Middle Grades 4-8 Praxis Study Blogs

*** Disney's Pixar movie "A Bug's Life" was playing on TV. One part of the movie really go my attention! It was the part when Flick is trying to use a rock as a metaphor to explain how a small seed can grow into a tree. He is trying to explain it to this young ant, but she jus does not seem to understand it. Here is a short clip of the scene I found on YouTube:) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Mzas1vgcIo So what does this have to do with Piaget's Stages of Development? The little young ant does not understand that Flick is using the rock as an abstract concept. He goes into this whole explanation about how this "seed" will eventually grow into a tree. The little ant argues that it is still a rock! I thought this was an example of one of Piaget's four stages of development. The little ant is at the concrete operational stage of cognitive development. She is able to make logical conclusions and know that it is a rock, but not yet abl...

How do students organize their thoughts, incoming information and new ideas? How are they able to draw conclusions and make connections? Part of this has to do with the student's Schema or their social illustrations and representations to organize, understand and categorize knowledge and skills (things, events and procedures)  Schema Theory = Cognitive Psychology =   Piaget's theory of Cognitive Constructivism Children construct their knowledge using social and mental concepts Students are active learners and create mental representations Assimilation v. Accommodation    Interaction between existing and incoming information in order to achieve stability  Assimilation is when a student is able to understand and incorporate new information Accommodation is when the student changes his/her pre-existing knowledge to adjust with the new information.  Can also be seen as reconstructing their knowledge  EXAMPLE When I was observing...

While I was watching the The Learning Classroom 3,  I came across something really interesting that happened in Fe Maclean's 4th grade classroom. Fe Maclean likes to have her students work in groups. She believes in the importance of having helpers and being helpers. There was one part of the video where it seemed like the two students were trying to write a sentence to describe a setting: Boy 1: " They picked out the fire." Boy 2: "No...they put out the fire." Boy 1: "Oh yeah~ good idea." This kind of exercise and learning emulates Vygotsky's principle of  social constructivism and how  students construct knowledge by interacting with more knowledgeable others . This kind of social interaction among peers and even teachers can help students develop new ideas and gain more insight on concepts they did not understand before. An example that came to mind was when in class, we were asked to do a pair share of our responses about the absence...

Here is a PDF link to access the Praxis Study Guide and Overview of the topics covered: http://www.ets.org/s/praxis/pdf/5152.pdf I will be focusing on the Topics Covered on page 7: Item 1. Adolescents as Learners