ElmCore Journal of Educational Psychology October, 2014 | Page 50

Science-Fellows®
or concepts. For example, one of Georgia’s QCC
Standards for high school language arts is that students
be able to gain insight into human behavior from the
study of literature. This is a theme that can be carried
through all lessons, units, and literary works, and it
can be a thread that helps students connect new ideas
and works to ones previously discussed. In addition,
this type of thread structure can make the literature
more meaningful - at once strengthening and
increasing the connections that can be made and the
opportunities for elaboration.
If in British Literature students first learn
about the qualities the Old English society valued in a
hero, could not the same discussion be held when the
concept of the hero changes in Middle English
literature? And, does this question not require students
to draw from information learned in the previous
material in order to find an answer. The larger
question could certainly then become what does the
current literature (pop or academic) tell students about
what society today values in its heroes. Even in this
simple example, there are tremendous opportunities to
allow students to actively integrate new information
with old by combining new information with existing
knowledge, by building or expanding structures, or by
creating new and more diverse structures.
Once the background is established, the new
information on the topic can be presented in a
variety of ways, but again, in order to ensure
understanding and retention, the new material
must be connected to concrete examples. For
example if the teacher gave a lecture about the
satire in literary terms, it would be absolutely
important to follow up the lecture by examining
an example of a satire and walking students
through an evaluation process of the example
showing them how and where the example
conforms to the characteristics named in the
lecture.
When the teacher and students have examined a
satire together, the students should be asked to go
through the evaluation process individually or in
groups. This allows students to demonstrate their
competencies or deficiencies in a safe
environment in which the teacher can guide,
refocus, or assist. The important aspect of the
activity is that the students are forced to begin to
synthesize and evaluate new information based
on their previous experiences and the new skill

ElmCore® Journal of Educational Psychology

that they are developing. To take this lesson full
circle, the teacher could ask the students to create
their own satire based on a current social
problem.
If a student creates an original satire at the end of
the lesson, this development is successful. In
order to facilitate those abilities, the class could
discuss possible topics as a whole and why
certain ideas would or would not be appropriate
for satire. In order to bring along students who
might still be having problems, starter sentences
or paragraphs could be provided or the teacher
could provide more examples of satires for the
students to evaluate. At any rate, through this
lesson, the students have moved through all
levels of the Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain
(Bloom et al., 1956). And have begun to process
information at the formal operational stage if they
can make the abstract connections required to
complete the activities of the lesson.
Another theorist firmly grounded in the
information processing approach is Sternberg (1988).
Sternberg’s theory suggests that development is skillsbased and continuous rather than staged and
discontinuous as stage theorists believe,