Assignment Topic 1 - Self Reflection

Introduction to Educational Psychology..My first impression

Educational Psychology is a fascinating scientific study. Understanding how an individual learn can help educators use appropriate pedagogic approaches to facilitate learning. The impact on teaching and learning can be far-reaching.

Initial exploration...

Intelligence is often considered how well you score on tests or what your grades are in school.
In the 1900's, French psychologist Alfred Binet tried to come up with some kind of measure that would predict the success or failure of children in the primary grades of schools. The result was the forerunner of the standard IQ test we use today. This gave us a dimension of the mental ability by which we could compare everyone.

Howard Gardner theory on Multiple Intelligence

However, in 1983, Howard Gardner came up with his theory - that we all have different natural or innate intellectual strengths or "intelligences." We learn best when these strengths are brought into play during the learning process. Gardner identified seven intelligences … and came up with an additional later making eight of them...

• 
  
  
  linguistic

• logical-mathematical

• spatial

• musical

• bodily-kinesthetic

• interpersonal

• intrapersonal

• naturalistic

Pilot Profiling

Though I have heard about Multiple Intelligence theory previously, I have never really understood its relevance and impact on teaching and learning. So in 2007, we tried to do a simple profiling to determine the learning style of a group of Sec 3 normal techhnical students to help us understand them better as a pilot project. The findings were as follows :-

The Real Me.. Class Survey observations on a group project…

• Group presentation was done by a member with interpersonal, linguistic intelligence
• Graphics was done by member with spatial intelligence
• Music was used in presentation by members with musical intelligence

Understanding them helps us to structure our approaches in facilitating learning and to redesign assessment guidelines and tasks so that students with different learning styles will excel in different
tasks giving them an opportunity to balance their performance.


The next step beyond...

We will continue to extend to lower and upper secondary in 2008 to do a more thorough profiling to better understand the students’ learning style. The school is also taking steps to introduce differentiated curriculum to help students cope with their studies…