Week 5: weekly assignment

For some reason, I enjoyed this weeks readings much more than any other's. Among many of the topics discussed, motivation piqued my interest. As in much of our reading, the authors reference studies as examples, and sometimes discuss what those studies concluded, but never in much detail. I suppose it's good to leave me wanting more, but I was tempted to look up some of the studies to learn more about how exactly you guage what students' beliefs about themselves are, etc. I also found it very interesteing that mild anxiety can aid motivation, but it was not discussed in depth.

I ran out of time and was unable to really dig into this, but I'd be interested in discussing the differences between general and meta- cognitive strategies and domain-based strategies. What exactly is a domain-based strategy? I plan to review for a couple of hours before class, and maye that will shed some light on it, but they lost me a little bit there.

I am planning to write my first paper on a basic "historiography" unit for high school students. The main objective is to teach the students (am I supposed to call them "learners" now? :) ) to evaluate the usefulness of source material. This week's reading gives me a few things to focus on. For example, I'm going to need to find a way to asses the extent to which my students already evaluate validity of the information they take in. Do they ever give any though to bias, for example? Also, I will need to find a way for this unit to allow students to focus on an area that interests them and which they see as having validity in their daily life (that's hard to do with history.) I could go on; this was good stuff.