Blog 10, Week 3

Sandra I agree with you that gender role is a big part of a student's development. The commercial you linked was a classic patriarchal society interpretation of gender roles. As a side note, I thought it would have been funny if they stuck a boy in there for a second to be PC. Although progress has been made, student's are still taught the stereotypical gender education. By this I mean that girls should focus the efforts on language arts and boys should focus on math and science. So long as society holds to this belief, a girl who excels at math will be an anomaly. Therefore it is up to every educator to show students that gendered subject no longer exist. If not, this belief will likely progress into the next generation.

Blog 8, Week 2

Sandra is correct in stating that giving out rewards indiscriminately can "backfire". In my psychology 101 class I learned that a behavior is much more likely to be retained if rewards are given out intermittently. Giving out rewards each time an individual performs a task correctly is not actually reinforcing that desired behavior. This will become evident when the individual is no longer given an external stimuli, in the form of a reward (stickers in this case), for doing something that they will be expected to do without reward in the future. This regression to a undesirable behavior is seen in studies like the Pavlov dog salivation study. The dogs were taught that every time a bell rang they would receive food, thus they salivated. After a period of time, the the bell was rung, however, no food was given. Extinction of the salvation trait happened much more rapidly for the dogs that received rewards every time verses the dogs who received a reward at a set interval. The connection to students is, if an educator wants to build a solid educational foundation within a student, then they must give a reward at the correct time and for the correct reason. As the book illustrates in this section, students need to be rewarded for exerting effort not for just completing a task. An effort reward regiment is much more likely to result in students goals being focused on learning rather than performance (Meece and Daniels).This students will ascribe to the incremental theory of ability rather than the entity theory of ability. Intelligence may be set, however, the sky's the limit when effort is exerted. Constructive encouragement and discriminate rewards are a positive way to point students into the correct educational direction.