Jacob Johnston, Chapter 9

1. For verbal codes, information is stored in long-term memory as an actual

word. This is perhaps why pneumonic devices work for memory. By
connecting a word to other words that are similar in sound or an acronym
that spells out the chain of words, we can recall that information. Imagery,
despite common usage referring only to visual images, works much like
imagery in literature where images refer to description of all of the senses. In
this case, the memory of something is stored as an image of what it looks,
smells, tastes, sounds, or feels like. If someone were to ask me to think about
a fire, I would not recall the word fire, but instead see the image of flames
dancing above a small pile of wood surrounded by rocks. Similarly, when
asked to recall the events of the last book I read, I often bring up visual
images even though I stopped reading picture books in Kindergarten.
Propositions are essentially the meaning of what is learned and not the
verbatim memorization. Instead of remembering large chunks of complex
information, the mind breaks it down to very small pieces of factual
information and their relationships. This is why, as I read this book, I couldn’t
quote a single sentence, but I can answer questions about information
presented here without much trouble. The information has not been stored in
words or images, but in propositions of small facts. Productions work much
like computer programs and store information on how to do things. For
example, while playing tennis, I know that if I hit a shot that is going to be
tough for the other player to return, then I should charge the net to take
advantage of their inability to choose their shot in return.

2. When theorists say that long-term memory is associationistic, they mean that
all the bits of memory are interconnected. For example, when I look out into
my back yard and look at the chickens scratching in the grass, I may also
drift into thoughts of other breeds of chickens, the different types of combs,
eggs, the chicken recipe my mom e-mailed me, other birds (including the
ducks in the pond) and even dinosaurs. That is because all of these concepts
are connected for me. An earlier theory about long-term memory was that it
was hierarchical, which is actually fairly similar to associationistic, except that
the theory stated that all of the information was organized in a hierarchy
instead of just connected. For example, the two chickens I saw when I looked
out of my window were Dominiques. Dominiques are a heritage breed,
meaning they’re a pure breed from before the time of industrial farming. So,
under the hierarchical theory, I’d have breeds like Dominiques, araucanas,
and fayoumis in the same category and Cornish crosses, and leghorn-based
laying hens in the commercial breed category. Both of those categories
would connect at chicken, which would connect with turkeys, ducks, geese,
and guineas in domestic birds. My chickens wouldn’t connect in the hierarchy
with the Western Grebes I saw in Wyoming until I pulled all the way out to
 Jacob Johnston, Chapter 9

birds in general. A propositional network also deals with information stored in

a web of associations, although in this model there’s not necessarily a
hierarchy in the organization. Like the definition of propositions, small bits of
true-false information, the information is organized in tiny bits of related
information. One of my ducks is a crested duck. It is connected to the other
ducks in that it is young, has a flat bill, has webbed feet, and lives in a cage
at the edge of my pond. It is connected to the grebes I saw in Wyoming
because it has webbed feet and likes water, but not the bill shape. It is also
connected to crested geese and polish chickens because of the afro of
feathers on its head.

3. Because I’m apparently on an avian kick today, I’m going to use duck as my
example of a concept. There are many millions of individual ducks, dozens of
breeds, and even dozens of species of ducks, but because I’ve always been
interested in birds and because I’ve raised ducks since I was a kid, my
concept of duck is pretty clear and precise. If I glance at a goose, I’m not
going to confuse it with a duck, something that bugs me when I see other
people confuse the two. I’ll use my black runner duck for my example of that
concept. He shares the defining features of a duck in that he has a large,
broad, flat bill, webbed feet on relatively short legs, has water resistant
feathers, and quacks. A correlational feature of ducks is that they tend to
hold a posture that puts the line of their torso parallel to the ground. Geese
tend to have a more upright posture, something that, along with their taller,
pointier bills, separates them from ducks. However, my little black runner
duck stands upright with the line of his torso being nearly perpendicular to
the ground, a feature of his breed, but not most ducks. Because this is a
correlational feature, this doesn’t disqualify him from being a duck. It just
makes him a weird duck. Examples of irrelevant features are his color (there
are ducks of all colors) and the fact that he’s in a pen at the edge of my pond.
Neither trait has anything to do with being a duck.

4. There have been several different models for learning of concepts over the
years. An early one was the buildup of associations, a model very strongly
associated with behaviorism. In this model, learners gradually came to
associate the relevant aspect of a concept instead of the irrelevant aspects
for being rewarded each time they identified that concept because the
relevant aspects would always be present, unlike the irrelevant ones.
Hypothesis testing and feature lists are both similar to this, at least to me,
but are more cognitive in their explanation. In hypothesis testing, the learner
creates a working definition of the concept when first being exposed to it and
then modifies that hypothesis each time an example of that concept is
 Jacob Johnston, Chapter 9

experienced. Features lists basically are a list of the features of the concept
and people have a threshold where anything that meets a certain number of
those features is placed inside that concept. Finally, we have prototypes and
exemplars, both very similar. In prototypes, the model suggests that we have
an image of the ideal example of that concept and each new example is
compared to that prototype. If it is close enough, it is classified with the
prototype. The main difference in exemplars is that each concept gets more
than one perfect example. Going back to the ducks (I know, it’s getting
excessive), this could explain why I easily recognize eider ducks and
mergansers, wild ducks with bills that vary pretty strongly from the normal
duck bill, as ducks despite the fact that they are fairly distant from that
prototype of the wild mallard that I think of when I think of ducks. It seems
that buildup of associations is the least useful explanation for this because it
seems that so much of learning is cognitive, at least in humans. Hypothesis
testing may be a product of the way the research was conducted and
prototype may be overly simplistic. To me, judging from the research
referenced in the chapter, features lists and exemplars make the most useful
models because each are fairly well supported by the research and can
explain fairly complex learning of concepts.

5. As a high school English teacher, I often have to teach the difference

between a metaphor and a simile. For this question I am going to use the
concept of a metaphor as my example. A metaphor is a type of figure of
speech that compares to unlike things as if they were the same thing. To
teach this concept, I’d first want to find or create a strong definition of a
metaphor since definitions actually help teach concepts. I’ll use “Metaphors
are figures of speech that compare two things that aren’t the same by
treating them as if they were the same thing.” We’ll assume for the sake of
this answer that they already know what a figure of speech is. Next, I’d show
the students a variety of examples of metaphors of different types, including
both direct and implied metaphors, as well as personification, which is often a
type of metaphor. Then, I’d show the students examples of things that aren’t
metaphors. Similes are very similar in that they compare two unlike things,
but instead of treating the things as if they were the same, they say one
thing is like or as the other. Those will be shown as nonexamples. I will
present the examples and nonexamples next to each other because this
works best when they are presented together. Finally, I’ll have the students
create a four-square where they write the definition in their own words,
create a new example of a metaphor and a new nonexample along with the
word metaphor. By checking these, I can quickly see if the concept has been
learned and by requiring them to produce their own examples and
nonexamples, I can see if they were just memorizing a definition.
 Jacob Johnston, Chapter 9

6. Schema is an example in a person’s mind of what a thing is. We have a

schema for a haunted house that suggests an old house, rather large, with
ghostly effects, and monsters. This is why if you were to get different groups
to design a haunted house, they’d probably end up with very similar
examples. A script is sort of schema for events. I have a script for how a
hockey game should proceed. If someone were to tell me a story about a
Thrashers game I missed (still with the birds, I guess) and they mentioned a
fight broke out during the game, I’d probably assume the person meant that
players started fighting because fights are an expected part of the script for
hockey. If the same person said a fight broke out during a Model U.N.
competition, I’d need to seek clarification because that doesn’t fit my script
of such an event. Personal theories are a set of beliefs about how a particular
phenomena or thing works. I have a personal theory that the sharp-shinned
hawks that live near my house will leave my chickens alone because of what
I’ve read and what I’ve seen them do and not do. If I found a sharp-shinned
hawk eating my chicken, I’d be quite surprised, but I’d expect that from a red
tail hawk because my personal theory on them is that they do eat chickens. A
world view is like a very large personal theory. This is a personal theory of
how everything works. From what I’ve seen of the world and what I know
from history, I actually tend to see the world as gradually becoming a better
place overall, despite the occasional area of regression or new problem that
pops up. Because of this world view, when I hear older teachers talk about
how students where better when they’re kids, I’m more likely to assume this
is an effect of nostalgia, the teacher focusing on a new problem without
taking into account the areas of improvement, or the fact that the types of
kids that give us problems now in high school likely would have dropped out
of school before they became problems back then.

7. It can be difficult to change a person’s misconceptions because their current

misconception works to explain their everyday experience. Trying to teach
someone who believed that stars were really tiny that many stars are in fact
larger than our sun, which is in turn many times larger than our earth, would
be difficult because the stars appear so small to us and they can’t even
provide any warmth or much light like the sun. People may also have a
personal or emotional investment in their existing beliefs. This is especially
true with religion. For example, in the Middle Ages, it was heresy to say that
the earth wasn’t the center of the universe. It was tied into theology that man
was a special creation and therefore should be at the center. There was an
emotional attachment to that belief. That erroneous belief was also
integrated into a cohesive whole of other beliefs. As mentioned earlier, the
geocentric model of the universe was tied into other basic religious beliefs
 Jacob Johnston, Chapter 9

that made rejecting it and replacing it with the heliocentric model extremely
difficult, especially since everyday experience didn’t provide much reason to
choose one over the other. One method to start changing misconceptions is
to identify them before the teaching even begins. Pretesting or just class
discussion can help identify what, if any, misconceptions on the subject
matter to be taught exist. This gives allows the teacher to plan for correcting
misconceptions. Meaningful learning is important in replacing misconceptions
with better ideas. The information should make sense and be relatable to
prior knowledge. It’s much harder to cling to erroneous ideas when another
one just makes more sense. Students should also explicitly compare their
current beliefs with the alternative explanations. This allows for a more
conscious look at the problem for the students and keeps the students from
holding rote learning of the new concept alongside a more strongly believed,
but incompatible, misconception.

8. First, I’d want to get students to think about gravity. In Georgia, we live
relatively close to the equator, meaning we live on the side of the world. Do
we feel gravity pulling us to the south toward the bottom of the earth? No, we
feel gravity pulling us to the center of the earth under our feet. Because of
that, up and down is created by gravity, which wants to pull us to the center
of the earth. Then, I would have them place their finger on the top of a ball
and ask them where the center of the ball is in relation to their finger. The
answer would be under their finger. Then I would tell them to, without moving
their finger, turn the ball upside down so that the finger is now on the bottom
of the ball. Where is the center in relation to your finger now? The answer is
above the finger. Since gravity always pulls to the center, you would still stick
to the ball if the ball were the earth and you were on the bottom. This helps
to create meaningful learning. The students can tie what they already know,
that they stick to the ground, to the more abstract meaning of gravity. This
also provides the students with the correct explanation, a second method of
overcoming misconceptions. Finally, to make sure that students recognized a
need for a change in their misconception of gravity, I’d talk about penguins.
Penguins are like any other animal that can’t fly. They aren’t sticky, but many
of them live near the South Pole. If people would fall off the bottom of the
South Pole, why don’t the penguins fall off too? This is because gravity pulls
you to the center, not to the South.
 Jacob Johnston, Chapter 9

Article response:

The article gave a very concrete example of how forcing the students to recognize
that their misconception needs a change and by creating meaningful learning that
misconceptions can be overcome. Instead of just telling the students that “warm”
clothes weren’t really warm on their own, but instead insulated object to keep heat
in or out would not have worked so well unless she first allowed the students to
experiment and start to question just how solid their previous belief was.