[AAACE-NLA] Associationism

[Andrea Wilder]

Yes, but the visual area and the auditory area must be synchronized,  
which is where the trouble lies for poor readers.  It is probably lack  
of synchronization that accounts for the word flips, like dog and god.

Andrea

On Jul 2, 2007, at 11:10 AM, Anita Landoll wrote:

> The latest research (fMRI) seems to be that, for the
> natural beginning reader, all words (regularly and
> irregularly decodable, as well as frequently and
> infrequently used) follow the same pathway on the left
> side of the brain. First the letters are sounded, then
> the information is processed in the decoding area, and
> finally it is stored in the automatic recognition and
> comprehension area. Later, the natural reader will use
> the auto recognition area to retrieve the stored words
> for reading comprehension and for comparison/contrast
> of unfamiliar words. (This information has been
> written about in UNDERSTANDING DYSLEXIA, as well as in
> material published for teachers under NCLB).
>
> So the struggling reader should be taught to use
> her/his decoding center to "make sense" of all words
> he/she needs to know in order to read the text she/he
> needs to be able to read. Then the auto recognition
> area will provide the necessary recognition and
> comprehension.
>
> Anita learntoreadnow
>
> --- tsticht at znet.com wrote:
>
>> June 30, 2007
>>
>> Associationism, Behaviorism, Constructivism: The
>> ABCs of Adult Literacy
>> Education
>>
>> Tom Sticht
>> International Consultant in Adult Education
>>
>>> From World War I in 1917, through World War II in
>> the early 1940s, and up to
>> the Vietnam War of the 1960s and early 1970s, the
>> teaching of reading to
>> illiterate, poorly literate, or non-English speaking
>> solders was based on
>> three different theoretical understandings of what
>> makes learning
>> effective.
>>
>> During World War I,  J. Duncan Spaeth, Director of
>> Education at Camp
>> Wheeler, Georgia and Camp Jackson, South Carolina,
>> wrote the Camp Reader
>> for American Solders for teaching illiterate adults
>> and non-English
>> speakers to speak, read, and write the English
>> language. In what is the
>> earliest discussion of the theory of learning
>> applied to adult literacy and
>> language learning that I have found, Spaeth explains
>> the four communication
>> processes of listening, speaking, reading, and
>> writing. He goes on to
>> explain, "All four processes involve the formation
>> of association habits,
>> and the first principle to be emphasized is
>> therefore repetition." This
>> principle followed from the understanding that
>> learning involves the
>> formation of connections or "habits" among ideas or
>> thoughts and that this
>> happens automatically when the ideas are associated
>> together repeatedly.
>>
>> In the latter part of 1929, the Secretary of the
>> Interior in the
>> administration of President Hoover appointed a
>> National Advisory Committee
>> on Illiteracy. The next year, Dr. William S. Gray of
>> the University of
>> Chicago was asked to prepare guidance for teachers
>> of adult literacy. In
>> response, he prepared the Manual for Teachers of
>> Adult Illiterates.  In
>> 1934 this was revised by Caroline Whipple, Mary
>> Guyton, and Elizabeth
>> Morriss, all adult educators, and renamed Manual for
>> Teachers of Adult
>> Elementary Students.
>>
>> While the shift from "illiterates" to "adult
>> elementary education"
>> represented a major redirection in thinking about
>> the needs of adult
>> literacy and non-English speaking adults, the
>> learning theory of
>> associationism was still in effect. This is clear in
>> a section on teaching
>> reading to native-born adults or limited education:
>> "During the first
>> period students acquire a sight vocabulary of words
>> of immediate value in
>> adult reading and learn to read and interpret simple
>> sentences relating to
>> familiar experiences. This is a period in which
>> special effort is necessary
>> to establish rich, vivid, and permanent associations
>> between printed or
>> written words and their meaning and pronunciations."
>>
>> During World War II, Paul Witty, a student of
>> William S. Gray's, was called
>> upon to develop literacy programs for illiterate,
>> poorly literate, and
>> non-English speaking recruits into the Army. As with
>> Spaeth and Gray, Witty
>> also followed the associationist principle of
>> repetition, repetition,
>> repetition to form associations among sight words
>> and their underlying
>> meanings. However, in addition to associationism,
>> Witty was aware of the
>> growing interest in behaviorism, with its
>> understanding of learning as
>> stimulus-response sequences. In a 1939 textbook
>> entitled Reading and the
>> Educative Process, Witty and his co-author, David
>> Kopel, state, "Perhaps
>> the unique characteristic of modern education is its
>> recognition and
>> application of the principle that the results of
>> instruction should affect
>> and influence behavior (p. iv). In designing the
>> Army Reader Witty divided
>> it into four units which progressed in difficulty.
>> In keeping with the
>> behavioral approach, he developed pre-unit and
>> post-unit tests to measure
>> the student's change in reading behavior.  This
>> approach to the application
>> of behavioral principles to the design of
>> instruction was to find a much
>> larger educational application in later years with
>> the introduction and
>> widespread use of programmed instruction.
>>
>> In the late 1960s and early 1970s I was called upon
>> to develop literacy
>> programs for soldiers during the Vietnam War and
>> into the All Volunteer
>> Army. In developing what was called the Functional
>> Literacy (FLIT) program
>> I made use of associationism, behaviorism, and the
>> newly emerging
>> constructivism. The latter was based on the
>> cognitive psychology that
>> followed behaviorism in the mid-1950s and
>> incorporated the concepts of
>> mental functioning between stimulus and response
>> that were excluded in
>> behaviorism. The information processing models of
>> mental functioning, with
>> concepts of sensory memory, working memory and long
>> term memory provided a
>> cognitive architecture for analyzing some mental
>> functions between stimuli
>> and responses, and the central idea was developed
>> that knowledge is
>> actively constructed during learning rather than
>> resulting from the
>> automatic formation of associations due to
>> repetition.
>>
>> In the FLIT program two curriculum strands were
>> developed. The first strand
>> followed behavioral principles and consisted of
>> instruction sequenced in
>> modules similar to Witty's World War II Army Reader,
>> with pre-and
>> post-module tests to assess learning mastery of the
>> material in the
>> modules. This was self-paced, individualized
>> learning in a semi-programmed
>> manner. In strand two students worked in teams to
>> study written passages of
>> some 300-400 words and transform them into either
>> pictures, matrices, or
>> flow charts. These were social constructivist
>> activities involving the
>> active use of prior knowledge to transform the new
>> information in the
>> written passages from one form of representation
>> into another
>> representation of the knowledge in the passages.
>>
>> An important point is that, in the movement from
>> associationism, to
>> behaviorism, to constructivism in World Wars I, II,
>> and the Vietnam War,
>> all the literacy programs used functional context
>> materials representing
>> the daily lives of the soldiers and the future work
>> they would be doing.
>> This ensured that experiential prior knowledge was
>> formed as the basis for
>> comprehending new knowledge, it motivated learning
>> by making clear the
>> connection between the content of the lessons and
>> its practical use, and it
>> facilitated transfer of literacy learning from the
>> classroom to the "real
>> world" in which the soldiers would live - - or die.
>>
>> It is now clear, after over a hundred years of the
>> practice of adult
>> literacy education, that the ABCs of learning are
>> still valid in various
>> teaching and learning situations. Repetition,
>> observations of changes in
>> behavior, and the active construction of knowledge
>> all have their
>> applications in the teaching and learning process.
>> And always, teaching the
>> ABCs in a functional context serves the interests of
>> adult learners.
>>
>> Thomas G. Sticht
>> International Consultant in Adult Education
>> 2062 Valley View Blvd.
>> El Cajon, CA 92019-2059
>> Email: tsticht at aznet.net
>>
> === message truncated ===
>
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