PSCH 352, Summer 2005
Notes, 7/19/05
Skill Acquisition and Learning
Some skill examples
Theories of skill acquisition and learning
Anderson - ACT-R =
atomic components of thought, revised
knowledge compilation
production rules
composition
Logan - instance theory of
automatization
Newell - SOAR
chunking
The power law of learning (Newell
& Rosenbloom, 1981)
What concepts that we have already
covered contribute to our
understanding of learning?
-Bottom-up vs. top-down processing
-Automaticity
-Strategies for successful encoding
-Expertise and practice
Intelligence
What is intelligence? What do we mean if we say someone
is intelligent? [class discussion]
Issues to consider
-Nature vs. nurture: do
people differ in intelligence because of genetic factors, or
because of differences in their
environment (how they were raised,
education, SES, etc.)?
Evidence
in favor of nature (heredity):
Correlations
in intelligence between relatives (Ridley, 1999)
What percentage of the variability
in intelligence can be accounted for by heredity?
Evidence in favor of nurture
Prenatal
environment
Improvement
in
IQ due to improvement in environment (Wahlsten, 1997)
-Is there more than
one type of
intelligence? (domain-specific vs. domain-general)
-Some researchers
have suggested
that intelligence is domain general and refers to a general ability to
learn
new things, interact with new stimuli from the environment, etc. The basic idea is that people
who are good
at one thing will be good at other things.
Other researchers have taken a domain-specific
approach: if
you
are good
at one thing, you might not be good at other things.
At issue as well is the
number of
different types of
intelligence
that can exist.
General
intelligence: Fluid vs.
crystallized (Cattell, 1943)
-Fluid
(gF) intelligence
-Crystallized
(gC) intelligence
-Researchers have suggested that g(F) correlates with many
different variables,
including reasoning ability, verbal ability, strategy use, and working
memory capacity.
[discussion of class results]
Specific intelligences and
multiple intelligences
-Gardner’s Theory of Multiple
Intelligences
-Gardner has suggested at least 7
types of
intelligence
-Gardner’s
theory has been applied in education to support different types of
learning among students.
-Criticisms
of Gardner’s theory
-Sternberg’s
Triarchic Theory of Intelligence
-Sternberg
has suggested that there are three types of intelligence, and that most
people have their
strengths in one area. The
type of intelligence that you possess
affects how you best learn.
-Analytic Intelligence
-Creative Intelligence
-Practical Intelligence
-Evidence
(Sternberg, 1996)
Creativity notes from last week