Instructional Strategies
Motivation Basics
Needs
Goals
Terminology
Misc. Stuff That's Important
Random Facts that Take up Space in Dr. K's Head
100
This category of strategies, existing on one end of a continuum, involves instructional activities that are largely controlled and directed by the teacher.
What are teacher-directed strategies?
100
This is the term for an internal force that directs and sustains goal-directed behavior.
What is motivation?
100
This key psychological need involves feeling in control of one's own choices and future. It's support is consistently an extremely important facet of productive and successful classrooms.
What is autonomy?
100
This type of goal involves a desire to demonstrate competence or avoid demonstrating lack of competence.
What is a performance goal?
100
These specific and measurable statements are used to reflect what new skills or knowledge students should be able to demonstrate by the end of a lesson.
What are learning objectives?
100
This is the act of demonstrating a task or skill for a learner, essentially showing them how to do it.
What is modeling?
100
The Devonian period, which occurred from 419-359 mya, is also known as this.
What is the "Age of Fishes?"
Fun fact: many of the fish in the Devonian sea were bony fishes and often had bone armor. This included armored rings around their eyeballs. Check it out the next time you go to a Natural History museum.
200
This form of instruction involves presenting information more or less in the form in which students are expected to learn it.
What is expository instruction?
OR
What is direct instruction?
200
This type of motivation comes from enjoyment of an activity.
What is intrinsic motivation?
200
This need involves a need to feel connected to and respected by the people around you.
What is relatedness?
200
This type of goal is associated with avoidance of tasks and trying to avoid exerting effort.
What is a work-avoidance goal?
200
These broad statements are often taken directly from state standards and reflect generalized statements about what students should accomplish by the end of a class or unit.
What is a learning goal?
200
This term refers to the reason a learner believes they succeeded or failed and has implications for the learner's motivation moving forward.
What is an attribution?
Example: Anne and Fernando both do well on a test. Anne believes her success is due to her efforts in studying, while Fernando believes he is a lucky guesser. Anne is more likely to be motivated to engage in studying in the future.
200
Dinosaurs are generally classified into two groups: ornithischians and saurischians. Birds are generally agreed to have evolved from this group.
What are saurischians?
Note: This is ironic, because "ornithischian" means "bird-hipped" and "saurischian" means "lizard-hipped". One would think birds came from "bird-hipped" dinosaurs, but no.
300
These skills are necessary for effective collaborative learning and involve things like turn taking, listening, and disagreeing respectfully.
What are social skills?
300
Drawing from behaviorism, this common motivational tool can be effective when used well, but is also associated with decrease in intrinsic motivation, development of unsupportive attitudes, and lack of student autonomy when overused or used badly.
What are rewards?
300
This need is associated with a need for stimulation and may cause students to misbehave when bored.
What is arousal?
300
This type of goal is associated with deeper-level learning, persistence through difficulty, and better strategy use.
What is a mastery goal?
300
Sean sees his friend get in trouble for talking in the hallway. He then decides to avoid talking in the hallway. This term summarizes this psychological phenomenon.
What is vicarious punishment?
300
These are the factors required for someone to learn from modeling.
What are attention, retention, and motor reproduction?
Extra explanation: A learner must be paying attention to what is modeled (remember back to information processing!), be able to remember it, and be physically capable of reproducing the behavior.
300
This inability to visualize things in one's mind led Dr. Kraatz to spend many years believing that people were just being metaphorical when they talk about "visualizing" things.
What is aphantasia?
400
This type of learner-directed instruction can be engaging and lead to development of high-level cognitive processes, but it requires that students have substantial prior knowledge.
What are inquiry activities?
OR
What are discovery activities?
400
This form of motivation is associated with nearly all academic tasks but can lead to some negative outcomes.
What is extrinsic motivation?
400
This model is useful for reminding us that lacking needs fulfillment may interfere with learning. However, the idea that needs consistently fall into a pattern in which some must be met before others has not been supported by research, so the model should not be taken literally.
What is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs?
400
Setting goals is useless without this follow-up process.
What is reflection on goal completion?
400
This term is inclusive of emotions and moods.
What is affect?
400
A student who works for an expected positive outcome but never receives that outcome is less likely to work for that particular outcome in the future. This phenomenon can be summarized with this phrase.
What is "non-occurence of expected reinforcement acting as a punishment".
Example: A student who studies really hard for a test and receives a "D" may decide that studying is not worth their time in the future.
400
What word summarily describes the act of throwing someone or something out of a window?
(Fun fact: Dr. Kraatz first learned this word as a freshman in college when a professor provided a many pages long list of vocab to be memorized for subsequent tests. She actually read it, and proceeded to excitedly share this word with everyone she talked to, like the true nerd she is. It's such a great word that everyone was equally enthused and the word became common knowledge on the college campus.)
What is "defenestration"?
(Continuation to the fun fact: When visiting the college some years later, Dr. Kraatz met a young college student who, upon being introduced, said, "You're the defenestration girl? You're, like, famous!" It is truly my greatest legacy.)
(Even funner fact: defenestration used to be an established method to express dissatisfaction with government officials; hence, the first, second, and third Defenestration of Prague.)
(Less fun fact: there were like towers and stuff back then, so defenestration was notably more fatal than it typically would be today.)
500
Coined by Johnson and Johnson, this necessary feature of collaborative learning indicates a need for students to rely on other group members for their own success.
What is positive interdependence?
500
Teachers should be careful of using this common motivational strategy in the classroom, as it can lead to social stratification, disengagement of struggling students, negative social interactions, and unhealthy self perceptions if used badly.
What is competition?
500
Structuring your classroom in such a way that students' voices are heard, students have say in the direction of their learning, and students get to make meaningful choices can be described with this term.
What is an autonomy-supportive classroom?
500
This term describes the type of goals that a classroom structure tends to promote through the teachers' choice of language, activities, grading schemes, etc.
What is classroom goal orientation?
500
This phenomenon, described by social cognitive theory, is adapted from behaviorism, in which it was not adequately considered. In it, a learner experiences an increase in behavior due to a stimulus that is applied to another individual.
What is vicarious reinforcement?
Example: Giselle gets praised for studiously perfecting her hog feeder design in ag class. Harvey then works hard on his own design, hoping to get praised as well. Harvey's on-task behavior was vicariously reinforced by the praise to Giselle.
500
These are the characteristics that make someone more likely to be an effective model.
What are competence, power/prestige, and relevance of modeled behavior?
500
This phobia is described as an irrational fear of the number thirteen.
What is triskaidekaphobia?