T Ed ucators and students have to handle everyday distractions in classroom environments. These distractions are sometimes present while the student is encoding information and/or when they are required to retrieve the information for tests. Even in the best-controlled classrooms, distractions will inevitably enter the classroom environment (Beaman, 2005). Auditory distractors have been shown to inhibit the ability to recall semantically related words (Oswald, Tremblay, & Jones, 2000), which is a vital component for a student’s comprehension of many learning tasks in a school environment. Even when the student is told to ignore the auditory distractors, his or her performance will suffer even with their best attempts to ignore the stimuli (Tiedge, 1975; Beaman, 2005). Students have to face an array of distractions from auditory to visual distractors. Attention between the task of learning and the distractor must be split thereby limiting the cognitive resources available to the student (Beaman, 2005). A broader understanding of this problem and control for the auditory distractors involved should help to give strategies for improving the quality of the learning environment and the student’s ability to retain needed information which is necessary to the retrieval component of test taking.
To produce an experiment that limits the potential for extraneous variables, we researched the types of distractors and how to properly employ them. Tiedge, (1975) found that distractors might influence the attitude of the persons experiencing the distractors. This attitude change, he stipulated, may be a cause of the changing performance to the stimuli that are the primary focus of their attention. He identified four primary component...
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...e fact that the participant’s scores were still lower provides limited evidence of non-relevant speech in its effect of memory recall.
Each of the experiments that attempted to measure the effects of non-meaningful speech had extraneous variables that obscured the researcher’s findings and left more in this area to be looked at and lessons learned for controlling our variables. Based on the evidence provided, this present study makes the following hypothesis:
1. Participants who are exposed to continuous non-meaningful speech during reading comprehension will perform poorer during testing than participants who are exposed to intermittent non-meaningful speech.
2. Participants who are exposed to intermittent non-meaningful speech during the test phase of the experiment will perform poorer than participants who are exposed to continuous non-meaningful speech.
The first study I reviewed was “Creating False Memories: Remembering Words Not Presented in Lists” by Roediger III and Kathleen B. McDermott. The study was published in 1995, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition. Roediger and McDermott conducted two separate experiments in their study. The experiments were modeled after Deese’s 1959 study “On the Prediction of Occurrences of Particular Verbal Intrusions in Immediate Recall.” The results of Deese’s study concluded that participants falsely recalled a nonpresented critical lure 44% of the time. 36 students from Rice University participated in Roediger and McDermott’s first experiment. The students participated as part of a course project. The participants were presented with six lists that were developed from Deese’s study and Russell and Jenkins 1954 study “The complete Minnesota norms for responses to 100 words from the Kent-Rosanoff word association Test.” The six lists that were chosen for the Roediger and McDermott study were shown to elicit high rates of false recall in Deese’s study. The list contained 12 associated words that related to one nonpresented word. An example nonpresented word is chair, the 12 associated w...
Session #1: The speech language pathologist (SLP) modeled and role-played different types of voice tone. According to Jed Baker (2003), when demonstrat...
This experiment is similar to a correlational design, however, the subjects in this experiment were chosen specifically because of the language they had been predisposed to; their characteristics were extremely similar. Moon compared preexisting “treatments,” the languages they were exposed to before birth. This research design gives a real world sense in terms of how a baby would react if they were to hear a language they had not been exposed to prior. This is a major strength of the natural experiment design. Although, Moon still determined a relationship between the variables; the variables being the language babies were susceptible to before being born and how they reacted to the vowels in each. A limitation of the natural experiment is that the findings may be caused by things other than the language they were exposed to. Moon states that “Additional studies will be necessary to examine whether the results reported here can be generalized to other vowels and languages” (2013). The findings of this research article support the hypothesis that babies are familiar with the language they are predisposed to. Moon writes, “The effect of language experience was significant (F1,75 = 4.95, p = 0.029), with a greater number of sucks overall during the non-native (MNon-native = 7.1, SD = 2.9) than during the native language (MNative = 6.5, SD = 3.3). The results show that the native prototype and its variants received fewer sucking responses than the non-native prototype and its variants” (2013). This supports the idea that babies understand language. They have already started the process of learning language. The news article does report that it is important to keep in mind that the language we speak to a pregnant belly affects the language foundation of the baby. Mann’s article correctly presents the information of the research article. We must keep in mind that babies are aware of language they are
Helton, W.S., & Russell, P.N. (2012). Brief mental breaks and content-free cues may not keep you focused. Experimental Brain Research, 219(1), 37-46. Doi: 10.1007/s00221-012-3065-0
McNamara, D. S., & Healy, A. F. (1996). Verbal learning and memory: does the modal model
...dering had an impact on performance while reading aloud and during a version of the Stroop task. During both experiments the researchers found mind wandering rates to be high and negatively associated with inaccurate responses across both conditions. In Stroop trials the researchers observed the slowest response times and highest error rates with incongruent trials (read word ‘red’ in green ink), however this was also the condition with the lowest amount of reported mind wandering. Increased mind wandering rates also forecasted slower reaction times; the findings suggest that processes associated with reading may correspond to those related to mind wandering.
Treisman, A. (1964). Monitoring and storage of irrelevant messages in selective attention. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour, 3(6): 449-459.
Macleod and Mathews (1991) induced attentional biases within a laboratory setting to determine that a ca...
Various perspectives on behavior have changed the face of psychology over the centuries. Some of the most influential of these theories on behaviorism were made by John B. Watson, B.F. Skinner, and Edward C. Tolman. The manner in which behavior is modified has become a growing debate in the aspect of which technique is more reliable and effective. The theories from these three men have become a foundation for many different schools of thought throughout modern psychology. Through their research, many modern psychologists have grown a better knowledge on why people react and behave during certain situations or in different environments. The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast the various theories of Watson and Skinner to that of Tolman.
Kornell, N., & Metcalfe, J. (2006). “Blockers” do not block recall during tip-of-the-tongue states. Metacognition And Learning, 1(3), 248--261.
This phenomenon of memory has been tested many times using the Wadsworth CogLab false memory experiment. In the Wadsworth experiment, participants are presented with a list of words each of which is shown for one and half seconds. These experiments usually entail six trial lists. After each list is shown, the participants are given a set of response buttons labeled with the words from the list. The buttons also include normal distractor words (a word that is unrelated to the list but was not shown), and special distractor words (a word that is related
In Betty White’s opening monologue to Saturday Night Live, she said, “I didn’t know what Facebook was, and now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it sounds like a huge waste of time. I would never say the people on it are losers, but that’s only because I’m polite.” Originally intended for the use of students at Harvard University in 2004, Facebook grew exponentially to be an online phenomenon in the years following. In 2006, it became accessible to anyone and everyone with internet connection. Aside from the advantages that give the site its popularity, creating a profile comes with a number of significant disadvantages inherit to online social networks. What do more than 500 million active users use their Facebook for? Communicating with long distance friends and spreading awareness of causes are common responses. Unfortunately, Facebook has it flaws, from limiting the privacy of relationships to creating a form of almost unmanageable bullying, making one reconsider their involvement and think, “do I really want my Facebook account?”
...er helpful technique was frequently taking timed tests to music on YouTube. This helped work our minds into the habit of clearing all distractions and noise. Noise(Insert hyperlink to noise) is anything type of distraction or interruption that will get in the way of getting things done, or even get in your way of understanding something; For example, pets, emotion, attitude, and interest. Those are just a few of the many types of noise.
In a survey of 100 students, 60% of them agreed cell phones cause distraction in a classroom environment. This shows that most of the students have experienced classroom distraction caused by cell phones. Cell phones should be prohibited at school campus because they are disruptive in a classroom environment and causes students to avoid their school work.
Just, M.A., & Carpenter, P.A. (2010). The psychology of reading and language comprehension. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, Inc.