1. How does this topic fit into what I have learned already in this course?
Theme 3 talks about how people handle positive information better than negative information. The same is true for conditional reasoning tasks. It is easier to understand positive conditional reasoning than it is to understand negative. The confirmation bias also agrees with Theme 3 because it says that people are more likely to confirm a hypothesis by affirming the antecedent. In the framing effect, the people also leaned towards the choices that portrayed a positive effect.
Memory is something that is used in so many parts of our cognition. To engage the availability heuristic, you must use your memory.
Top-down processing seems to come up again and again. The belief-bias effect, the confirmation bias, the illusory correlation, the anchoring heuristic and the adjustment heuristic are all examples of top-down processing.
2. What am I still not clear on in this week's reading(s)?
I had a hard time understanding the four kinds of reasoning when I looked at Table 12.1 because it was too abstract and ambiguous for me. I understood it much better when they referred to Demonstration 12.1. But, I must say it is something I really have to think about, it doesn’t come easily to me.
The anchoring and adjustment heuristic really confused me. I understood the part about buying a jacket in the store, but they lost me after that.
3. Under what conditions would I apply this material to my own teaching/work?
I will have to say that of all the chapters we have read so far, this is my least favorite and I don’t know that I can apply much of this to my classroom. For most of the chapter, I felt like I was reading a probability or statistics book. The few things that I can take away are : “Performance is better if the propositions are high in imagery.” I find that many of my students are very visual, so I do try to encorporate a lot of visuals in my lessons. The text also said that performance was better when concrete example were used verses abstract examples. Once again, I find this to be very true for my students, so I try to make my examples very concrete. The last thing I am taking away from this chapter is that if people are usually overconfident about things, I need to apply that to my classroom. If my students state the they think they understand, I had better make sure that they really do because they may just have overconfidence in the subject.
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I too was confused by the anchoring heuristic. I understood some of it but I was not sure why we would rely too heavily on the anchor when it is not always accurate.
ReplyDeleteI thought this was one of the harder chapters to understand and apply to my own situation. Concrete examples do make the most sense when applying this material to our classroom situations. The overconfidence information is most applicable to many students. I was just discussing this issue with my student teacher today. She was reporting the scores of last week’s reading test. She noticed one of our higher students usually gets a score that is lower than she would anticipate. I am sure this is related to the overconfidence issue. It is there even at an early age.
Jill,
ReplyDeleteI agree that this was a difficult chapter to understand and enjoy. I also kept referring back to Dr. Liu's session on probability and statistics. My mind doesn't think in those terms, so like taxes and insurance, I just tune it out.
I was able to relate the anchoring and adjusting heuristic to when we first found out Hunter had epilepsy. I remember going to a doctor who was just sure that he was allergic to something. That was my anchor, and it seemed very logical. Once we found out that it wasn't the case, we had to adjust our way to solve the problem. We then would find another anchor. It was more of a trial and error situation than any.
I hope that next week's chapter is a little more applicable for you!