to learn. When fight or flight is activated over and over again, it creates pathways in the brain that become ingrained in the prefrontal cortex which the executive function in the brain which shuts off the thinking so the brain can go into primal mode which will later carry on into the classroom.
There are many ways in which our public education system can be improved. As of today, schools focus more on the cognitive aspects of teaching. The cognitive teachings involve standardized testing that measures the student’s ability in math, reading, and comprehension. Schools are more worried about the success rate and how well the school testing percentage looks than how well the students truly understand what they learn. What schools lack now a days is the non-cognitive teaching which is just as vital, if not more vital, than cognitive teaching. Non-cognitive is the social, self-control, soft skills, and the personality traits that a person has learns and acquirers early on in life, also known as their character. One thing that schools can do to help improve the education system is to teach kids at a young age how to express themselves in a positive and productive output. They can also teach classes, especially to the teens, on how to have better self control and how to succeed later on in life. Schools can focus on the non-cognitive skills and teach children that so they can do better in school and life later on.
Terms: attachment, secure attachment, avoid attachment, ambivalent attachment, fight or flight, adrenaline, hormone, prefrontal cortex, executive function, cognitive, non-cognitive, caregiver

Psychological terms I used were learning, classical conditioning, conditioned response, operant conditioning, and positive reinforcement.

This radio show and our book are tie together because they are both about learning. The book shows all of the many different ways that people learn. The book also talks about the development of individuals (classical and operant conditioning) to show that they are ready for the world.
With this being said, the radio show presents many things that makes me question our school systems. One of the first things that were brought up was the old and the new ways of looking at learning. The old way consisted of only looking and testing the cognitive development (what would be reading, math, science, and spelling) of students. They tested them through a series of standardized tests. These tests don’t show the other many clear defining factors that correlate with success. The new way of looking at learning consists of looking into the different sets of qualities that are important in learning and future success.
The radio show showed some interesting research on the GEDs; are GEDs equal to a high school education? The GED study performed by an economist named James Heckman. He was in a class room studying something else and one person had said something along the line of “you realize that these kids are going to be studying for their GED and they be getting it in about a month. He thought it was amazing that they could train and teach these kids the skills that they needed in just only a few months and have it be equivalent to four years of high school. The average study time for a GED student is roughly 32 hours for the entire one month program. For high school people that attend high school, they spend roughly 1,000 hours a year studying. This information made Heckman wonder if high school was even better. What he found out, was GED’s did better than people that didn’t go and get their GED. High school graduates did exceptionally better. They also found a correlation between people who got their GED’s and their later lives. They really didn’t have to much of a success rate for really anything, marriage, military, college, jobs. It’s like they always dropped out of it. He found that these test scores are not an accurate way to decide if someone is capable of showing that their cognitive skills were just as good. The test scores show that they’re not testing all the different variability that are key factors in success.
Heckman used other words in place of non-cognitive skills, such as soft skills, people skills or personality traits. They feel like non-cognitive skills imply a harsh or dark connotation. He had decided on character, but not morally, his definition of character meaning social skills.
With all of that being stated, I feel like a better step to fix this growing problem would be to not allow people to drop out until they can create a better testing system in order to evaluate the social, motivational and characteristic skills of students. I feel like if they have these kinds of tests, then teachers and educators would have a more structured, beneficial way to help these at risk teens.
Terms: Cognitive learning, development, non- cognitive development, soft skills, social skills, classical conditioning, operant conditioning.

The show we had to listen to for the assignment can tie into what we learned from the chapter. The chapter mainly focused on how we learn from different things. Everyone learns from non-associative learning, associative learning or learning by watching others. We look up to our peers and follow the examples they set for us. If we make a mistake in a task we trying to get done, we keep trying until we get it right. The show that we listened to described how the school runs can be a problem. People can drop out of school after the eighth grade and receive their GED. The show mentioned that to get your GED you would have to study for 32 hours while in school, a student will study at least 1,000 every year. The people who do get their GEDs are more successful than the people who just dropped out of school. However, those who do go to high school for four year are more successful than those who only have their GED. Being successful in life takes a lot of time. You have to work hard toward your goals and make sure to stick to them. During school, some students may feel that what they are learning is pointless and they want to drop out. It is critically important that students finish high school so they can receive the education they need. The show also talked about how being stressed out can take a toll on kids and how they perform during school. Students who are/were raised in a poor household are more likely to be stressed out and feel like giving up. These students may lash out at others and may not want any help. When things start going bad at home, the student may feel like giving up on their school work and want to drop out. If situations at home are going very well, it is likely the student will do great in school.

One topic that concerns me is how some students in high school will “brag” that they received a better grade on a test than someone else. Some students just need to work harder to receive a better grade. One question that I always asked myself in high school is “how are people so smart?” It always seemed that I never understood some of the material while others did. My guess is that some people have really smart parents and that gene was passed onto their children. However, this does not make sense. Is there really a way for the “smart” gene to be passed onto offspring. I personally do not believe so. People need to work had to be successful. People can learn new things by observational learning which is by watching other people perform tasks. Another way that people are able to learn is through modeling.

I feel that the public education system can be improved by providing more opportunities for students to receive help. If students are struggling in a class, but they are not able to make it to school during the specific hours for help, then chances are they may want to give up. I believe that if there were more options open for them, they might be able to catch up on what they don’t understand. I also feel that students should really get help if they don’t understand something. I know it might be embarrassing to go asking for help, but in the long run, it helps out. By providing these opportunities, i feel students would be able to perform better in school.

Terms: nonassociative learning, associative learning, observational learning, modeling

In this episode of This American Life we listened to James Heckman in Act I, an economist who noticed something while he was studying people who received their GEDs instead of successfully graduating high school. What he noticed while doing this was that those people that got their GEDs, while more successful than those who just dropped out, were much more unsuccessful compared to those people that graduated high school. He noticed that they were much more likely to give up on a lot of things, much like how they gave up on high school. This included forms of higher education such as college, and in more personal situations like marriage. What Heckman concluded from this is that the testing portion of schools does not fully determine the success of the person, that there are more factors to a person’s success than just being able to good on test. Cognitive abilities aren’t the only determinants. A lot of the problems with the public school system, according to him, is the lack of emphasis put on the “non-cognitive” skills. While these are necessarily defined he thinks of them as personality and social skills. When then hear from Dr. Harris who ran a clinic in a poor neighborhood and she explained that for many of these kids lived in disastrous households, and a constant sense of living in fear can lead people to block of their social skills and start to focus more on their primal desire to survive which can lead to this lack of these “non-cognitive” skills. According to Paul Tough ⅓ of kids have an insecure attachment with their parents which can lead to poor social development. Earlier in the show James Heckman explained that these social skills can be taught to kids and can lead to them showing increased success. I have first hand experience of this. In my senior year of high school I mentored an “at risk” student at one of the middle schools. The leader of the program that I went through explained to me that I wasn’t necessarily there to only help him with homework, I was more there to provide support and to help encourage him to continue to try to succeed in school. I think that when looking at the public education system we look at more than just the cognitive abilities of the students and start to work on also developing the character of the students. What I think is important is that the schools instil a sense that everyone can succeed, and that test are not the only measurement of a persons intelligence. They should stress that good work ethic, the ability to listen and ask productive questions, and patience with others can lead you to be just as successful when you get out into the real world. While there should still be a large emphasis on testing and the learning aspect, there should also be an emphasis on preparing kids for life after school.

Terms: cognitive abilities, insecure attachment,

The radio post “Back to School”, talked about intelligence and learning, as well as how different aspects of a child’s life can have its effect on how they learn and grow. In the beginning, they talked about how a school system is set up now, and where school systems strategies on learning are going. Modern school systems are set up on cognitive development, teaching subjects main subject. The point of teaching cognitive skills is so everyone will have basic knowledge on certain skills such as math, science, reading, etc. With teaching cognitive skills, it is easy to chart and see a child’s growth with use of standardized tests, which have gained importance over the years. The radio post talked a lot about how there is a shift on what people think schools should focus on teaching. A new approach being talked about is teaching more non-cognitive skills. Non-cognitive skills include, self-control, tenacity, and resilience, which are being viewed as more and more vital today. Character, personality, and social skills are some different ways to say non-cognitive skills.
One aspect of the show, relating to non-cognitive skills, is how stress can affect a child’s learning. They talked about how stress makes going to school and learning as very difficult aspects of life. Chapter six had a lot to do with environmental factors that effect learning and stress in a big factor for children in school. If a student’s home life is not satisfactory or a child is constantly worried about other things, they will not retain any information taught to them. On the radio show, they talked about how when an emergency response is activated in the brain, or the stress hormones are released into the brain constantly, a person brain is unable to develop correctly. This can effect the prefrontal cortex, which is where many non-cognitive skills are located. When the brain is in constant fight or flight mode, these non-cognitive skills can be affected in a negative way. To go along with stress, later in the show they discussed how parents can also affect stress and development. Scientists did a studied lab rats that were groomed by their mothers every time they were in a stressful situation. The study showed that these rats did better on all the tests, than did the rats whom did not have this attachment with their mothers. Having an attachment to a parent and also having a happy and stable home life, children will have a better time learning.
I believe that schools can be changed to help students succeed, Schools are set up today to only teach cognitive skills and not working with students of non-cognitive skills. Rigorous testing such as the standardized test, ACT, and SAT do not help a child learn. Having to be tested every week can lead to the anxiety and stress on students, which I talked about earlier. I think that the use of tests is not really doing what it was intended to, chart students growth and how much they are learning. I believe testing today just charts how well students can memorize information. The way school systems are set up today focus on memorization and the students’ ability to retain the information taught is on the back burner. If schools focused a lot more time on actually making sure students understood the material and helped kids by teaching them more non-cognitive skills, school would be more effective.

Psych terms: Learning, cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills, stress, fight or flight, prefrontal cortex, hormone, and attachment

This show ties into our previous chapter about learning in many ways. This radio show focused basically on the way that learning is set up in school systems, and our book went into detail about the different ways that we learn, and how we apply that information to help us succeed in life. Paul, the guest on the radio show, pointed out that schools focus on mostly cognitive skills, rather than non-cognitive skills. Schools are more interested in standardized tests, IQ scores, reading levels, ect. They started to look deeper into this by talking to a man who did an experiment on whether or not students who graduated from high school did as well as those with GEDs. They followed these students later in life and found that those with just GEDs performed a little better than drop-outs who didn’t take the GED, but not even close to those who graduated high school. He noticed that those who dropped out of high school and didn’t get their GED typically quit almost everything that they started, causing them to have conflicts in many aspects of their lives. The weird part was that whether or not the students graduated with a GED, didn’t affect test scores, so there had to be some other explanation. There had to have been skills that the GED students lacked, that the high school graduates had. Eventually they realized that GED students were missing non-cognitive skills. The non-cognitive skills that they were missing were things such as self-control, impulse control, restraint, ect. The thing that was preventing these students from developing these non-cognitive skills was stress. Stress not only affected their learning abilities, but caused major health problems as well. They gave an example of a girl named Kewauna, who had a very upsetting childhood. She was forced to move around a lot, never had a permanent home, and didn’t have much of a relationship with her parents. This ended up affecting her brain development in several ways. One of the ways that her stressful childhood affected her brain development was with her impulse control. Kewauna was an angry child due to her living circumstances, which caused her to have a very bad temper. She described an instance at school when a girl in her class upset her, and she recalls blanking out and not noticing anything around her. Because of the stresses with her family and home life, she was put into a slow class for under-performing students. This example proves that stresses in life can indeed cause issues with the development of non-cognitive skills. I think that our public education system could be greatly improved by focusing more on non-cognitive skills rather than cognitive skills. After listening to this radio show, it is apparent that standardize tests only focus on a small aspect of a student’s intelligence, when we could be focusing on a students full potential if we add non-cognitive skills into the mix. I realize that this is probably easier said than done, considering the fact that non-cognitive skills are harder to measure. I think it would be beneficial for schools to identify students that may have a stressful home life, and seek to help them work out their issues before expecting them to develop their full cognitive skills. That way, their stresses will decrease, causing them to more easily develop their non-cognitive skills, which will in turn boost their cognitive skills.
Terms: learning, cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills, IQ scores, stress, impulse control, self control, brain development

This episode was a very interesting topic. They talked about what we teach people in school. It seems like a weird question. We learn basic subjects like math science and reading. We also learn non cognitive skills as they call it on the episode. These include personality traits and social skills. The first act talked about how we are tested. We are only tested on the cognitive skills and we base our entire educational system on these test. We set pay of teachers and evaluate schools just on these subjects. These are only half of what our teachers are expected to teach us. They are supposed to teach how to be responsible, punctual, and socially sound. We don’t test or evaluate kids on these behaviors. These behaviors are showed to have a large impact on how we perform on these standardized tests. They have done studies with kids that are in stressful households, and they have learned that it has a harmful effect on health and school performance. As a result from not performing well on these test we put kids into easier or remedial classes. This can hurt their self-confidence and put them further behind.
They followed a young gal that grew up in a bad part of Chicago and was in a stressful household. When they first found her she was doing terribly in school and they stuck her with a coach. This coach would teach her non cognitive skills such as how to act in a group, treat others, and how to respond to a setback. This on one year raised her GPA substantially. She also had an intervention with her family on some of the issues at home. After this she showed improvement as well. This just shows that to be successful in schools we need to first go back to how we act. We need to get good non cognitive skills and not base so much on standardized test. We need to get away from basing so much of our educational system on these test and focus more on how each student grows socially and educationally.

One of the main things that I took from this radio show was the part where it said that it was difficulty of learning. I never actually realized that there is a whole science based on learning. This all has to do with the biology of the brain, and things that schools should be doing to improve teaching for students. One part that I enjoyed listening about was the question: Is this going to be on the final? Its amazing how true this is because there are certain things that motivate students and a student does not want to learn something if its not going to be tested on. Another thing that I learned about from the radio show was cognitive development. Cognitive development is the way that you think about smarts in school. Cognitive development is the stuff that is in standardized testing. The thing that they said about cognitive development was that in the past that was the only thing that was important to students to learn. We know realize that that is not the only important thing when it comes to learning. People are trying to figure out the best way for students to learn because as a student myself I know that I personally have had several teachers that I just have not been able to learn very many things from. Everyone has their own methods and ways of doing things but people also need to realize that every student learns in a different way. There are several ways you can learn whether it be visual, kinesthetic, auditory, or reading/ writing. Everyone has their own method for learning something to actually retain the information. Something that I thought was interesting in the article was where they were talking about the GED test and the difference in results that they got from people who graduated from high school and the people who took the GED test. They said that people who actually took the GED test gave better results than people who graduated with a high school diploma. The article basically talked about how our learning is constantly improving over time to adapt to the needs of people.

Some psychological terms that I used were: learning, biology, cognitive development, visual, kinesthetic,and auditory learning.

On the show, the anchor talked about and to some teenagers that had a tough time learning in school. There were some scientists that ran studies to see why some students had difficulty learning. They discovered that they lack cognitive skills because they hadn’t developed them yet. They are lacking those skills because of the environment they grew up in which did not support or encourage those skills. The kids soon fell behind in school and were put in separate classes to help catch but they did not help because the students said the classes were a joke. To truly learn, the students must have a change in behavior because of an experience. The students that were cognitively developed can change their view of the world easier from what they learn and use that to get ahead in the world. The students lacking those skills may have a harder time piecing together what they learn. It is difficult for schools to teach all people the same way because of their different learning styles. Our education system may be improved if we found a way to separate people with better cognitive development so that there can be two education systems or may that can be the most beneficial to their learning needs. By doing this the students will be in a learning environment just for them. A poor way to learn or teach is by bribing students to do well in their classes. If students are being bribed then when they go out and get a job they will assume they will get something other than their pay check for their work. Learning should be a way to get students prepared for going to college and getting a job. This show relates to learning because the show describes scenarios of struggling students and scientists trying to find out a way to help.

Both the book and the radio show go into detail about the topic of learning however the book goes into more detail about what learning is and various types of conditioning while a bulk of the show talks what can inhibit a person’s ability to learn. The show talked how children with high amounts of stress are usually brought to doctors to be treated for ADHD while they all had signs related to trauma. Most of the kids are having negative side affects from the flight or fight response to stress/trauma due to the stress hormones (adrenalin and cortisol) being activated over and over again causing their brain to create pathways that are more ingrained over time. According to the show a specific part of the brain that gets affected from this is the prefrontal cortex where a lot of the non-cognitive skills occur. Since these kids live a life in a constant state of emergency it doesn’t allow their executive functions and brain to develop properly.
Our public education system could be improved by finding ways to decrease the drop out rate of high school students. The show talks about how many people who drop out of school go on to take an exam to obtain their GED, which is thought to be the equivalent to graduating high school. They discuss how the average high school student studies 4,000 hours while a person who gets their GED only studies for 32 hours. But the show then looked into it more and most people after getting their GED we doing better than dropouts later on in life but were no where near the performance level of high school graduates. Most high school graduates go to college and receive another degree and start a good career while most people who obtain their GED fail to go to college and succeed in few parts of life.
They believe that the reason some students drop out is because of the lack of the student’s non-cognitive skills. Our non-cognitive skills range from self-control, self-regulation skills, conscientious and many more. Now if school and teachers could work on these skills like how they used to teach character to students they may possibly be able to improve their student’s non-cognitive skills. If the non-cognitive skills are built or improved upon then a result would be an increase in a student’s ability to learn and a decrease of high school dropouts.

Terms used: Conditioning, ADHD, adrenalin, cortisol, prefrontal cortex, non-cognitive skills, and executive functions.

This chapter on language and intelligence, and the chapter on learning tie into what I heard in this talk show because they both are about learning, and different ways we learn things. Although the book goes in more depth about the different types of learning, and ways people learn like through classical learning, and through operant conditioning. The radio show talked about how the levels stress at home in their personal lives, and at school can affect the growth and development of their brain. They talked about how some of the kids went to the doctor and got told they have ADHD, but they were falsely diagnosed just because of their brain not correctly developed all the way. The girl on the show talked about how she would act out in school, and got 72 office referrals because of the way her home life was. She came from a low in-come family that could hardly take care of themselves, and she took all of her anger out at school.
They talked about how kids that get a high school diploma test out better than the students that get a GED do because they learn everything within a few months rather than what a high schooler has to go through. I think that going through all four years of high school gives you skills like cognitive, and non-cognitive. It also gives you better social skills, soft skills, personality traits, and consciousness. I have found that research shows that someone with a GED, and not a high school diploma are most likely to be unsuccessful because they do not have a lot of these traits and skills from actually attending high school and being in that environment.
I think that our public education system can be improved from the things I know about language, intelligence, and learning because I feel like the schools try teaching everybody the same things, the exact same way. Not everyone can learn and absorb everything the same way. For example, the kids that are having a hard time at home might not be getting enough sleep, or able to get help on homework aren’t learning the things very well like the kids that have a better home life and get 8 hours of sleep, and their parents are willing to help them on their homework.

Terms Used: language, intelligence, ADHD, classical learning, operant conditioning, development, cognitive, non-cognitive,

The connection that I made between reading chapter seven and the radio talk was that behavioral actions can be taught and learned no matter the age or environment. In chapter seven there were many experiments where this was going on.
For example, when Mr. Watson had baby Albert with a variety of animals that at first Albert didn’t mind but as soon as the rat was presented with a loud noise that scared Albert he associated that with the rat and from then on was afraid of the rat. On the radio show they in a way shared a similar story. Ira Glass talks with a teenage girl named Kewauna who has had a rough childhood and who is a very aggressive person. After getting arrested and realizing she needed to get her act together with the help of her family, she came across a group called One Goal. One Goal is a program that reaches out to average kids in regular schools that don’t necessarily send many kids to college. They help these kids to develop non-cognitive skills and explain to them how having these skills are important for college. In both of the stories I found that the main topic shared was behavioral changes had occurred. Baby Albert was retaught that rats were dangerous and Kewauna was retaught these non-cognitive skills.
After obtaining all this information that I received from both the chapter and the radio show I believe our educational system is much over due for a face lift. Although my first perceived definition of learning has now been changed, I find that they both should be evenly blended together. What I’m trying to say is that learning is both what I call “book smart” and “street smart.” We should still have testing over the material that we are learning in the class room but also offer the same for these non-cognitive skills. We need to take these skills as seriously as we do our standardized tests. Having both of these skills, “book smart” and “street smart,” we could be more prepared when entering the real world.

Terms: non-cognitive, behavioral, aggressive, environment.

After listening to this radio show episode I see many aspects that connect with what we are learning in class. It does this between learning and intelligence to cognitive skills. The radio talk show really does a great job in showing how and why different kids learn differently. I thought it was very interesting about how it talked about how kids growing up in poor family’s’/homes do worse on cognitive test then others. They found out that it had nothing to do with the kids being poor, but more about the extra stress that was on the kids. Also in the talk show they talked about the learning responsibilities of the parents to the children which was a section in chapter 6 as well. The talk show and the chapter differ when it comes to learning in general though. According to our chapter experiences is the most important part of learning, but the radio talk show talked about how stress the most important thing when it comes to learning which goes back to the example about the poor kids. To add onto the example about the poor kids is that there cognitive scores aren't as high as others, but the non-cognitive scores were around the average student their age. The last connection I made to the chapter is study they talked about in the show, it talked about attachment and how it affected the confidence of the children. If the child had a secure attachment the child was more confident then ones without a secure attachment. This is connected to our chapter because if they children have stable home environment and support system the child will be less stressed and have a better opportunity to learn.
Terms: learning, cognitive, non-cognitive, and secure attachment

I loved this radio show. The beginning itself is something that I don’t think a lot of teachers realize. That their students may have something else going on in their life that affects their learning. If a child is failing, doing poorly, or just not doing as well as they should be that does not mean that the child is stupid. Both of my parents are teachers. My mom I admire heavily as a teacher though because of what she does for certain students (she teaches elementary art). She’s good at finding the kids who are having a hard time outside of school and turning their focus to art. It’s like she opens a whole new world to them and to every other kid. She can make the naughtiest kids behave and actually do their work. She can brighten up any day for those kids because they all love art and she can make the saddest kids smile through hugs, support and a smile. It makes me truly wonder what she could do with highschoolers.
Anyway, the chapter and the radio show tied together this time by talking about how teachers can teach students by doing things like: positive & negative reinforcement/punishment (so they know what is the right and wrong thing to do), and observational, insight, and latent learning. Its also really cool how if a child had a empathetic, understanding and supporting relationship with an adult then they can reverse a lot of early on negative stress. If kids have that they are more socially competent, more engaged, and it will have a great impact on non-cognitive skills.
According to what I know, there a few ways to help improve the public education system. First, would be to weed out the worst teachers. Its a difficult process, but all you have to do is ask the students! The students know who the good teachers are and who the bad ones are, and they aren’t afraid to tell. And really when doing anything inside of the school, ask the students. The students know their teachers and their school up, down and sideways. Second would be to just lay off the kids. At my high school I had eight classes every day, and until my senior year, I was completely booked in the homework. Those three years I had science and math every night with english and history often mixed in as well. There were countless nights that I would be in the middle of homework and get a text from a friend who wanted to die or had hurt themselves. It’s difficult and stressful to keep going when you’ve got your plate overflowing already. Third would be how the teachers are teaching. Honestly after so long, I’m damn tired of learning off of a powerpoint or having to learn literally everything from a book. there are teachers that can get away with powerpoints. How? They make it interesting. They show their students their passion for the subject and they make it fun. Reading straight from a slide is not teaching. Many people can’t learn like that. Finally, I would change how teachers talk to their students. Students want to be treated like adults (assuming we are talking about a high school). My dad was a high school teacher for a few years and after meeting some of the people he had as students, I found out their favorite thing about him was that he spoke to them like real people. He never talked down to them, they knew that he cared about them and they knew that he wanted them to succeed. And thinking back to high school, my favorite teachers did the same thing. They looked you in the eye, didn’t talk down to you and helped you whenever you need it.
Terms: positive & negative reinforcement/punishment, observational, insight, and latent learning, socially competent, socially competent.

This audio and the reading that we did tied together very nicely because the book was telling us how we learn and the audio was really a “real life” example and studies. Sure the book gave us the studies and whatnot but those were old boring ones. The new ones have much more interesting facts and actually may apply to my life in some way. This really tied in with how the beginning of a child’s life is very important for speech and learning. At a young age, a babies mind is very susceptible to learning new things. This makes it easier for the baby to learn how to speak and learn vocabulary. However, when a child becomes older he or she is mainly taught from two (of the three) ways of learning. These are habituation and sensitization. Habituation is just like the example of how high school takes around 4000 hours of studying and those hours help us pass classes but the GED can be obtained with only 32 hours of studying. This means that over 3900 hours are spent in helping shape more than just our intelligence. Those hours help shape our non-cognitive skills and allow us to be more disciplined in our day to day world. This is important for everyone to learn because with these skills they will do better in the real world from an economic view. Less stress, more income, and many more are the “side effects” of the non-cognitive skills we learn. However, sensitization is when the brain encounters something that it has to pay attention to because it is a possible danger. This directly correlates with the audio about the bear and stress that affects children’s schooling. When cortisol is constantly present it makes the brain always on edge and makes it “jumpy” and allows people to black out and just not pay attention to class material. This is why kids who are stressed do not do well in school; not because of economic standings like previously thought. Another thing that tied in well with the reading is how the uprising of a child can do a lot of help. Like shown in the rat study; rats that were groomed after a stressful situation did better on tests and were healthier. This goes the same for parents. If they groom and help their child when they are stressed it helps relieve the stress and allows an attachment which will help in later years. Also the genetics of a child help in the cognitive skills of the baby such as IQs. After listening to the audio and reading the chapter I think that the public education system can be improved by the schools knowing more about the family. I know this sounds a little bit invasive but in the long run it will help the child receive the teaching that they need. A child who lives in a stressful environment at home will have to be taught in a different manner than those who are not in a stressful home. The schools can also help parents cut down the amount of stress at home through assemblies or parent meetings.
The psychological terms that I used were; habituation, sensitization, non-cognitive skills, cortisol, cognitive skills.

In this video, it focused mainly on learning, which is what we obviously discussed in our latest chapter. However, I feel like it translated into many other things we have talked about previously in earlier chapters. I got the notion that it discussed psychological factors that relate to learning. For example, in the video they talked about how when it comes to cognitive development, stress hormones could be creating some problems regarding the development. Stress can really be a burden to your brain, and when stressful situations present itself over and over, the brain sends itself into a more primitive version of what it normally presents itself as. This ultimately affects your brain’s ability to think cognitively. Your brain will then just be focused on survival, and this could distract your learning ability. Another thing I found that came up on this episode, is secure attachment. We also covered this earlier on in the book. Towards the end of the show they discussed how parents can help stressful situations by attaching themself to their children. The more involved the parents are in their lives, the more willing their student will succeed.
When it comes to high school nowadays, cognitive skills are crucial and heavily relied on. They are measured by test scores. However in reality, test scores only show a tiny ability of how someone will be successful or not. Tests determine students’ level of obedience, not intelligence. When it comes to being successful in life, you need to have not only cognitive skills, but non-cognitive skills. What I found interesting is how someone can get the equivalent of four years in high school by just taking one test. The one test determines whether the person gets their GED or not. This is just uncomparable to four years of school in my mind. Experiencing high school all four years gives you more skills than someone getting your GED in just a few months. These include cognitive and some non-cognitive skills. It’s proven by research that someone with a GED is not nearly as successful as those who graduated high school by taking all four years and getting a diploma. It’s because people getting their GED lack skills such as social skills, personality skills, self regulation, and many other non-cognitive skills. I believe if you want the highest level of education, you simply take all four years of high school and get your diploma. Then you can go from there, possibly by going to college to get an even higher level of education.
I believe today’s public education could be improved in many ways. The first thing I would change is not having it be so stressful for everyone. I believe students of all ages need a break from learning 8 hours a day. I already can’t imagine going through 8 hours of high school every day rather than a couple classes a day, and I’ve just been in college for a little over a month. Give the kids a break from learning and have a leasure period once a day. If you throw out too much information to learn and study to the student, it’s going to be too stressful for him/her. Another thing I would change is the tests and how they are a huge portion of the grade. Again, it puts too much pressure on the student to succeed in one single, but extremely meaningful test. Like I said before, tests aren’t as important as non-cognitive skills, which I believe will actually get you far in life. You may ask how can students build their non-cognitive skills in the classroom? Have more group and socializing activities, and cut down on the tests. Our education system just needs to find a way have more of a balanced teaching criteria. Specifically, we should cut down on the cognitive and academic learning, and balance it with non-cognitive skills, including social and personality skills. I believe everyone would end up being a whole lot better educated and skilled in the long run.
Terms used: cognitive development, cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills, hormones, secure attachment

This episode of This American Life show was interesting because it directly connected with us. It describes the major drawbacks of our educational system. The major idea of this episode was about importance of both cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Our school system focuses only on cognitive skills such as memorizing and understanding basic science, math concepts for writing bunch of papers, essays and so on. As I know from the chapter, learning is a change in behavior, resulting from experience. Learning helps to shape many aspects of our life. I'm sure that high level of cognitive skills does not mean that an individual can succeed in the life. We still need to improve our non-cognitive skills level such as persistence, interpersonal skills, self-control, communication and so on. In this episode they discussed about opportunities of GED, those people who dropped of the high school could get the same diploma as a person who graduated school, if they will pass GED test. It is a great opportunity but if they could not even finish high school, what are the chances that they won’t switch from job to job or even could they find a proper job position. School is not only knowledge about such things like gravity law or mathematical equations, it is experience that everyone should get. High schools, colleges teach us time management skills, being more sociable, work as a team and other important skills. However even those people who study in high schools still don't get enough non-cognitive learning, because our educational system do not focuses on this type of learning. I think we have pay more attention on social developing of children, teachers should help students to understand and adapt to world, because life is not finishing at school, it is only beginning of it.
From the chapter we know three types of learning: Non-associative, associative and watching other. Each of them we use throughout the life and each of them are equally important. However in this case i think watching other is play very important role for children in their development process. Everything starts in family; if there are any stressful situations inside the family of course it will negatively impact on education and life itself. Family is closest people to everyone, at least in stage of learning basic aspects of life; each individual should feel support from them and be confident in their relationships. Each bad story starts from negative or aggressive relationships between parents and child. Children learn a lot through watching, so parents should be a good example to inspire them. It is important to have secure attachment between a child and parents, so child will feel confident in his parents. Through observational learning children acquire or change behavior after viewing performance of that behavior. Also children imitate behavior through observation which is called modeling, so parents should be careful. A kid see and feel everything, is he/she is small it doesn’t mean that they don’t understand. In case of Kewauna Lerma from the episode, her mom said that she doesn't want her to go through she had to go through, the suffering, being homeless and so on, because Kewauna started to acting as her mom. Thus family play important role in developing non-cognitive skills, of course there are not perfect families, each of us has own problems . If a kid lives in a stressful, chaotic atmosphere one of those homes where things are bad enough that it can affect their brain development and they don't learn non-cognitive skills. Thus professional people from outside should help to develop relationships in families. In case of teenage mom from the episode, a woman was helping to understand how to attach to her child. It is one of the good methods to help which will affect positively in future and help those children develop more non-cognitive skills. So, I believe that people should more pay attention on mental developing of children in schools and families.
Terms used: cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills, learning, non-associative, associative and watching other types of learning, observational learning, modeling, mental developing.

In this episode of This American Life, they started out talking about what it meant to have a GED compared to graduating high school. They said the average amount of study time to pass the GED test was around 32 hours compared to around 1000 hours kids spend throughout their four years of high school. This information was very shocking to me and I started to wonder if these two labels were really equivalent to each other. Researchers tested how well the GED students and high school graduates acted and succeeded in the real world and found results that were hardly similar. The students who received GED’S instead of high school diplomas showed nowhere near the same success in college, military, or even marriages. This seemed to happen mostly because they were used to quitting something early and trying to find an alternative, which isn’t how the real world works. However, some see this being a flaw in the educational system rather than in the students themselves. I agree with this statement as well. I think that if educational systems stopped putting all of the focus on certain scores and more on the students’ behavior and attitude towards learning, they would see better results.
One thing I remembered vividly was that the United States has the highest college dropout rate than any other industrialized country. For me, the main topic they focused on in this podcast was how students are being taught versus how they should be taught. Schools seemed and still may seem to be too focused on the cognitive development rather than the non-cognitive skills. Cognitive skills are the measureable scores the students receive based on tests like the ACT, SAT, ITEDS, etc. While these scores may be important, the non-cognitive skills like developing who you are based on your self-control, your study habits, and your attitude towards people. Non-cognitive skills that students gain in high school have proven to be more helpful to them in the long run.
However, there can be other outside factors that may help or hurt the student’s ability to learn.
The story of Kewauna Lerma proved that living in an unstable environment can affect how she acted in school. She was getting into fights, couldn’t control her temper, and was hard to control in general, so she was put into “special” classes called WINGS, which only put her down more because of how she was bullied and how the teachers treated her in those classes. The main reason she changed her attitude towards school was after a serious talk with her mother and great-grandmother about how her actions were unacceptable. These non-cognitive skills can be learned and taught at later ages, like Kewauna learned.
However, it is better to learn them early on. Whether students are faced with adverse situations, like domestic abuse or neglect, or not, parents can protect their children from having these bad affects occur in their schooling. We have learned in the previous chapter about different forms of attachment, but in this situation the most important is formed early on called secure attachment. It is shown that a secure attachment to your caregiver will help your behavior and attitude later on in life.
The psychological terms I used were: cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills, attachment, secure attachment

This podcast tied into the last two chapters of reading by talking about learning and the development of the brain. This brings up the two basic areas of learning; cognitive and noncognitive. Cognitive skills can basically be described as school teachings. It talks about knowledge such as math, science, ACT scores, etc. Noncognitive skills can be both positive and not so positive. They basically make up who you are as a person, such as your character or personality. The show discusses whether or not schools should teach more noncognitive skills, and how not having cognitive skills can influence your success later in life.

It also talks about how poor parenting or upbringing can negatively influence the development of the brain. This causes for difficulty learning cognitive skills, which can lead to misdiagnosis of A.D.H.D. Though the development of the brain can be stunted, the learning process never stops. Crucial skills that aren’t learned early on can be taught later in life. This happened in two separate cases on the show. One follows a lady that had a poor upbringing and had a stunt in the growth of her cognitive skills. After poor schoolwork, her sophomore year she was taught necessary skills and increased her GPA enough for college. She then went on to succeed in college proving that the cognitive skills necessary to thrive can be taught at any time.

The other lady had a child at an early age and lacked the mother instincts needed to provide proper care. She had a tough time growing attached to the child, and decided to be taught. After her teachings she has grown a strong bond to her child and interacts nicely with it. Although she did not have the mother instincts, she was able to learn them for a positive life for the child.

I feel in order to improve our academic system as a whole, there needs to be both teachings of critical cognitive and noncognitive skills. I feel there also has to be reason for the child to go school. If they feel they can have a better lifestyle and succeed then they will go, then they will. But if they feel they are dumb and won’t make it into college anyway then they will probably drop out. Teaching both cognitive and noncognitive skills can help students feel that they can succeed, and the future is bright if they do.

Psychology Terms: Cognitive, Noncognitive, Skills, Brain development, Learning, A.D.H.D.

The chapters we have read and previous chapters relate to this talk show very much. Stress can be a huge factor of how we learn. It can affect us mentally, of course, but people aren’t aware of how it can affect us physically too. Learning is essential to life. In the talk show they discuss how the children in a poorer area of the city are stressed out which affects their learning in the classroom. Many kids from this area aren’t dumb; they just haven’t been in an area where learning is praised. They all got put into a ‘stupid’ class as they called it. They started to realize what was happening to them and how their actions were only causing them trouble. Vicarious learning was a factor because they watched as the other children got to stay in the ‘smart class’. The kids from the poorer area probably learned through behavioral learning because their parents aren’t good role models and don’t try hard at their own life so the children learn not to try heard in their life. It is interesting how in the talk show they can see the differences between learning and intelligence based on how the child grew up. Learning starts from birth and if the child is not in a stable environment, the way they learn when they get older will be affected.
Our public education system can be improved in more ways than one. Especially when we are little kids it is difficult to learn in-group settings because of all the distractions. One on ones should be used as often as possible for each student so they can learn the material as best as they can. Another suggestion would be to use positive reinforcements very often. Whether it is a sticker or a piece of candy, kids would do a lot better if every time they did something the teacher asked for they would get recognition for it. Students would behave better too if one kid is sitting nicely, for example, and the teacher gives them a piece of candy many other students will do the same actions as the student who got a piece of candy because of observational learning. In my hometown, elementary teachers give out RRPK tickets. RRPK stands for respectful, responsible, prepared, and kind. Every time a teacher sees a student act like one of those four qualities they receive a ticket. Which is like variable interval schedule because even though the student may act nicely, they won’t receive recognition by a teacher unless the teacher sees and thinks it is worthy of one. At the end of the week the teacher puts all the tickets from her class into a hat and draws two tickets and the winners get a prize. The students are learning that if they act respectful, responsible, prepared, or kind they have a better chance to get a prize at the end of the week. I think more schools should have systems like this because it teaches them how to act outside the class. On the radio talk show when the girl would say how violent she would get during class and things, maybe she would have behaved more appropriately if she had gotten recognition for it.
Key Terms: Learning, vicarious learning, behavioral learning, positive reinforcements, observational learning, and variable interval schedule

This radio talk show and the chapter we read about learning are similar because they tie in the ways of learning. In the United States schools have put a huge focus point on standardized testing early in life this is one of the focus points in the video they were explaining. The textbook went a lot more in depth and had more information such as how we learn and the three ways are non- associative, associative, and watching others. The radio station focused on how and when to apply those learning skills to kids in school. Also if taking your GED and passing would get you out of your high school faster. Some people actual passed the test but when it game to life experiences they lacked more then people who graduated with a diploma. The radio station also talked how stress affects your learning abilities. People also learn from their parents and others growing up which is told in the book also in the radio station neighborhoods that are poor and have kids growing up learning from there low educated families they follow in there path learning what they do and end up the same ways as them.
There are many ways to improve our schools education systems. What I think should happen in schools are they need to change the way they teach and not rely on standardized testing which stresses kids out and affects there learning. Mainly this happens due to there personal lives growing up and areas they grew up in many kids in poor neighborhood have a harder times then kids who are middle class or richer who’s parents are motived and have taught their kids well growing up. So basing kids on where they live and there life styles we should give them certain classes to improve there learning to catch up to other kids in there grades. Schools could even try to make the kids who have bad life styles more happy so they are more suitable to learn better and improve there overall self esteem.

Key Terms: non- associative, associative, watching others, stress, self esteem,

Before listening to This American Life’s episode “Back to School” there were several things I was unaware of regarding education, learning, teachers, students, and the studies being done on these things or people. Heckman, an economist who has been researching the skills of individuals, spoke during this episode. He was especially interesting to me because he talked about non-cognitive skills. These skills are things such as self-control, consciousness, temper, and the ability to resist impulse. He values these skills and believes they are much more important than cognitive skills. These are the skills that involve reading, writing, science, and math. Heckman talked about how non-cognitive skills have lost importance in the school system because they are much harder to measure than cognitive skills. This led into his next discussion over standardized tests. He believes that standardized tests and cognitive skills should not define one’s intelligence. I strongly agree with him and his argument. For most of the conversation he talks about the GED, but my frustration with the ACT is what really helped me relate to what he was saying. I received straight A’s in high school and maintained a good grade point average, but I’ve always struggled on standardized tests. I not only dislike the ACT because it’s a three hour test full of trick questions at eight o’clock in the morning, but because the test was an inaccurate measure of my intelligence. I took the ACT five times and received three different scores. Believing the ACT is an accurate calculation of my intelligence is hard for me to believe. This section was definitely the most interesting to listen to, because it is nice hearing a well-educated figure has the same view towards standardized tests as many high school and college age students. There was a conversation about the GED that also was very interesting to me. Why get your GED instead of spending four years in high school? When I first heard that question, I instantly thought to myself, “Why haven’t I thought of that before?” High school has always been an expectation in many families, especially in Iowa and the Midwest. As the discussion progressed, I learned that those who do not receive a high school diploma and instead get their GED have many troubles in different aspects of life including work and success. Also, divorce rates are a lot higher if you received your GED versus a high school diploma. I think that a person’s ability to be committed to something plays a huge role in this. Another major topic on this show was the study of children in adverse, poor environments and how their learning is affected. I learned that we have a “fight or flight” response that acts as an emergency response in our bodies. This is when one is frightened or scared of something and feel threatened. For most, this response is only triggered every now and then, if even at all. Children living in poor conditions, however, experience this emergency response constantly. This has a serious effect on the frontal cortex of the brain, because if one’s brain is constantly in “fight or flight” mode, it cannot develop correctly. Unfortunately, the frontal cortex is where most non-cognitive skills are developed, and it has been found that this is why children with adverse childhoods have less non-cognitive skills than others with a typical childhood. The stress of the children at home often turns into stress at school, and this has an effect on cognitive development. This was definitely the most surprising information to me, because I had no clue that one’s behavior was influenced so much by their childhood. When talking about how this show tied into our previous learning, I feel that society has made learning a completely different thing than it is intended to be. In the listening and the reading it has not been said that standardized tests help one’s development intellectually. That being said, learning is a whole different concept psychologically than it is in the school systems. Schools focus too much on trying to prove that they are successful through standardized tests, that they overlook improving students non-cognitively as individuals. When I think of this I think back to the chapter six reading about learning from others. There is nobody students are around more than their teachers. Teachers not only have the power to develop students cognitively, but also to be role models. The examples of the children with the adverse childhoods are directly about childhood affecting one’s learning. The fate of a child’s success starts with their home life, just as we were taught in the book. I believe our public education system can be improved by focusing more on the student’s well-being than their standardized test scores. This is much easier said than done, as stated in the show. It is very hard to measure one’s non-cognitive skills, but I believe classes like workplace readiness, consumer and survival skills, and parenting are a move in the right direction towards learning useful knowledge. Ultimately, it is someone’s social skills and personality that will win them a second interview versus a 32 on the math portion of the ACT. I strongly feel that the American education needs to be geared towards producing successful individuals prepared for the real world and the challenges it brings in which non-cognitive skills will be the only skills that matter.
Terms: Cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills, frontal cortex, fight or flight response, learning

Of course, learning and intelligence has many factors such as attention, memory, and so much more. As they talked about on the show, there is such a thing as non-cognitive intelligence which simply means that you can be smart in other ways that cannot be as easily measured. I have to agree that not all intelligence can be measured through standardized tests. I do understand why they make us do them because they want an easy way to check if we are up to par with our studies but it is simply too circumstantial and it doesn’t give the best results. Also, the stress aspect talked about on the show is really insightful and interesting because it is a huge factor in the development of kids and also is clearly present within a large population of our peers and underclassmen. Obviously, we are all going to encounter stressful situations within our lifetime and we need to know how to deal with it but it can also harm our bodies, our way of thinking, and our eventual outcomes/successes. Stress is a big deal. I really don’t think there is any one easy solution to our school’s problems but one thing I think will help is for the school to continue to do Standardized testing but to not put so much weight on it. Kids need to be tested because the teachers have to check their progress but the tests shouldn’t be relied so heavily on to tell them the child’s skill level or ‘intelligence’. Also, the stress that goes along with standardized tests is crazy! Many of us kids were taught by the school system at a young age that if we didn’t do well on these tests, we weren’t as smart as we should be and that can create a negative outlook on education. Performance on strict tests aren’t end all be all, they simply give a number that represents only a small portion of our intelligence. These tests aren’t a scale that can detect worldly knowledge or street smarts or people smarts or even intuition. It isn’t accurate and our schools need to take that into account. Psychological Terms I used were: intelligence, attention, memory, non-cognitive, standardized tests, circumstantial, stress, and intuition.

This show was mainly on the subject of learning and testing in schools, and the chapter we just read was on the subject of learning and how we all progress and take away knowledge from experiences in our lives. The two talking on the podcast are talking about how schools and learning has evolved over the years. In the past, everything was based on testing and IQ, but now that is changing in this new era. The marshmallow test was a pretty interesting, getting a second treat if they wait a certain period of time until their caregivers return. The kid in the experiment was trying really hard to resist the temptation, and gave the researchers a certain idea on how kids resisted this temptation. When they moved on to the next topic about children with less opportunities in a poor and negative environment. Negative punishment and negative reinforcement were brought up at one point. Negativity plays a big part in stress in childrens' lives. It's not necessarily the schools that are failing the kids, but their homes and families are failing them as well. Punishment to children is considered to be a large part of the downfall of kids and how they develop. To me, while listening to this podcast, this is like a different version of classical conditioning. When a child is continuously beaten and threatened, they develop responses that come from that abuse. When the young girl described her experience growing up with rage responses, she described herself as blacking out and not remembering what happened when she was set off. It was almost like a sort of sensitization, the more she encountered an uncomfortable or frustrating situation, her response would be blinding rage. She was considered troublesome and retarded because of the way they acted in class. The way she described her wings programs, this sounded exactly how my high school was. It is not even funny how true this was, whenever a kid acts out or makes trouble, the school doesn't deal with it, they just send them to a “slow” class. Now the question that is asked, what do we do with these kids? Instead of sending them to a daycare in high school, what else could we do to help them improve in school? They explained how sometimes a person was sent to take care over these kids individually and encourage them to do better, which is a very good idea. It does not always work, but it is a lot better than sending the kids to a babysitter. They then move on to the discussion of secure attachment, and how good it is for kids to have this kind of attachment with their caregivers. When they have a good relationship, the children begin to behave in a good manner, being more willing to learn and grow without as much frustration. Having a secure attachment with someone is great for a child's cognitive growth. The final part of the segment is about non-cognitive skills. They move on to a story of a girl who was extremely aggressive and had to be tazed by policemen. She needed and intervention, so her family sat down with her and spoke to her about their lives. Her great grandmother is the one who broke her barrier, when her grandmother started crying she finally started to listen. Her mother explained how she made so many mistakes in her life because she didn't listen to her own mother, and this speech gave Qwana a new outlook on life. It didn't happen immediately, but she progressively got better after this intervention. Learning self control and how to be resourceful, helped Qwana progress more throughout life and get good grades. After the podcast finally finished, the best suggestion I would have for improvement in education nowadays does not only have to do with the education system, but also family homes and a child's relationship with their caregivers. Parents have to step up and give their children a better life. Teen pregnancy is one major thing, I believe, that is working against children nowadays. How are kids (who are barely developed themselves) supposed to raise a child on their own? A majority of teen pregnancies don't have a happy ending, and the parents end up splitting up. The best thing education systems can do nowadays is make the kids who feel like they don't have a place to call home, become the home for those unfortunate children. Make them look forward to actually going to school, instead of heading towards another neglectful prison.

Terms: secure attachment, classical conditioning, sensitization, negative reinforcement, negative punishment, cognitive thinking, non-cognitive learning,

I learned a lot about the education system from this radio show. I grew up in a small, rural school and graduated with a class of about 40. It was a high school where you knew all of the kids in your high school. It was also a school where people stayed. Out of my graduating class, only one person had come in after high school, and a few had come during middle school. The rest of us had been together since kindergarten, and possibly day care before that. From that school system, I was never exposed to the family trouble described in the show. After I was aware, I kept thinking that there had to be a better way to teach children who live in horrible home situations. I liked the idea of having college aged roll models, who just tell the kids that they can succeed. By using modeling behavior, they children have someone to follow. Some children in bad home situations are well aware of vicarious conditioning. They watch their brother get arrest, or look out the window to see a fight. If we could have someone flip that idea on it’s side there may be some progress. Instead of watching a fight, the child watches how a mentor behaves and the results from her behavior. It would be a way to reteach the skills that Trough said were lacking.
The problem still remains that they child is in that stressful environment. Is there a second place they can go after school or before school where they can feel relaxed and maybe happy? They just need a place to let their fight or flight levels go down and stay down for a while.
Another thing I was wondering, is if there is a class or activity that can teach work ethic. I see so many college kids that just don’t want to work. They would hang out and do poor in classes instead of getting decent grades. My dad runs a small company and he is always frustrated when he has to fire someone because they didn’t show up to work. I can’t imagine what our country would look like if everyone did their work to their full potential. It doesn’t mean that everyone needs a college degree, but that they just do the best job they can do wherever they are. I know Trough talked about these kinds of skills.
Psychology Terms: modeling, vicarious condition, learning,

Being a teacher would be an incredibly different job, being a “good teacher”, I should say. There are many different approaches to it and so many different factors that come into play when trying to pass a message on to multiple types/kinds of students that learn differently. A major problem that I think definitely exists in the larger school are how all children are addressed the same, and not treated as different. The pediatrician states a ton of disorders that can carry over from kids experiencing hard times in their homes. If these issues were addressed at a young age, while they’re developing, the prevention of these kids shutting down, and being so stressed they’re unable to learn, could be greatly improved. Kids that experience issues at home have horrible effects from it, from being in a state of emergency at all times, their brain cannot develop correctly which leads to them developing a learning disability. The specific spot of the brain affected by being in this constant state of emergency is the prefrontal cortex. When this part of the brain is active all the time because they are stressed, they cannot learn important skills that lead to success later in life.

An interesting point they talked about was the GED. Personally I think the GED is a joke, in the radio show they say, “preparation time for the GED is 32 hours”. Where as, “total high school study time is around 4,000 hours”. It seems to be an unhealthy way out. Even though it may be felt that there’s a lot of information being crammed into classes in high school, there are other valuable lessons being learned, that are not obtained by people that get their GED. In the radio show these are referred to as “non-cognitive skills”, and that term referred to a giant array of skills that are taught/learned by kids that put the time in during school, like; social skills, communication, temperament control, etc.. Not having the time to learn skills like this cause the rates of failure to be extremely high in people that receive a GED over a high school diploma in anything they do, ranging from; college, the workplace, or even marriage.

In part two, we’re given an example of a girl that had trouble with developing “non-cognitive” skills when she was younger, and her school’s solution to this was putting her in “special classes”. Where she says, “while in these classes they were doing nothing”. This is another HUGE issue in schools, there are an array of different disabilities among children and they cannot all be thrown under an umbrella and only do as much as the least capable kid can do. In their research they found that even in later years, “non-cognitive” skills can still be taught. In this girl’s case, if this was never discovered she would have been kept in that class for maybe the rest of her high school career and had no chance at college, and thrown into the world with no knowledge.
Terms: prefrontal cortex, learning, brain, non-cognitive skills, disability, stress

This episode discussed development and learning along with the factors that effect them, while focusing on cognitive development versus, what they described as “non-cognitive” development (social skills/personality) and how these things affect a child’s long-term success. Our book explained what psychological and biological factors come into play as a person learns and develops. Early development and a child’s home environment heavily effect their learning capabilities and their possibilities of life long success, this was touched on in our text, but talked about in great length in this program and I really appreciated that.
In this program they brought up an experiment referred to as the “cookie test.” In this test young children’s will power is examined by seeing how well they can resist the temptation of a cookie (or some type of treat) placed in front of them. Studied later revealed a correlation between the individuals who displayed better self control then those who did not, the children that had been able to resist the treat were discovered to be leading more happy successful lives down the road. This backed up the idea of the importance of “non-cognitive” development in childhood, something that for a long time most schools overlooked in their education systems. Most schools lean heavy on test scores and striving/pushing for cognitive development, but many children, especially those who are considered “at risk”/come from underprivileged environments lack skills that even allow for cognitive learning to occur at an average pace.
Studies have shown that a chemical in the brain called cortisol is released along with adrenaline during stressful “fight or flight” moments, this chemical is much more long lasting than the energy boosting adrenaline and has been shown to actually shut down complex thinking processes and is designed to help us when in danger. The example that was brought up was coming across a bear, theses chemicals would help who survive, but “for some children that ‘bear’ come home from the bar every night” as a researcher put it. This constant stress releases the cortisol over and over, which negatively effects development in the pre-frontal cortex, resulting in slower thinking and learning abilities. All of this is connected to what we’ve read in our book about development and learning processes, but particularly parenting styles and the importance of a comforting attachment figure early on in life. In the episode, it was mentioned that even though statistcs show that those who have grown up in unstable/violent/underprivileged home environments are much more susceptible to mental illness and to very likely to been seen as unsuccessful. However, it was also said that if those children, even while living in adverse environments have at least one comforting attachment figure those statistics drop and in some cases compleltey go away.
I think, basically what all of this boils down to in regards to our public school system is that there needs to be much more focus on more than just cognitive development and high test scores, but also reassuring all students have opportunities to be nurtured in a way that enables healthier social and psychological development. There should also be more focus on helping the families of the students have a better understanding of just how important developing strong and safe relationships with their young ones is. Older students who may be struggling should also have constant reinforcement of the notion that it can get better and that their skills are not fixed/determined at birth and during their upbringing. There is always room for improvement and building up an stable and equal learning environment for all students, no matter their background is crucial to successful development.

Psychological terms: cognitive development, personality, attachment figure, self control, cortisol, adrenaline, pre-frontal cortex, parenting styles,

The American schooling system… Now where do we start? I like that there are dedicated teachers out there. Those are the people that we need to get paid more. They are those people that are educating the future generations to become the scientists, the doctors, and those other teachers that will then educate more students.
Anyway, this chapter talked about learning and how it is affected by the personal well-being of the person, or how the subject was raised. An example from the radio show was that of a Marshmallow test. The subject, around the age of 4, is placed in a room with sweets to test their self-control. I followed this up with the many other videos on the Youtubes, of home videos of the experiments. The way the child had respond was a response through conditioning by the parents when the child was young, but what four year old would not resist a sweet? The problem with the school system is not with the teachers, it is how the students are being taught, and what they are being taught. Each person is different, and they are raised differently. Each student should be taught on how they learn the quickest, and the most effective way. When I was in middle school, my class took this small classroom activity on how each person learns the best. Each person was given a result of either reading, writing, tangible objects (such as notecards or paints), or listening. This would enable the teachers to focus on how each student learned the best, thus getting more time out of their money.
Now it all isn’t with just the student, a steady home life can produce a great student, or hinder their learning capabilities. Having a stressful home life can release stress hormones which can create problems with cognitive development. Always having an unhealthy home life can send ones brain into a different state of mind, which can affect how someone learn, because the brain focus more on the motor skills than brain skills, which can hinder your learning capabilities. Not everything can be learned from school, like the non-cognitive skills, such as social skills or personality, which can make a person who they are. So school isn’t just a complete waste! (Hahah, Just kidding, I like school) but really, it makes us become more responsible adults, prepare us for the real world.
Terms: Cognitive Development, Non-cognitive skills, Hormones, Learning

For this assignment I listened to This American Life episode #474 called Back to School. This episode focused on learning, cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills, and stress, as well as education in schools.
This current chapter and the previous chapter tie into this show in many ways. The show mentioned a lot of the different types of ways we learn that are mentioned in the book. They talked about how we learn from experience and cognitive learning as well as non-cognitive learning. As we experience the same things over and over we begin to associate certain stimuluses with certain responses. The book refers to it as classical conditioning. Its like we automatically program ourselves to assume the outcome of every situation. Something that takes place in schools is learning through modeling. If you watch others do the same thing everyday you’re going to pick up on it.
When touching on classical and operant conditioning in this episode they began to move towards stress. I found it very interesting when they were talking about all of the effects that stress has on learning. When they did experiments such as put kids in a room with cookies, which was really funny, you heard how the kids were stressed about wanting the cookie. The stress of them having to wait ten minutes so they could get two cookies was too much for them and they began to cry. I also found it interesting when they talked about the stress of homework and how it can effect learning. Especially when they mentioned how in high school we had around 1000 hours of homework per year. To me, that is way off because I never had homework in high school. I definitely felt it was easy to learn without having to worry about school while away from school. I agree with the people in this episode when they say stress effects learning.
Another part of this episode I really enjoyed was when the girl was explaining how she was put into a slow class when in middle school and she felt as if they were treated like babies. I love the fact that she said it like that because that is how i feel about special classes. I’m not saying special classes are bad, however I don’t feel like people in special classes should get to be in the same category as everyone else. I come from a high school where kids that were normal, just simply slow readers, got to take special classes all four years and still graduate with high GPAs and the same honors as everyone who actually earned their GPA.
If there was a way I could improve our public education system I would give the hardworking kids what they deserve. I watched my sister work her tail off to be #1 in her class for four years. She finished high school with a 4.0 GPA yet was awarded practically nothing when it came time to give scholarships for college. All of the kids coming from poor families and terrible home lives were given the scholarships. Not that giving money to those in need is bad, but at least take care of the kids that work for it too! When a student does something academically spectacular they should be awarded for their hard work. The way it is done now is that the “special kids” are awarded for trying and the hard working kids are ignored because since they are hard working kids doing something great was already expected of them. That is what I tho k needs to be improved in the public school system.

Terms Used: Learning, Classical Conditioning, Operant Conditioning, Cognitive skills, Conditioned stimulus

Both of these chapters are basically what the entire show was. They were talking about how we can make learning and intelligence better. The last chapter we read was about how we learn. It really did not talk about the learning chapter. The show talked about learning, but nothing really from the book. It was talking about things from the past chapter that was about developing. The show makes a reference to attachment. They do not say the name, but they talk about secure attachment. This has a big impact on how smart you are. They were saying that if you have a secure attachment you are smarter. If you do not have a secure attachment you are not very smart. They talked about how you are brought up will effect you in school. The show was talking about if you are brought up with a lot of stress school can hard because you have stress. People who do not have stress at home do well in school because they do not have stress. The show did not talk about the kinds of learning. They did not talk about learning by seeing someone else, non-associative, or associative. There was not a link with the chapter about learning and the show. That is kind of weird because the show talked about learning and the chapter was how we learn.

Something that teachers are doing that helps students is giving examples of things. Also teachers are doing example problems that help students. Doing these examples is one of the three ways to learn. It is seeing someone else do it. This is very good for students because it is one of the ways people learn. One thing that would help that is actually done in elementary is using reinforcer. This is operant learning is associative learning. A reinforcer is like something you get after doing something. This would help students a lot. This would kind of make a motivation for students to learn. This may have happened to me in school, but a teacher could make a deal saying that if the students do their work for the week that they will not have to do homework for the weekend. This would motivate the students to learn. Then the students would not have to do homework on the weekend. A reinforcer would be a good thing to use because it helps the student and the school. It helps the student because they are not doing homework on the weekend. It helps the school because the students will want to learn so they can do their work.

Secure attachment, seeing someone else, non-associative, associative, operant, reinforcer

The process of learning and how we learn are discussed both in our textbook and also in the radio show. There are more things that go on with learning than what's in the classroom. With learning in school there are many other factors, such as how the student feels physically, if there's something distracting in the room, or something different all together--a bad home life. This can be very hard for some students since the American education system focuses on standardized testing, or cognitive development, which is what the stereotyping idea of "learning" is. The radio episode discusses this. Can you really judge on how well a teacher teaches by the test scores of their students? Especially when new studies show that the home life of a student can affect the brain itself. If the brain is not right, then it can be impossible to learn.

There was also a study done following students who dropped out of high school and instead got their GED. They did better than students who dropped out and didn't pursue their GED, but did no where near as well as students who received their high school diploma. The GED students lacked "non-cognitive skills", which are essentially someone's personalty and social skills, or things that are learned day to day from experience.

With cognitive skills there is also the idea of self control and self preservation. The marshmallow study was brought to light, where researchers would have four-year-olds as their test subjects. If the man left the room and they ran a bell signaling him to come back, they would get one treat. However if they could wait for the man to come back on his own, then they got two treats. He later looked up the children when they were older to see where they had gotten in life, and there was definitely a relationship between the kids who waited/didn't wait and their success in life.

Our current education system could definitely be improved in many ways. It is not the teacher's fault if their students choose not to learn, or choose to not study for a test. Their job should not have to rely on the performance of their students. There is almost an endless list of factors that can influence how a student does in the class. They might not like the teacher's voice, they might be sick, the school could be hot or cold making it hard to focus, the student might have something going on in their personal life that makes learning difficult, or they could just plain not care. I feel as though a lot of students learn by non-associative learning. It gets beat into their head for long enough that eventually it's just remembered or memorized. I think hands-on learning and one-on-one learning would benefit at least myself, but it would be very hard to pull off, especially with larger schools.

I wish there was a way to make things more "fair". I think it would be nice for there not just to be a written test, but an oral test also, for students to pass to get to the next "level", like how must math classes are. If you pass pre-algebra, then great, you go on to algebra. if not, then maybe there's another section of that pre-algebra class that has just repeaters in it, so things can be more thoroughly explained. If the student didn't know what they were talking about at all, then they shouldn't be able to go to the next level and then get meetings with a tutor or the teacher to help them advance. But then there could be students who never advance, and then there would awkwardly be a senior among freshmen.

The school system should also make sure that students come out of school knowing important life skills and non-cognitive skills, since they will help you advance even further in life. It is great that we focus on the "core" subjects", but I also want to know how financial aid works, what to do in an interview, how to write a check, how to change a tire or jump a car, how to take out a loan, and how mortgages work. I was very fortunate in high school to have some teachers who understood that we needed to be taught these things, so they subtly slipped them into their lesson plans. I wish there was a mandatory life skills class; I think a generation down or two, it would be slightly easier to know how to get a handle on life.

Terms used:
Cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills, learning, non-associative

This episode of The American Life focused a lot on learning and today’s education system. Also it talked a lot about the parent’s role in a child’s life and how it effects their development. Our last chapter was all about learning and the different types of learning, and how the brain changes when we learn. Chapter 4 was all about development and the different things that can affect the way we grow up. They talked about the importance of a positive parent figure in your life, especially when you have tougher living conditions than most; poor in Chicago. When they were discussing this, it brought me back to when we learned about the experiment with the monkeys. One of the stuffed monkeys had food and was made of something not soft like wire, then the second one was made of cloth and soft material but had no food. They found that it was natural instinct for the monkey to go to the more comforting mother when he got frightened as opposed to the mother with food. They also talked about the girl that had a very tough upbringing, even being homeless for part of it. They proved how much she has turned her life around with her GPA and other statistics. She accredits one of her high school teachers for this, for giving her life tips that she would actually benefit from; how to dress professionally, how to ask questions, and many more.
Today’s education system could benefit from many adjustments. I think schools should focus on building relationships with the students, especially in towns like Chicago. Kids in high school are generally not very concerned with their education, but that is what needs to change. Just like in the episode we listened to, the girl practically doubled her GPA in one year just from coming to class and paying attention. I think it is important that school is a place kids, especially troubled kids, want to go to. While I agree the education aspect of school is most important, that doesn't matter if kids aren't even showing up. So that comes first. I also think that schools should work on teaching subjects that are going to help people in real life. For example, why did I learn how to solve chemical equations, but I have no idea how to do my taxes. Schools needs to modify their curriculum to help students better prepare to be independent in the near future.

The broadcast and this chapter both relate to the topic of learning. While the broadcast explains stress levels and learning skills, while chapter six goes into the further explanation of different forms of learning and how we adapt ourselves into learning particular brain functions to help us in our everyday lives.
The broadcast starts by focusing on the education system and how schools and testing changes lives. The broadcast then goes on to discuss how the way we learn can improve teaching and the surroundings we are in also effects our learning capability. It then goes on and talks about how cognitive skills that go on tests used to be focused on way too much and that we are kind of brain washed all the way from the beginning of our infantile lives. With this we think of how we learn today and what our education is actually accounting for. The GED was a big focus during this broadcast. The speakers stated that as high school students study for about a thousand hours to pass through all four years of school, a drop out can simply study for thirty two hours and take a test that says they have the same smarts as a high school student. Once we know this? We might think, what is the point of high school? Tests show that someone who gets their GED are pretty successful at times, but nowhere near as successful as an individual who achieved their high school diploma. The GED also tends to lead to further dropping out of many things such as college, military and even marriage. But these test skills needed for a GED are considered to be non-cognitive skills.
From what I know about the scientific aspects of language, intelligence, and learning as presented in my textbook, I believe that our education can be improved in a couple ways. The first being that the education system should not focus so heavily on cognitive skills. The tests and scores from these tests only measure if the particular person has the skills of taking standardized tests. The perfect example is the ACT test. While you take this test, there is hardly a way to know what is exactly on the test. The material on the test may or may not have been taught and possibly not even been heard of by the test taker. I think that if the education system continues to focus on standardized testing then students will have a harder time in furthering their education.
The second way our education can be changed is to emphasize what is actually appealing and interesting to the child. If a child is bored or uninterested and get fidgety, then they are labeled as having ADD. This to me is an outrage. If a student cannot sit still in class, it is because they are most likely bored and the lesson is unappealing. They want to be able to focus on something that they feel is fun or worth working for and worth practicing for. The focus on this would not only change the way children learn, it would also develop new forms of learning and new ways of interaction between student and teacher, resulting in positive reinforcement.

Terms: Learning, ADD, GED, non-cognitive skills, cognitive skills, education, intelligence, stress, ACT, intelligence, positive reinforcement.

The chapter about learning and the radio broadcast tie into each other on what learning has become in America. Kids in school today are tested all the time to see if they have learned the skills they require graduating. However we see that the people who take the GED are passing through school faster than actually going to school for four years when it takes about three days to study for the GED. The schools are teaching the children, but the children are not learning. American schools pride themselves with high test scores and having the best teacher to student ratio, but none of that actually matters. A student will either know the material or they will not. The only learning that actually takes place in school is what happens beside the classes, the extra activities, communicating with others, and seeing their ideas. Test scores do not show what we actually learn in school they show what we have memorized for the past twelve years of our lives. Learning is the use of our non-cognitive skills, similar to street smarts. These are things that they do not teach in school like self control and resist temptation. The radio show talks about the famous marshmallow test where four year old kids must wait until the tester comes back to get a second treat, or they could ring a bell and just get one. This is a skill that is learned while in school and does not show up on any exam. Another problem for students is the impact of their home life. Not how much money is coming into the home, but the stress of living in the home. Houses under more stress have students that have attention issues like ADHD and do worse in school. The school will say they are not smart, but that is not the case. The school system needs to help these students deal with their issues and help them function better.
The education system in the United States needs to change a little bit to test the students for these non-cognitive skills and help those that do not yet posses these skills. The traditional way of teaching is still important for the general education of children; however it should not be the main focus of the system. Schools need to teach the skills needed to live in the world outside of school which many schools do not do and their students are not equipped enough to function well in society until they learn the skills that are necessary. The skills that are learned in high school will reflect how the students will function in the world. The non-cognitive skills need to be taught early so the students do better than their will not be a need for intermediate classes where the students are called dumb and they do not learn. A student may not be able to increase their intelligence, but they will not need to if their non-cognitive social skills are very high. These people are able to adapt to situation and find the best way to solve problems.
Psychology terms: Learning, non-cognitive skills, ADHD, marshmallow test, stress, intelligence

Both of the chapter and the radio show both talk about learning. The radio show discusses the high school education system and how kids who are dealing with stress during their schooling can affect the way they are learning. The book goes in depth and talks more about the classical conditioning and operant conditioning. The radio show also discusses cognitive and non-cognitive learning. They discuss a test where they would put four year olds into a room and if they ring a bell while waiting they can get one cookie, but if they wait until Walter came back they could have two cookies. The kids would try and resist and it was very hard for these kids to do. Later on in life, about 20-25 years he discovered the kids that were able to wait even longer for the cookie ended up doing better on the SAT and on tests.
I believe we can improve our education system if we start teaching different. Teachers these days will teach to the level of the lower half of the class. The kids who are much smarter than their peers are not learning as well. They do not learn as much. Kids who are smarter are not being encouraged to keep learning new things because they have to relearn so that their peers can be as smart as them. Instead I believe what we need to do is have tests that allow kids to test into each grade. Some kids are smarter at the age of 7 than other children are so they should not have to wait a few years for their peers to catch up. They should be allowed to move on and continue their development.

Terms used: classical conditioning, operant conditioning, learning,

This was related to the previous chapter that we read because it had a lot to do with learning. In our previous chapter learning was the main topic and many ties were made when listening to these acts. Not only did it talk about learning but it also talked about stress levels in children and how it affect their ability to learn and can influence cognitive development along the way. Not only was learning tied into what we have read in the book before but also this video made a good point about children and secure attachment. The more secure attachment that the child has while home the more the child will succeed and learn better. Meaning the more quality time and attention the child gets from the parent then the better for them. It’s not good for the child to see the parent struggling or stressing out about things because they will soon start to do the same thing. Which was mentioned in our book and called modeling. Most of the impoverished areas like Chicago have children that can’t focus because they are too busy worrying about something else that they might think is even more important than learning in school like being killed or seeing a loved one get killed. In the video they showed a perfect example and explained that it is very hard to teach children that are from places like Chicago because they have things that are wrong with them mentally and feel they cannot fix them.
There are many ways that we can fight to improve our school systems. I think that all children should be subject to talk to someone on a daily basis so that the schools can know what’s going on in the child’s life. Not all children are raised the same and have the same background at home. Some children want to learn and do well in school but the odds are against them and they are just waiting for someone to reach their hand out to them and help them. Also, I think that the school systems shouldn’t focus more on cognitive than non-cognitive because I believe that they both are just as important to a child. Many school systems also think of children that can’t learn as having ADD or ADHD and don’t even consider that it might be problems at home. This is also a way that the school systems can better improve.

Terms: secure attachment, cognitive learning, non-cognitive learning, modeling, ADD, ADHD

In this episode of This American life ties into the chapter of learning because it discuses cognitive and non-cognitive skills. They talk about how having s lot of stress in the home can have harmful effects on developing kids and it can cause them to do poorly in school. For example, Kewauna was a girl they brought in to talk about the struggles that she had as a kid and how it affected her in school. She talks about being homeless and having her father who is the only source of income abandon them. Then she talks about how her school life used to be which wasn't very good. She used to act out in class and was sent to the principals 72 times in just one year. Kewauna was put into a special class for kids who act out and she said it was so embarrassing because they were considered the dumb kids and they never actually learned anything. She was also arrested for punching a police officer, but thats where she started to turn things around and do better in school. She signed up for a program called One Goal to help kids develop their cognitive skills.
Another part of this video talked about children at home who don't develop good cognitive skills because their parents don't communicate with them and teach them the basic skills that they should to help them learn. When they showed the mother that talking to her child and getting her to spend time teaching them things like the alphabet and counting at a younger age their likely to have better cognitive skills
So one things schools can do to improve learning for students is have a class like the one Kewauna was in to help students that struggle with their cognitive skills instead of just putting them into a classroom where they aren't going to learn anything.

I think that this podcast and the chapter readings tie in completely with one another in various ways. I think that the chapters were broad enough to cover the broad and diverse areas of flaws that are found in the education system. One example that I found especially I interesting is the fact that our school systems have lumped the GED and a 4 year High School Diploma into the same category. Although the two are seen as equal and I understand that sometimes life happens and doesn't allow us to do things in a traditional ways, I do not believe that these two are equal. One of the main reasons that I have feel this way I because the social experience is completely different. I think a lot of the skills that we learn from the high school experience have to do with out social experience and learning and growing as a person throughout those experiences. Also the commitment of high school is another trait that has to be learned. The GED may have equivalent educational purpose and does provide someone a less traditional path to go down if need be, but the commitment factor of the two simply do not add up.

One of the things that I found exceptionally interesting in this broadcast was how much stress has an affect on education. I think that we all have experienced stress and know that it can have a negative affect on time management and other factors pertaining to education, but I was really surprised to see how much of an impact it had in such large numbers. I think that the way our education system us set up sets us up for failure when it comes to stress. Due to the large numbers od students in certain school in the education system everything is competitive which causes a lot of stress on students, almost everything derived in the education system is based on competition rather than the quality of education that each student receives.

The last things that I found most interesting about this broadcast was how important touching and talking is to a very young baby and toddler in order to develop their cognitive skills. Numerous studies have shown that children who did not interact with their surroundings and their parents do not develop as much cognitively throughout the rest of their life and at their young age is absolutely essential.

Psychological Terms: Cognitive, learning, development, GED

This was a tough program for me to listen too. I have a very different opinion when it comes to the role of school. All opinions aside, I think the program did have some valuable points, the most basic of those being that some children do not get taught non-cognitive skills. I also agree that non-cognitive skills are incredibly important, even more so than cognitive skills. Having the ability to work with other people, control impulses, be curious, and be self-confident leads to a more productive student. This relates directly to the book when it comes to learning because not all of these skills are regularly taught in schools, and learning as a whole is a very different process than what we are brought up to think in school. When I think about my elementary school, I did not learn to be confident or curious. I was taught to memorize and to calculate. We know from our chapter reading that there is a lot more to learning than just memorizing. Learning needs to be a comprehensive experience that includes social behaviors and emotional stability because they help produce better students. We need to be able to flex all of our different learning muscles instead of just the cognitive ones. Being able to learn through other means makes better use of our brains natural capacity to gather new information and make use of it. Now whether or not schools should be responsible for teaching students life skills AND cognitive abilities is a different questions. I personally think that parents/guardians should be responsible for teaching their kids the important non-cognitive abilities. School is where kids should go to obtain a broad understanding of a lot of topics so they can decide what interests them later. Home is where they learn to be curious or restrain themselves. I do realize that not all families are stable or able to provide such instruction, and I don’t yet have an answer for how to resolve that issue. By having schools teach more and more non-cognitive skills, kids who develop the non-cognitive skills at home are being left in the dirt. I know I was not interested in learning how to behave properly in school. I went because I wanted to learn about math and the world. So in summary, I agree that the non-cognitive skills are lacking and important, but I don’t think school is the right place to fix it. I do not have a better solution worked out yet though. Either way, very interesting to think about.

Terms: Non-cognitive, Cognitive, Learning, social behaviors, emotional stability

Paul Tough says that in order to fix something you have to realize what the problem is, and in this instance the problem is that schools are mostly focused on cognitive development; standardize test, math and reading test, and IQ test. That’s not a bad thing at all by any means, but schools put such an emphasis on cognitive development that they miss out on other learning styles that might better fit the students. What they are realizing is that cognitive skill isn’t what matters most in a child's success it’s a different set of qualities. James Heckman was brought on and started talking about the equivalency of a GED and a high school graduate, and in his studies he say that high school graduates were doing much better than people who dropped out and just got their GED. He said that those people will drop out of many other things in life if they start at dropping out of high school. Our entire school system is revolved around tests, and how smarts that you can measure on a test are the most important information that you can have about a student, and that’s how we know if schools are well run. GED proved that the test scores only explain a little about who is successful and who is not, and that there are other factors, non-cognitive skills, that really tie in to why a high school graduate was more successful than someone with a GED even though they are supposed to be equal. Heckman’s study about the GED v. a high school graduate just proves that more is involved in learning and intelligence, like our chapter taught us, than just things you can teach and measure, cognitive skills, in a classroom. The non-cognitive skills that Heckman found mostly deal with self control. The Marshmallow Test, is a good example of self control, and I have to admit when the recording started to happen I laughed so hard, and it’s hard to think that for kids its that hard to remain in control, even if they just have to wait 10 minutes. Through research they found that stress can prevent you from having non-cognitive skills. Someone living in a poverty setting is going to be more stressed than someone who isn’t. Dr. Harris starts to talk about how most of the children she would have to treat kids who people thought would have ADHD, but really looking into the background of things there was trauma in the home life. She realized that there were connections between all these kids and their symptoms, and she concluded that people of an adverse childhood experiences when they were little had worse health that continued into adulthood. The repeated stress of the constant fight or flight stimulus affects the development of these kids brains where self control is.

I thought the section about Barbara and Aniya was really interesting. I’ve always thought that attachment between a mother and a child always came naturally, so it was interesting hearing all of the things that both Barbara and Aniya had to learn from Simone. The fact that Barbara had to learn to tell Aniya reasons why not to do things like for intense using scissors, she had to learn to say “I don’t want you to use them, because I don’t want you to cut yourself. I was honestly in awe that non-cognitive learning could teach attachment like that, and the percentages at the end of the study had such a difference for people who got the help to improve non-cognitive skills for their children and for themselves.

I know for sure that schools shouldn’t be placing the “problematic kids” into different schools or programs because then they are around people just like them that can set off their tempers like Kewauna easier. I think they should be in special classes that they can learn the non-cognitive skills that they need. I think that if non-cognitive skills can be learned, and they are as easy to learn as Heckman said they are that they should be offered to be taught. I know it’s never going to happen, but I think that our society should cut back on how much we care about standardize test scores. As we read in the chapter, there are many other ways to learn other than just cognitive learning. I think the One Goal program Kewauna was in is a really good program that all schools should consider having if they have a lot of kids who have act out.

This broadcast was really interesting and eye opening. I would have never guessed that the United States had the biggest drop out rate in college because we put so much stress on going to college. I’ve learned that non-cognitive learning is just as important as cognitive learning, and that there are many different factors of non-cognitive learning.

Terms: Cognitive, Non-Cognitive, Stress, Development, GED, Self-Control, Fight or Flight

This video tied into the chapter of language and intelligence, and previous chapters on learning by the learning style and how to learn. They were both, the chapters and the show about learning and the different types on how to learn depending how you can. Also they both focused on the cognitive abilities, which is basically brain based skills we need in life to do any simple task there is. Plus it has to do with so much like, first off how we learn, making some type of decision, talking, socializing, etc. Also it talked about the non-cognitive skills. Both being something we have but for example usually use the cognitive skill instead of using the non-cognitive skills just because the non-cognitive skills are just things as in behavior wise and attitude. At school they want to know is you can take in and remember everything which is basically the cognitive skill, where you have the ability to memory, attention, logic and reasoning skills, etc. But how the system is at and everything I wish it could be different because sometimes it isn’t fair for everyone because we don’t all learn the same because we are all different and do things differently. I mean in the show it talked about how teachers could careless and how others really care and would really want a difference and or change. I mean I get why some teachers might not care because some kids just really don’t care about school but that’s only because this is probably something new to them, plus their parents probably don’t know how big it is to have an education for their kids, or maybe they don’t care either. It is really hard for the kids that don’t care really get an education since they don’t have no one to help them through or to just tell them to keep going. But overall I think that the education system needs to somehow use both cognitive and non-cognitive skills, it could help.
Terms: learning, cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills

Listening to the radio show gave me a lot of thought of how it was relatable to chapter 6, which explains the cognitive thinking we do as humans and the different skills that can be tested in today’s society. The show gave examples of the different ways raising children are done and also the different cognitive skills being met. Parenting skills are used in a variety of ways in different households, and the show gives an example, that talked about poor households and how high-stress levels are different and much higher than a family with higher income. I could relate because of the stress that I had to deal with growing up with a single mother plus having two jobs to support my family and I. Being the oldest, made me realize how much responsibility I had to have for my mother and learn to deal with situations that couldn’t handle on a daily basis. The non-cognitive skills did not affect me has a children because I knew being anger was not going to help me needs and show weakens to people that looked up to me. The learning behavior is taught from family, friends, and strangers in our everyday lives. Public schools to me are an amazing experience people should go through, because of learning different experiences and also knowing society before actually being out there in the real world.
Public schools can be very much improved because of always getting the short end of the stick, in addition to being over populated with children not wanting to go overall. Teenagers go through so much in a short amount of time and knowing how to handle the situations that are given to them. That is when drugs are put into play to submerge negative problems in balancing school, family, friends, and other things that could be handled with people to help them. Turning to different negative substances are a way for people to forget about their problem, but in reality it only makes it worse. Therefore, I think public schools needs to give more guidance for kids to lean on and tell them their problems. Not having someone to talk to can make a person turn to negative people and problems so they can become something there not.

Terms: cognitive skills, Parenting skills, and non-cognitive skills.

This show relates to chapter six in the book called learning. The chapter on learning, ties into This American Life episode named Back to School by the reporter, Paul Tough, and Kewauna Lerma a women who grew up in poverty. Paul Tough’s emphasis on learning is through his book “How Children Succeed.” In his book he talks about children’s cognitive development and non-cognitive skills. His view on cognitive development is what children learn through their teachers, such as measuring and counting. The textbook’s view on cognitive development is all about what children know by the time they get to school through their environment and genes, known as nature vs. nurture. The point of view of non-cognitive skills through Paul Tough is that non-cognitive skills are known as the children’s social skills, their personality traits, their self-control, and their own conscientiousness. These non-cognitive skills are supposed to help these kids learn better and it’s the children’s vital point in bettering their education. In the textbook, it views the children’s non-cognitive skills by being taught by their parents or guardians. For example, through reinforcement and punishment whether it be positive or negative. This is supposed to help the kids with their self-control and behavior. Kewauna Lerma, a women who has had to go through many things in her life helps relate to learning. Her life story is all about poverty and how it affected her in her education. Kewauna grew up in poverty with no parents and living on her own. When she was a child she had a bad temper and would take that out in school, where she would be sent to the principal’s office multiple times. This led to her being put into the Wing’s Program, a program for kids who were troubled. This program gave her no set of direction in her education, for example they would play video games and eat popcorn. This relates back to learning because of Kewauna growing up in poverty and being a trouble child she did not have any advantages towards being able to be taught or learning anything while she was in school. Kewauna never grew up with parents, which resulted in not having any non-cognitive skills that would push her through school and being able to learn better. Both Kewauna and Paul have different examples about learning but both examples help the meaning of how learning is so important in children’s lives.
Our public education system needs to improve a lot. I think that teachers need to be able to help any type of kid that needs extra help. This could go a long way in helping their future education, for example if Kewauna had more help from her teacher she probably would have been fine and not have been put into a special program. I also think that teachers need to make parents get more involved in their children’s school education, especially in elementary school. Another thing that needs to be changed is our tests. Tests are supposed to help teachers know what we have learned, but if we haven’t learned anything then our tests will be bad. This should give the teachers an idea that they need to teach better or spend more time on it rather than moving onto another subject without ever looking back onto what we learned beforehand. All of these examples would help teachers but even more the kids who are our future generation.
Psychological Terms: Learning, Cognitive Development, Genes, Nature vs. Nurture, Non-cognitive Skills, Reinforcement, and Punishment.

The Radio show and what we have read in the book are similar because they are both about learning. They also talk about cognitive and non-cognitive ways of learning. The book is more specific on the different way and kinds of learning. The radio show is more talking about how learning can be affected, such as high levels of stress. Kids raised in different households have different cognitive and non-cognitive skills than others. Some teachers also tend to care more than other teachers and that can affect the child. Some are getting the full attention or structure they need and that can stress the children out. I think our systems could be improved by knowing the background of the children so you have a sense of why they may act the way they do and so you know how to help them succeed. Also more one-on-one classes would be great so the kids aren’t expected to learn alone. We need to enforce group work and projects so we can improve the non-cognitive skills. Their could also be more positive and negative reinforcement so their would be less punishment. That could lead to better behavior!
TERMS: Cognitive, Non-Cognitive, Structure, Positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, punishment, behavior

Both the chapter and the radio show discuss learning. The chapter focuses more on the fundamentals and terms associated with learning. This radio show puts learning into a current day perspective and how learning can be obstructed in the school system. I believe the public school system can be improved with more specialized classes. The teachers need to be more aware of the background of the children and being more sensitive to a child's problems. Instead of addressing skills needed to pass a test, the school system should be also teaching self control and financial literacy. In the show there was a man who discussed how to be successful from an economic standpoint. I agreed with his opinions about teaching students skills besides measurable things in order for students to be successful after graduation.

This subject is very important to me and hits home. My mom is a special education teacher at a small town middle school. Her job is very closely related to cognitive development and how that affects learning in school. She works with many kids who have been diagnosed with EBD or emotional behavioral disorders. These kids are usually the ones we deem as the naughty children. In actuality, EBD is directly related to home life, early attachments, and cognitive developments. Kids with rough home lives are much more likely to end up in a special education program. The trauma of living in a stressful household causes physical distraction or physical illness. The statistics of kids in school who have a hard time in school due to traumatic events was shocking to me. There are cases of EBD in my high school but nothing to this extreme. I lived a mostly sheltered life so this was an eye opening part of the radio show for me.

Standardized tests and No Child Left Behind are two subjects that are also important to me. Once again, because of my mom I see the negative effects of these two things up close. I do not believe that tests are a proper way to measure a student’s knowledge. They do produce a score but they do not take into account kids who are poor at test taking. These tests don’t measure character. Just like Paul tough discussed noncognitive skills are important things learned in the school system. Because of these tests schools are more focused on teaching measurable things. I come from a school where the most important things taught were math, science and American history. I never learned other important life skills such as cooking, financial literacy, taxes, how to apply for college, how to apply for a loan, and how to buy a house or car. I agree that math is important but in order to succeed in life young adults also need to know these types of skills.

Another interesting part of this radio show was how he said cognitive skills can’t necessarily be learned but noncognitive skills can be learned. This show suggests that if a child is at the top of his class in elementary school they will continue to be successful in school throughout high school. IQ has a limit for everyone. I agree with this as well and I have seen it happen. Part of my moms job is teaching them social skills and I have noticed a difference in the childs life. A child with autism has a hard time relating to other people. Teaching them to put themselves in someone’s else shoes takes time but is achievable. A child with autism asking another person how their day was is a great triumph. That skill can’t be measured by a test but is still an important social skill.

Psych Terms: Learning, cognitive skills, non cognitive skills, development, attachment, perception, social skills, IQ, emotional behavioral disorder,

The chapters tie into what the radio show by talking about cognitive and non-cognitive learning. In the radio show they were talking about how your living conditions when you were growing up can persuade someone’s cognitive learning. For example, if you were a kid and had a lot of stress or you were homeless and in some hard times your cognitive learning wouldn’t be as good as a young kid who grew up in a good home and in a good neighborhood. On the other hand non-cognitive skills can be learned by anyone. Like the girl the talk show interviewed, she grew up homeless and scored low on tests. She did however learn her non-cognitive skills and her GPA throughout high school went up until it was a 4.1 by her senior year. Although her ACT scores only went up by four points she got into college, sits at the front of the class, introduces herself to the teachers after class and isn’t ashamed of asking the teachers for help. This shows that just because your cognitive skills aren’t the best because of your childhood conditions it doesn’t mean you can’t learn non-cognitive skills and do very well in school and life. Our public education system should focus more on non-cognitive learning. You can’t control the environment a kid is growing up in, but if non-cognitive skills can help kids as much as they helped that girl in the radio show then anyone can be helped that much. Terms used: learning, cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills

Back to School
This radio show linked a lot of what we have learned on intelligence, language, and learning. They talked about many different children that had a tough life at home. A tough life at home means a tough life at school for children. One of the biggest topics they talked about on the radio show, was the idea of stress. At a young age a child can have stress hardwired into their brain by constant stress that their home environment brings them. This makes sense when it comes to the development process that we learned in the previous chapters. The term that the book uses is Long-term potentiation. The more something is exercised by the brain, the stronger the synapses between those neurons become, making it a better learned trait. With the stress then, it becomes a very well-known pattern to the brain, making it hard for the child to avoid stressing out, becoming angry, ect. The stress effects are from an unconditioned stimulus, which changes the behavior of the child. This leads to the question, “Is our home environment important to how well we achieve at school?”
The idea behind this is attachment. The book talks about how we learn from experience, and our first experiences come from our homes and relationships with our parents and families. Having a relationship with your parents, or some sort of “support group” has shown to help children become more successful. Due to the upbringing of some children, the radio show talked about how some schools have taken it upon themselves to sort of “reteach” the troubled kids confidence, self-sufficiency, and how to cope with the stress that they feel. With learning these qualities, children have a much better success rate. There are also people out there trying to teach parents how to interact and create a healthy environment for their children. They will both be happier if each one of them can create an attachment to the other. An important idea that the radio show brought up was that our intelligence levels will always be something given through birth, but our success can be a learned trait. From my own experiences, I know that I am not the most intelligent person in my class, but I do know that my success is sometimes more than those with higher intelligence than I, because I have learned how to create a work ethic, self-sufficiency, and have confidence in myself to succeed. Sometimes these characteristics are more important than the intelligence that you are born with.

Terms: stress, synapses, attachment, learn, long-term potentiation, unconditioned stimulus, neurons

This talk show shows that a very large portion of a person's success in and out of the classroom happens to be non-cognitive skills. This is a strong indicator that schools should be teaching their students more than reading, writing, math and science, they should set aside more time for people to be taught non-cognitive skills like: grit, respect, discipline and hard work.
I thought it was interesting when the economist said that people would bring their kids into the doctor because they thought they had ADHD. The children did not, in fact have ADHD, but instead they weren't allowed the proper growth they needed as a child, mentally, so the kids were not able to focus in class. Some children may actually have cognitive abilities, but instead of succeeding in school they can't focus or apply themselves correctly because they didn't develop the non-cognitive skills that are necessary for success.
The program that was offered to the teenagers to increase their non-cognitive skills shows that people can not only improve their abilities, but they are able to improve drastically even at a later age. After focusing on her non-cognitive skills Kewauna was able to improve her extremely low GPA early in her high school career to a 3.4 GPA shortly after. Focusing on her hard work was able to improve her academic performance so much that she was able to get into Western Illinois University.
In the chapters that we read it discusses the importance of having a secure attachment between mother and child. This show reinorces the idea that if a child does not form a secure attachment they are not as comforted by their mother, and if they are not able to be comforted they undergo early-childhood stress. This stress causes problems with focus, attention span and other non-cognitive abilities later in life.
The book also discusses the importance of the hormone, adrenaline, in a person's fight or flight instinct. When a person is presented with a threat the adrennaline directs blood flow to only the necessary parts of the body, so the part of the brain that involves logical thinking is cut off. In a difficult home life when a child is constantly ready to fight or flight they are affected long term. Kewauna grew up in a difficult household, so when she is faced with a threat her body kicks into a blackout mode where she really doesn't have control of what she says or does and her surroundings are a blur. Difficulty in a child's home life can lead to problems with impulse control.
Terms: non-cognitive, cognitive, ADHD, secure attachment, early-childhood stress, hormone, adrenaline, fight or flight

This American Life discusses topics around education. They start off talking about the GED and how people who have dropped out of high school can still take a test that would give them the “equivalent to graduating high school.” But, when discussed with professionals we find out that only cognitive skills are used here and that in the long run even those who have taken the GED and have gotten their high school degree still don’t do as well as those who graduated high school after their four years of attendance. They discuss how it only takes a few hours to study for the GED in comparison to over 1,000 hours a year that students study for just to do well in class and graduate. The professionals then tell us that there are more skills than those of testing. They describe to us what they call non-cognitive skills and compare it synonymously to character. Public schools have gone further away from focusing on character building and have been more concerned with test scores. Test scores have become more important and schools teach their teachers that if the test scores are poor then they must be doing their job wrong. Back in my hometown in Winterset the teachers have begun to believe this about themselves. I was talking with my dad who had went to parent teacher conferences for my younger siblings. When talking to their teachers, and some of which are his friends, they told him how they have begun to do a different way of grading. The teachers grade more on completion of homework assignments now than on the actual answers. If you get wrong answers on homework and even tests now the teachers may take off some points, but then give it back to the kids and let them retake the test after they have improved. This may seem like an alright teaching skill for middle school students when wanting to make them learn from their mistakes, but this is happening in our junior high. Junior high is suppose to prepare the students for high school, but with grading like this it will only hurt them in the long run. But unfortunately this is all the teachers think they can do in order to raise test grades. One of my dad’s friends said that he takes it extremely personal (as a reflection of him being a poor teacher) if his students aren’t doing well on tests. I would think that the head of the school would have stepped in and would’ve fixed some if not all of this problem, but I think that they only encourage it. This is one direct way that I’ve seen the school district worry much more about cognitive skills than that of character and non-cognitive skills.
The stress that kids endure in their life (especially at an early age) also has a big part to do with how well they can do in learning environments. Dr. Harris uses an example of a bear in the forest and someone using a fight or flight instinct to deal with that problem. She then says, “What if the bear comes home from the bar every night.” This really caught my attention and through me just a little more off guard than I thought. This part helped me understand that when repeatedly having to use the Fight or Flight response that it hurts them mentally and internally. The stress and pressure put on a child like that greatly affects how they act in society and how they can learn in learning environments.
I think that we could help the school district by being a more caring and loving facility within all public schools. I’m not saying focus solely on being nice to each other and the prevention of bullies, but teachers in the high school level and below should be more concerned with the student’s life and their well being. I know some of my favorite teachers weren’t the ones that I learned the most criteria from, but the ones that I learned life lessons because they genuinely cared about me. And I know we can’t focus on this alone and have the school systems improve, but there’s an obvious correlation between student’s social life and how well they do in school. If we can help them improve their social lives through the school then maybe the test scores will also increase because everyone will be in a better environment. And coming right out of high school I know how boring and annoying it can be to a high school student when teachers are forcing students to talk about their feelings and try to be more social with every group within the high school. But, I believe that was because we had become so custom to doing our own thing and not interacting with other groups for so long in our school careers that when they tried to make us come together later in my high school career most of the student body looked down upon it. So instead of trying to deal with this just as we’re in high school and about to go out into the real world, I think that schools should start teaching children like this at a younger age. If students were to learn to interact more with different social groups in their school and to have better relationships with teachers from a younger age then when students advance into higher grades they would be in a more positive environment and would therefore be better students. It goes back to the positive reinforcement talked about in the book. If children are given negative feedback and are in a negative environment then they will do worse than that if they were in a more positive setting. So if we create a more positive and caring structure within the school districts then I think our public education system would be improved.

Terms: (non-)cognitive skills, Fight or Flight response, learning

This radio show emphasized that we should not rely on tests that measure cognitive skills to determine how successful a child will be in life, as learning is much more than just cognitive skill. On the contrary, it is the non-cognitive skill of a person that truly seems to be highly correlated to his or her success.

The most memorable part of the radio show to me is the follow information: It takes around 4000 hours of studying to graduate high school; it takes around 32 hours to pass the GED; those that pass the GED are said to be cognitively on the same level as those who graduated highschool, but their success in practically all areas of their life form then on out is significantly lower than those who earned a high school degree.

In my last comment I stated:
“It has been come to be understood that when we learn we are “strengthening [the] synaptic connections between neurons,” (likely within the hippocampus) which is known as long-term potentiation. By looking at these various ways of learning, it is clear that learning is not simply reading out of a book, as many people would initially think of learning.”
Tying this into what we know about those who don’t graduate high school but get the equivalent degree, it would appear that though those with a GED have strengthened the synaptic connections enough to retain the knowledge that will be on the exam, the connections that result in what the radio show described as “character,” or the ability to stick it out in tough situations, were not strengthed, as result in concequences later in life.

Because of this, I believe that our public school system can be improved in the same way that Kewauna and Aniva were helped – by educating students who need it in such a way that they develop those non-cognitive skills necessary throughout their lives. This could be executed through a method of associative learning – possibly even from telling children that these skills will help them later in life. Indeed, I imagine that if this were to be a standard part of teachers’ education and expectations for their classrooms, our society as a whole would be more productive and smooth-running.

Cognitive skills, learning, non-cognitive skills, associative learning

The radio show entitled “Back to School” helped myself better understand what kind of things tied into the lives of not only myself, but people I’ve met along the way throughout my school career. I always had a feeling that standardized testing was no way to judge each and every student, and it makes sense why that would also not be a reliable way to grade how well a teacher does at their job. The chapter on language and learning definitely tied into the radio show, and I can think of a few different topics that help support why I think this. Associative learning is one of the topics I remembered from the text while listening to “This American Life”. Associative learning is when a child, or an organism, learns not from teaching, but by discovery on their own, or from an observation of someone/ something else does something worth noting. The second topic, which I feel is the most reflective in the episode I listened to is conditioning. In the show, I heard about how when children are in a home that is impoverished, generally that child experiences a lot more stress, and the pathways in their brain become more hard wired for a Fight or Flight experience. This is an example of conditioning, because the organism is influenced by something for an extended period of time, and based on the consequences they see and feel, form a way of life around it. Finally I feel like after listening to what the show had to say, there could maybe be a few things we could do to try and change how our school system goes about not only grading teachers, but helping students to develop skills that can help them do better in school. One way I think the school systems could help out, is maybe by evaluating each of their students, and learning about their upbringing and situations. After this, the students that seem to be worse off or are struggling could have a mentor, or some staff member that could follow up with them outside of school occasionally. That person could also provide them with information on places they could go for help, and try to help that student get set up for some sort of extracurricular activity or therapy for example.
Terms: Associative learning, Conditioning, Fight or Flight