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37588 results in Cambridge Textbooks

Page 1495 of 1880

  • Chapter 5 - Cognitive tools in the classroom

  • Catherine Scott, University of Melbourne
  • Book:
    Learn to Teach
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    10 September 2014, pp 82-96

  • Summary

    Chapter objectives

  • Understanding the structure of human memory

  • Sensory memory

  • Working memory

  • Working memory in the classroom

  • Tracking down g

  • Long-term memory

  • How school improves memory

    • Introduction

    In this chapter we will discover something about how the human cognitive system – that is, the mind – works, with a focus on memory. Understanding memory will help you to use teaching methods that ensure your students learn well. Learning is memory, after all, so understanding how it works is essential for educators.

    Memory is the essence of what it means to be human. Our identity depends on our fund of personal memories; and our ability to imagine ourselves in the future and our ability to plan for that future depend on what we have learned and remembered. Much of what we know about memory, how it is structured and how it works is the result of studying cases where people have suffered illnesses or brain injuries that have affected their memories. In many of these cases, the experience of being human is profoundly altered and disrupted by the damage to their memory processes or structures.

    Structures and processes

    Theories about how memory works use two sets of explanatory concepts: structures and processes. Structures are used to explain where material contained in memory is stored, while processes explain how material enters, is retained in and then retrieved from these storage modules.

  • Chapter 3 - Natural pedagogy

  • Catherine Scott, University of Melbourne
  • Book:
    Learn to Teach
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    10 September 2014, pp 48-63

  • Summary

    Chapter objectives

  • Nature and nurture: What makes us human?

  • Vygotsky and the role of culture

  • The role of schooling

  • Language and learning

  • The Zone of Proximal Development

  • Culture and school

    • Introduction: Nature and nurture – yes, again

    Our society has, as has been discussed, two central grand ideas that are used to validate our beliefs, help decide between courses of action and generally make sense of the world. We look to science for guidance, but we also value the natural very highly. Indeed science is understood as the formal search for the laws of nature. Often placed in opposition to nature are things that are believed to be artificial – chiefly, human culture. In some traditions of debate that have influenced educational thought, describing cultural practices or beliefs as ‘socially constructed’ is regarded as sufficient to dismiss their validity.

    Early attempts to understand how children develop and how their minds grow were framed by this belief: science must uncover the natural trajectory of human growth. Chapter 1 discussed how this lay behind Piaget’s attempts to chart human cognitive growth, and how it goes a long way to explaining why his ideas are still current, despite the body of evidence that shows that his depiction of the human child as progressing through a universal series of stages is incorrect. Also inaccurate is his depiction of the child as a sort of lonely scientist discovering the world for himself (choice of gender deliberate). The latter idea featured strongly in his theories for, ironically, thoroughly cultural reasons. Western societies were already strongly individualist, and the ‘self-made man’ was a cultural icon.

  • Chapter 9 - Teaching unplugged: Talk for learning

  • Catherine Scott, University of Melbourne
  • Book:
    Learn to Teach
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    10 September 2014, pp 149-166

  • Summary

    Chapter objectives

  • Social psychology and classroom practice

  • Nurturing autonomy

  • Classroom talk that builds cognitive skills

  • Effective talk

  • Types of talk

  • Dialogic teaching

    • Introduction

    For several decades now there has been a trend to see teaching as inevitably lacking unless it uses a variety of technological devices, the list of which changes as new gadgets enter the market. There’s no doubt that computers and other electronic devices can be very handy tools, but it is possible to teach very effectively without them. Similarly, teaching can facilitate learning very well without a range of gimmicky programs. This is not meant to give you permission to ignore innovations so much as it is a plea for you to remember that teaching is fundamentally about human relations and thus about what happens between you and your class, with or without a computer in the room.

    Language is the teacher’s primary tool, no matter what new technologies appear on the market. We have already seen how language is the main mediator in human learning – in other words, it is the main means by which the tools of a culture become the cognitive tools of an individual. By understanding how language is used in the classroom and how to use it more effectively, you can become better both at classroom management and at helping your students to learn curriculum content and develop their cognitive skills. It’s all in how you talk and how you encourage your students to speak.

  • Chapter 10 - Assessment and feedback: Teaching’s engine room

  • Catherine Scott, University of Melbourne
  • Book:
    Learn to Teach
    Published online:
    06 August 2018
    Print publication:
    10 September 2014, pp 167-187

  • Summary

    Chapter objectives

  • Assessment: what is it? What are the characteristics of good assessment practices?

  • The three main types: Formative assessment; summative assessment; diagnostic feedback

  • Designing assessment

  • Feedback

  • Levels of feedback

    • Introduction

    Think for a moment about a time you learned a skill from a friend or relative – that is, not in a classroom. The skill might have been knitting, bowling a cricket ball, using a sewing machine, using a drill or riding a bike. What was that experience like? What were the most valuable things about the experience?

    It is very likely that, for many, the most valuable aspects of any one-on-one learning experience will have been knowing the intended outcome of your learning, and having someone watching as you attempted the skill, providing instant feedback about how you were progressing towards the mutually understood goal. The first characteristic allowed you to have ownership of your learning, to make it ‘self-directed’. The second helped you to make constant adjustments to your technique and thus to avoid the embedding of the types of errors mentioned in the chapter on expertise, which create the ‘expert novice’ whose skill plateaus and becomes resistant to improvement. (That is, of course, as long as your instructor was proficient at the skill being taught.)

    Put in the language of education, you were an ‘autonomous learner’ and your ‘skills instructor’ was employing assessment and feedback to help you to learn and improve your skills. Good teachers know that assessment does more than measure what children have learned: it also provides feedback to both teacher and student on how students are faring. It allows for constant adjustment to the teacher’s practice and the learning strategies that students employ.

  • 2 - Words and their parts

  • Edited by Ralph W. Fasold, Georgetown University, Washington DC, Jeff Connor-Linton, Georgetown University, Washington DC
  • Book:
    An Introduction to Language and Linguistics
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    04 September 2014, pp 63-104

  • Summary

    Chapter preview

    This chapter introduces the subject of morphology, the study of the internal structure of words and their meaningful parts. Morphological processes accomplish two basic purposes: (1) to create new words in a language and (2) to modify existing words. We may associate a word with a certain basic idea, image or event, but modifying the exact form of a word can also contribute important information, such as who is participating in an event, when or how it occurred, or something about the speaker’s attitude toward it. The more complex the word, the more information of this sort it is likely to convey. By manipulating various parts of a word, we can shade, intensify, or even negate its basic meaning, or change its grammatical role within a sentence. Different languages, of course, have different ways of doing this.

    GOALS

    The goals of this chapter are to:

  • introduce key concepts in the study of complex word analysis

  • provide a concise description of some of the varied morphological phenomena found among the world’s languages

  • illustrate methods used to derive and support linguistic generalizations about word structure in particular languages

  • touch briefly on how knowledge of complex word forms comes to be acquired

  • 13 - Second language acquisition

  • Edited by Ralph W. Fasold, Georgetown University, Washington DC, Jeff Connor-Linton, Georgetown University, Washington DC
  • Book:
    An Introduction to Language and Linguistics
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    04 September 2014, pp 445-476

  • Summary

    Chapter preview

    As we saw in Chapter 6, first language acquisition is a complicated but relatively rapid process through which children become competent and proficient users of their communities’ language(s). However, for those of us who start learning a language after childhood – for example, by enrolling in a foreign language course or moving to a new country – the process of learning a non-native language is far more difficult and much less likely to end in complete mastery/fluency. Adult language learners usually take years to reach a level of proficiency that most children attain easily in their first languages before they are three, and few adults achieve complete native-like mastery of languages they have tried to learn after the end of childhood. What can explain these differences? Why do so many people claim the title of “worst language learner in the world” for themselves? Do adults learn second languages in the same way as children learning their first? If not, what kinds of instruction or learning contexts are most effective for them? These questions are central to the field of second language acquisition (SLA) – broadly defined as the formal study of the learning processes and teaching practices related to the acquisition of non-native languages.

  • Preface

  • Tacitus
  • Edited by A. J. Woodman, University of Virginia
  • With C. S. Kraus, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book:
    Tacitus: <I>Agricola</I>
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    04 September 2014, pp vii-viii

  • Summary

    For almost half a century the standard English commentary on Tacitus’ Agricola has been that by R. M. Ogilvie and Sir Ian Richmond, which was published in 1967. It began life as a revision of the commentary produced by J. G. C. Anderson in 1922, which itself was a revision of the commentary by H. Furneaux published in 1898, when the United States and Spain were at war with each other and the British fought at Omdurman.

    The present commentary differs from that of Ogilvie and Richmond in three principal ways. First, it is not a revision of any predecessor but is an entirely new and independent work. The text, for example, is different from, and considerably more open to conjecture than, others currently available. Second, the commentary lacks the heavy archaeological content which characterised their book and which was in many ways intellectually misleading: Tacitus in his biography of Agricola provides very few specific details of events or localities which can be illustrated by reference to evidence on the ground; for the most part he talks in general terms, designed to portray his father-in-law as an ideal military commander and provincial governor. Readers should therefore not turn to the present book for the latest information on Roman Britain, which is in any case a scholarly field subject to rapid change and revision. Third, and most important, the main aim throughout has been to explain the nature and meaning of Tacitus’ Latin. In keeping with the general principles of the series Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics, an effort has been made to provide ‘all the guidance with grammatical and syntactical matters’ needed by today's undergraduate and graduate students. At the same time, it is hoped that the work will not be deemed negligible by fellow scholars. If there has been no reluctance in quoting parallels, that is partly to illustrate the texture of Tacitus’ language, partly to correct any misleading inferences that may be drawn from the commentary of H. Heubner (1984), who wrote without the benefit of modern computerised search programmes and the like.

  • Preface

  • Martin Vetterli, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Jelena Kovačević, Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, Vivek K Goyal, Boston University
  • Book:
    Foundations of Signal Processing
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    04 September 2014, pp xxv-xxviii

  • Summary

    Our main goals in this book and its companion volume, Fourier and Wavelet Signal Processing (FWSP) [57], are to enable an understanding of state-of-the-art signal processing methods and techniques, as well as to provide a solid foundation for those hoping to advance the theory and practice of signal processing. We believe that the best way to grasp and internalize the fundamental concepts in signal processing is through the geometry of Hilbert spaces, as this leverages the great innate human capacity for spatial reasoning. While using geometry should ultimately simplify the subject, the connection between signals and geometry is not innate. The reader will have to invest effort to see signals as vectors in Hilbert spaces before reaping the benefits of this view; we believe that effort to be well placed.

    Many of the results and techniques presented in the two volumes, while rooted in classic Fourier techniques for signal representation, first appeared during a flurry of activity in the 1980s and 1990s. New constructions of local Fourier transforms and orthonormal wavelet bases during that period were motivated both by theoretical interest and by applications, multimedia communications in particular. New bases with specified time – frequency behavior were found, with impact well beyond the original fields of application. Areas as diverse as computer graphics and numerical analysis embraced some of the new constructions – no surprise given the pervasive role of Fourier analysis in science and engineering.

  • 12 - Writing

  • Edited by Ralph W. Fasold, Georgetown University, Washington DC, Jeff Connor-Linton, Georgetown University, Washington DC
  • Book:
    An Introduction to Language and Linguistics
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    04 September 2014, pp 413-444

  • Summary

    Chapter preview

    As preceding chapters have shown, a fundamental characteristic of language is that it varies; different speech communities develop different languages, and different groups within those speech communities develop their own dialects. Speech communities also vary their use of their language to serve different purposes and different situations. People speak to friends differently than they speak to their bosses. People use different language in a church versus in a bar. Someone giving a report at work speaks differently than that same person telling a joke at a party. And when they write, people use language in different ways than when they speak. Different ways of using language to meet the communicative and social needs of different situations are called registers.

    Writing is perhaps the clearest example of the adaptation of language to serve different purposes and situations, so we will examine the different writing systems of the world and how they developed. Describing the different kinds of writing systems with examples from three East Asian languages and Arabic, we’ll show how each system is suited to its spoken language and its culture. Then we’ll trace the history of writing from Egyptian hieroglyphics to the Latin alphabet, a story which demonstrates the two-way relationship between writing and the development of human culture. Finally, we’ll take a look at the role that writing has played in more recent European history.

Page 1495 of 1880