Writing a literary review during this class has challenged me, it has taught me that there is much better ways to do research.  I am very glad that we had so much time to complete it because in all honesty it is quite a bit of work, especially if we are going to do it correctly, follow directions and attain a good grade.  Doing this review is helping me understand how I should approach research and what I should look for in my resources.  I think that the most difficult part of writing the literature Review was actually sitting down and converting all the information I  already collected and putting it together in a manner in which it would make sense.  This was hard for me only because when writing everyone has their own personal style, and although it might sound good to me it might not be the best form in which to present the information to our professor.  Throughout the course our professor has been nice enough that she has pretty much held our hand and walked us through the process telling us what it is she want exactly, and this has been very helpful.  Learning the process in this manner has giving me the ability to learn what may be the correct and better way to do research, and that I need to take my time to do it.  My understanding about my research has grown immensely, in the past is seemed to me as if this might just be a very vague subject that needed to be explored, but now I know that there have been many studies going on during the last 30-40 years in the area, I had just never bothered to search or consider looking into it.   I think that what I would now like to see or find is more studies done.  I think that over the years many of the researchers, psychologist and teacher have identified various factors that influence student engagement and promote learning and education and it would be wonderful to see them being applied.  I do believe it would be quite difficult, as students, teachers, parents, and a school administrators would have to agree on doing a study of this magnitude and follow through with specific directions over long periods of time in order to attain reliable result.  Well thank you very much for reading my blog and hope we all learned from this experience.  

In this weeks annotated bibliography I decided to include a book which tied to my research very well called “Mindset” as well as an article which I found while looking through the bibliographies of some of the other articles that I had chosen in the past. I think that these sources were both credible because the author of the book is well educated and known within the field of psychology, additionally I found that in quite a few of the articles that I looked over while doing my research she would often be mentioned as one of the experts.  I think that both of the sources which I chose to include deal with the learning and promote the need to teach students not to succeed but to work hard toward their goals.

The research topic I chose seems to be a new areas of study, and because of this I think that I will not be able to address every question that may arise from it.  I believe that we as a society we need to implement better learning habits and promote and encourage our students to work hard rather than just aim to obtain higher grades.  I think that many people will probably be interested in my topic since I have been researching how to maintain students engaged and the importance of teaching them better learning techniques.   I think that by teaching students to enjoy learning and encourage them to approach their education as a challenge and in a more positive light they will have a better learning experience.  Education for me during the last couple of year has been incredibly important and leaning better teaching and learning techniques for myself as well as my children has become a priority, and because I am a parent I believe that this information can be very helpful for others who like me may have experienced difficulties with their children and a sense of helplessness if unable to support and help their children. 

Question:

"What psychological factors can teachers utilize to increase student engagement in the classroom?"

Resources:

1. Anderman E.E.M., Anderman H.L. (2009) "Psychology of Classroom Learning: An Encyclopedia”, Vol. 1. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA. [0]. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 24 Jan. 2016.                                 http://go.galegroup.com.libproxy.chapman.edu/ps/i.doid=GALE%7CCX3027800001&v=2.1&u=chap_main&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w&asid=ba0c32a611cbdf97a6e7b60eb921bea7           

    The book that I chose to use for this assignment is “Psychology of Classroom Learning: An Encyclopedia”.  I chose this specific E-book/encyclopedia because it seems to have a broad amount of topics which pertain to the educational system, child psychology and the various social aspect that can impact a child’s educational potential.  This encyclopedia also seems to incorporate the various author’s real experiences within the classroom setting.

    The encyclopedia seems to be broken into articles or sections which discuss specific topics that are associated with education. The encyclopedia itself does not seem to be written by a specific person it seems to have numerous contributors, but two editors who are Eric M. Anderman and Lynley H. Anderman.  The articles/sections seem to be very well written, and the authors or contributors seem to be highly educated and work within the field of education.  Additionally each article seems to also have individual bibliographies.

       2. Dweck S.C. (2006) “Mindset”. New York, Random House

I found this book to be incredibly insightful.  The book itself goes through a series of examples in which people’s will to succeed and effort became the strongest factor in reaching or exceeding their potential.   I believe that the author is very well qualified, as she is well educated and known within the field of psychology.  This source specifically addressees my research question as it provides examples of individuals in the real world who have successfully overcome obstacles in life and education and was a great influence when I chose my topic.

3           3.Duckworth, A.L.; Seligman, M.E.P. (2005). “Self-discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting 

             Academic Performance of Adolescents”. Psychological Science. 16 (12). 939-934.

This article is especially important for my research, it is a review of a study in which the students IQ and study habits were taken into account while evaluating their academic performance.  I think that the authors and researchers were highly qualified as they seemed to be well educated in the field.  I believe that this review addresses my question as it evaluates students learning habits while comparing their IQ.

        4. Galla, B. M., Wood, J. J., Tsukayama, E., Har, K., Chiu, A. W., & Langer, D. A. (2014). “A

         longitudinal multilevel model analysis of the within-person and between-person effect of

         effortful engagement and academic self-efficacy on academic performance”. Journal of School

         Psychology, 52(3), 295-308. doi:10.1016/j.jsp.2014.04.001

The article seems to be a wonderful addition to the other research I have gathered.  This article analyzes the academic performance of students over time, while taking into consideration other factors such as classroom engagement.  I think this article is helping me get a better understanding of my research because it is helping me understand how difficult it might truly be to measure growth and academic performance of students. 

          5.  Himmele, P., & Himmele, W. (2011). Total Participation Techniques: Making Every 

          Student an Active Learner. Alexandria, Va: ASCD.

I believe the book will improve my research as it explores positive learning techniques and aims to teach educators to incorporate many of these techniques in their classrooms.  The books authors have PhD’s in intercultural education, were teacher for a number of years and are assistant professor at Millersville University. They are well educated and passionate in the field of education, and so I believe that they are well qualified to write the book.  The teachers they worked with while writing this book had on average of 9 years of experience teaching.  I believe the book addresses my question as explores teaching techniques and students learning.

           6. Ohst A., Fondu M.E.B, Glogger I., Nückles M., Renkl A. (2014), Preparing learners with 

           partly incorrect intuitive prior knowledge for learning, Frontiers in Psychology, 

           doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00664, http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00664

The article I found was “Preparing learners with partly incorrect intuitive prior knowledge for learning”.  I chose this article because although it might be very different to all my prior references, it actually set out to test learning strategies.  In the study they set to find out how prior knowledge affected the way in which students learned and how much they did. They had a group of students who had what they called a “pre-training intervention”, while others had none. I think this article is wonderful as it prepared some of the students by giving them some kind of outline of the information they were to receive and in doing so allowed them gain better understanding of the subject.  I think this article set out to prove how much we need to learn how to learn, it gave some of the students a base from which they could begin to learn and a direction in which to follow when learning.  I think this article would support my research as it would help me prove that as students we first need to acquire better learning techniques.

           7.  Scott D.S., Dweck S.C. "Mindsets That Promote Resilience: When Students Believe That 

           Personal Characteristics Can Be Developed." Educational Psychologist 47.4 (2012): 302-

           314. Academic Search Premier. Web. 4 Feb. 2016.

 I found this article to be very interesting as it sheds some light on the need to make youth resilient 

and the importance to teach them how to overcome failure.  The authors believe it’s important to

teach students that doing well educationally is achievable to everyone through hard work and effort. I think this article will help me in my research as unlike many others this one takes the students state of mind into consideration.  Many of the other articles I have been briefly reading seem to share techniques that teachers can use in the classroom in specific ways and manners, but this one focuses on teaching student to that they can learn versus teaching teachers to teach.

This week we were introduced to open access articles and reviews.   I learned that the idea behind such websites is to allow the masses to learn and share their knowledge with the world.   We also learned that unlike traditional copyright practices these open access websites allow the masses to use the information they like as long as they are given credit and are not misused or misinterpreted. I found this to be very interesting since in the past it seemed as if everyone was always ready to sue each other for using information without their consent. 

I think that knowing that there is open access articles that can be accessed freely might change the way I generally look for information, I probably won’t be relying as much on google, Bing and even Wikipedia when looking for free scholarly articles and information.  But I do have to say that I really loved using the other Journal databases that we used during the last few weeks, it just seems as if we took a step back when we used open access websites.  I found it incredibly difficult to narrow down my subject and find articles that I would be able to use for my research.  But I do understand that open access websites are very important as they promote and encourage freedom of knowledge.

The aspect of academic plagiarism that still seems a bit unclear would be, how the universities might go about deciding if certain information can be considered commonly known versus plagiarized.  At what point exactly is it considered commonly known, in today’s age of technology I think that it can become very difficult to determine this especially with all the free information available to us.  I personally had an issue with this last session because I found myself attempting to look for a resource to explain my knowledge of Shakespeare.  

Week 5

This week’s research has made me realized that the studies in the psychological factors that influence student academic achievement have been happening fairly recently.  The information that I have been coming across seems to concentrate on research that is less than 30 years old. And most of this seems to be from the past 10-15 years. 

As far as the focus of my question, I think that I am very happy with it at this point, my research question is, “What psychological factors can teachers utilize to increase student engagement in the classroom?" and Professor Woolley did help me narrow it down.   In all honesty there was a couple of articles in the resources that did catch my eye it was “Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents” by Duckworth, A. L., & Seligman, M.E.P and “Teaching adolescents to become learners. The role of noncognitive factors in shaping school performance: A critical literature review”, by Farrington, C. A., Roderick, M., Allensworth, E., Nagaoka, J., Keyes, T. S., Johnson, D. W.  I think that both of these articles would be very helpful for my research as they both focus on a child’s ability to learn versus “how smart they might be”.

I think that my research skills have improved greatly over the course of the past 5 weeks.  I already had some prior experience using Ensco Host, but learning how to narrow down my subject has been very helpful.  What has really helped me the most has been learning that I should not think of research as just looking up a keyword, instead I need to use controlled vocabulary.  Learning how to use controlled vocabulary has made things much better, now I can try to narrow down to a specific word or phrase that will encompass what I’m researching without it needing to be exact words.

Week 4 Finding a Journal Article

Hi everyone welcome to my blog, we are now in week 4 of our class. We have learned how to look up various sources, and this week we had the opportunity to learn the proper, correct and best way to locate a Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journal. This week’s assignment gave me the opportunity to learn what Scholarly or Peer Reviewed Journals really are, and the importance and weight they carry in research.  Something great that I learned from this week’s assignment was that we can always look into the references that the scholarly articles might have used as a possible lead, especially if we are having issues finding other scholarly sources.  Another important thing that I learned from this week’s assignment is that we can narrow our search by publication date. Being able to narrow our search by date allows us to make sure that the information we are using in our research is accurate and up to date. Wonderful right?

As far as frustration and difficulties I would have to say that the worst part of this week’s assignment was actually having to think about what question I really want to answer with my research.  There is so many things that I want to research and learn about that narrowing my question really seemed impossible.  Knowing how to be a successful teacher seems to encompass so much, and student engagement seems to be crucial in order to succeed. 

Wk 3, Finding a book

Hi everyone and thanks for reading my blog,

    This week’s assignment has been probably the most difficult one yet, at least for me.  After following the directions and looking for books through the Leatherby Library I came up empty handed multiple times.  I eventually circled back to the book and looked over chapter two in which Badke asks us to really think about what question it is we want to answer with our paper and research.  And so with that in mind I decided that what I really want to research and learn is the various methods used to keep students engaged and participating in the classroom.  I want to learn what part psychology, sociology and even technology play in the classroom and how they are helping teachers and students succeed together in the classroom.

     I started by researching education in California, psychology of education, and lastly classroom engagement.  I looked through books and then decided that my best option would be to use E-books as I would have the option of accessing them immediately. This search finally led me to the e-book “Total Participation Techniques: Making Every Student and Active Learner” by Pérsida Himmele and William Himmele. I think that this book will be a great start to my research as it will help me learn about total participation techniques and classroom engagement.  What I am hoping to eventually find with my research are proven techniques that have helped teachers keep their students engaged and that will ultimately lead students to gain a greater understanding and commitment to their education.

Week 2 Assignment 2: Blog Post

Hi everyone, 

As I conducted my research during the last couple of days I found that by reading about education, psychology, and the social aspects that surround it, it helped me find a title or narrow my research.  My title will be The Psychology of Teaching, I think that my research will focus on the various aspects of teaching and how they impact children’s ability to learn.  The research is helping me narrow my interest, my initial subject was very broad as it encompassed everything that I think teachers should consider when teaching children.  I also learned that the amount of things that may impact a child’s ability to learn is infinite, and that every day will be different especially if they have some kind of social or psychological disorder.

I chose to do two different searches, one using google and the other using the Leatherby Library system as we were instructed.  In doing this research I found that google will have an exhausting amount of websites and sources many of which for me personally seem too broad and their reliability might be sketchy.  I found the Leatherby Library systems to give me conscious of mind when it came to its sources which was very important to me.  Although initially the Library website seemed a bit overwhelming after moving a bit through it I was able to learn how to better search for information.  It allowed me to look at various subjects and a breakdown of them within each area in the Gale Virtual Reference Library which was incredibly helpful, unlike google which just gave me a list of articles and websites.  In short I think I need to narrow my topic more.  

   Thanks for reading Norma