UNDERSTANDING CONCEPTS

Understanding of the Following Topics

Understanding of the Following Topics

Introduction

In this paper I will demonstrate my understanding of the following topics that are as follows intellectual development, physical development, emotional development, and social development. For this purpose the paper will explore all these points will remain focused to demonstrate easily understandable concept of these points.

Intellectual development

A concept closely related to intellectual development is that of approaches to learning. This part of the paper reviews this concept, shows that a deep approach to learning is almost by definition what students at high levels of intellectual development tend to practice, and summarizes the conditions that have been shown to promote adoption of a deep approach. The instructional model to be proposed incorporates these conditions (Schlinger, 2008).

Marton and Säljö define two dramatically different approaches to learning-a surface approach and a deep approach. Students who take a surface approach memorize facts but do not try to fit them into a coherent body of knowledge and follow routine solution procedures without trying to understand their origins and limitations. These students commonly exhibit an extrinsic motivation to learn (I've got to learn this to pass the course, to graduate, to get a good job) and an unquestioning acceptance of everything in the textbook and in lectures. To them, studying means scouring their texts for worked-out examples that look almost identical to the homework problems so they can simply copy the solutions (Schlinger, 2008).

They either ignore the text outside of the examples or they scan through it with a highlighter, looking for factual information that the instructor might consider important, which they will attempt to memorize before the exam. They often do poorly in school.

In contrast, students who take a deep approach try not just to learn facts but to understand what they mean and how they are related to one another and to the students' experience. They have an intrinsic motivation to learn the material and a tendency to question conclusions offered in lectures and readings (Schaie, 2009).

They cast a critical eye on each statement or formula or analytical procedure they encounter in class or in the text to see if it makes sense to them and do whatever they think might help them understand, such as restating text passages in their own words, thinking of analogies to things they know, or trying to come up with their own examples. Once the information makes sense, they try to fit it into a broad conceptual view of the subject or chapter rather than simply memorizing it if it looks like something that might show up on the exam.

A student may adopt different approaches to learning in different courses and even for different topics within a single course. An orientation to studying is a tendency to adopt one of the approaches in a wide range of situations and learning environments. Students who habitually adopt a surface approach have a reproducing orientation, and those who usually adopt a deep approach have a meaning orientation (Schaie, ...