Improving observational skills
The higher education instructor needs to develop his/her or stratgies that will help the student improve their decoding skills. In order for a student to succeed these skills need to be further developed as an on going process.
Teaching critical thinking processes and the decoding of information is something that is not restricted to education alone. This is something that should be taught for the purposes of learning excellence and professional use.
Jay: I agree with you.
We must keep up with new ways (and our own ways) of helping students to decode the information we are given them. Every classroom environment is different and the contents vary from discipline to discipline. Some disciplines such as statistics and chemistry lend themselves to using decoding mechanism to break the information apart into smaller pieces and then put them together, examples include the Bell Curve and the Periodic Table.
Thanks,
Jose
I strongly do agree with your comments.
Students' frames of reference and experiences are constantly in flux. The more the material can grow and change with the student, the longer it will stay with them. For instance, the topic of gaining attention has been brought up in Communication class. A young adult may associate this skill with attracting a potential date. As the student matures and possibly gets married and has children, gaining attention may take on different connotative meanings. Neverthless, the principles of gaining attention have remained. It is up to the Instructor to gain insight into what associations will help students recode information so that the information stays with them.
One of the things that I always ask my students in my lecture about Patient Assessment is, "Why do we have two ears, two eyes and one mouth?" I remind them the power of observation: We can learn so much by listening, watching twice as much than talking.
I have to agree with this thought, no mater what leavel you teach at you should always look for ways to improve your skills to help students in the way they learn or retain information.
This is wonderful - I will use this with my students. I think so often we get excited and, when we do, we stop observing and, instead, we wait to talk.
