PRE-MID TERM TEST (WHAT TO READ)

Dear students,

PLEASE DO YOUR COURSE VALIDATION (VALIDASI SUBJEK) STARTING FROM 5/8/09 - 8/8/09. FAILURE TO VALIDATE WILL CAUSE YOU TO STATUS DROPPED. TQ


Read all this okay. Good luck!

CHAPTER 1 - Introducing psychology

Define psychology.
List and describe the four goals of psychology.

Contrast the nine approaches/perspectives in psychology: structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism, psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology, cognitive, neuroscience, evolutionary and sociocultural.

The students understand the history how psychology developed as an independent discipline.(Specialties)

Define basic and applied research, then describe the first four basic steps involved in scientific research.

Describe the guidelines for respecting the rights of human and nonhuman animal participants in research and psychotherapy clients.

Define experiment and describe how independent and dependent variable, and experimental and control groups are important to the experimental method.

Describe researcher and participant problems in research and the experimental safeguards related to them.

CHAPTER 2 - Neuroscience and Biological Foundations

Draw a neuron, label its part and describe the function of each part.

Define neurotransmitter and explain how neurotransmitters act to excite or inhibit action potentials.

Describe the effects of the major neurotransmitters and explain how they are related to some disease, poisons and mind-altering drugs.

Define the major division of the nervous system, list the subdivisions of the central nervous system and describe the functions of the spinal cord.

Locate and describe of the cerebellum and the three parts of the brain stem.

Describe the methods for studying behavioral genetics.

CHAPTER 4 - Perception

List and discuss Gestalt principles of perceptual organization.

Explain perceptual constancy as it relates to size, shape color and brightness.

Explain how a person perceives depth, using binocular and monocular depth cues.
Define potential problems with believing in extrasensory perception.

CHAPTER 6 - Learning

Define learning and conditioning.

Explain the process of classical conditioning, describing the differences between an unconditioned, neutral and conditioned stimulus, and an unconditioned, conditioned and conditioned emotional response.

For classical conditioning: describe stimulus generalization, stimulus discrimination, extinction, spontaneous recovery and higher-order conditioning.

Define operant conditioning and differentiate it from classical conditioning.
Define positive and negative reinforcement

Compare and contrast classical and operant conditioning.

Describe the four processes involved in learning through observation, and describe how cognitive-social learning is related to prejudice and the influence of various media.

Flash Toys At WishAFriend.com

IF YOU SEE AMY (song by Britney Spears)

She's at Chek's house ok...

Funny Horoscopes at WishAFriend.com

Make a Ladybug Note at WishAFriend.com

Sweet Home Inderapura

This is a story of my home development...
It took about 2 months for me and my "papa" to find the best house yet affordable around Kuantan area and finally somewhere in October 2008, we found a semi-D house in Taman Sri Inderapura.

These are the front viewsNo.1

No.2

No.3

Without wasting time, papa contacted the number glued on the wall and we managed to see the person in charge on the next day.

The Effectiveness of Reflective Teaching - by me

Teaching? Well it sounds easy for me. I give lecture, students nod their heads. I give more lectures, students jot down the notes. That is only for those who are interested. I give lecture, students yawning or playing fool at the back without knowing their objectives for coming to class. When the time is up, I get out from the class and return to my cubicle smiling happily assuming that the students understood what I have taught. Then the process remains the same as it should be every time I teach. Isn’t it easy to be a teacher? It was easy to me but that was long before I joined the Kursus Asas Pengajaran (KAP) held at UiTM. The course had reflected me so much that now I don’t want to be the ‘old me’ anymore.

Now I realize that teaching is not only focuses to the traditional way of teaching but it also requires a lot of researches, creativity, perseverance, teaching philosophies, reflection and so forth. When we choose a particular role, do we think about the responsibilities or the challenges we have to face? Yes we do think of them but how far we implement them effectively. Reflecting the role that I choose, there are still a lot of improvements needed to become an extraordinary teacher. Hence reflective teaching should be practiced by teachers to evaluate and analyze the teaching skill to achieve higher effectiveness.

The definition of reflective in the Oxford Dictionary carries a meaning of tending to think deeply about things or thoughtful. Whereas in the same source the word teaching by mean is the work of a teacher. On the other hand, reflection is a metacognitive strategy that helps teachers think critically upon their experiences, actions and decisions during their teaching practices. Metacognition is an awareness or analysis of one's own learning or thinking processes.

According to John Dewey (1933), an American philosopher and educator, the process of reflection for teachers begins when they experience a difficulty, troublesome event, or experience that cannot be immediately resolved. Prompted by a sense of uncertainty or unease, teachers step back to analyze their experiences. This stepping back can occur either in the midst of action or after action is completed.

There are three primary reflection spaces that you need to know in practicing reflective teaching. The spaces are general reflections on education, classroom reflections and self-assessment reflections.
In general reflections on education, the questions are more likely to help you articulate your philosophy of education. The following sets of questions below are some of the examples:

• What is education and who is it for?
• Who am I teaching?
• What should we be teaching?
• Why teach?
• Who teaches?

The second space, classroom reflections is also crucial to help you think about the atmosphere and design of your classroom. The following question might help you to have a better environment.

• How do I want students to interact in my classroom?
• In what ways is it important for students to interact with the community in which
they live?
• What resources should be available to my students?
• How can I use the wall space in my classroom to further active learning?

The last space, self-assessment reflections can help you think about your work this week and this year for instance, what have you learned this week? What have you taught this week? How are you doing in your work? Below questions are designed to provide you with some space in which you can consider your own professional development.

• What was the most important thing I tried to teach my students this week?
• What is/are the most important thing(s) my students will learn from me this year?
• What did I learn from my students this week?
• What was I thinking?

In view of the above reflection spaces, why do you think we need to reflect? Reflective practice helps teachers to have a deeper understanding of their own teaching style, teaching philosophies and teaching identities. While we are teaching, we are also learning. As you reflect, you will better understand your role as teachers.

In addition, reflective teaching gives you more control and you become empowered. This control is in terms of the class development. By having a well prepared lesson plan, you will not be teaching a topic that is outside your teaching content. Plus the class activities which you have planned encourage involvements of each student and make them feel that they do not fall behind as everyone is constantly learning.

Reflective teaching also makes you see yourselves as “growing”. From the pass teaching experiences evaluation, not only you will improvise your way of teaching but you will also be looking forward to make it more interesting in the future.

Moreover, teaching becomes connective when you practice reflective teaching. As you become sensitive with yourself and your class environment, you are not only making a connection between the outcomes for the students but also the outcome for yourselves. Besides that, you see the “ideology” behind teaching and classrooms become more democratic.

To have an effective reflective teaching there are three suggested technology-integrated ways for reflection that you can practice. They are self observation, teaching journal and action research.

Before you can implement the self observation, you need to have sets of questions like in the self-assessment reflections. Then you need to video tape your lesson. This is one of the techniques where you observe and evaluate yourself under the guidance of the sets of questions you decide before the observation.

Rather than writing your teaching journal in traditional way, why not use blogs to write about your experiences or record some specific teaching events, and your feelings about them on periodical basis. As you go through the reflective cycle, you can write down your experiences on your journal.

Action research includes data collection and data analysis. It is a reflective study of a teacher’s actions and the effects of these actions in a classroom context. After you decided on your problem area that you want to study on, you can use SurveyMonkey.com, SurveyShare.com or some other free online survey tools (survey software) to prepare survey to collect and analyze the data.

In conclusion, there is a lot of benefits in reflective teaching and one of the primary benefits is it creates awareness of own knowledge, assumptions and past experiences. In my opinion, it is very significant for you to question yourselves on general reflections on education, classroom reflections and self-assessment reflections in order to achieve higher effectiveness of reflective teaching. The practice of video taping your lesson, creating blogs and doing action research for reflection are good ways to evaluate your conclusions, actions and work process itself to further your personal and professional development. Thus, nurturing reflective teaching is crucial to successful teacher education.

Good luck to all TEACHERS out there!

QUOTES of the week

Last December 2008, I joined a 7 days course in UiTM Shah Alam and no doubt it was fun and facsinating. The speakers were very good and what made them good was their speech. Appearently, they included several best quotations in between the line of their speech. I was so attracted by the quotations as they could make a speaker look very knowledgable. So today I would like to share with you a few quotations that might help to arouse interest of your audience in case if you are asked to deliver a speech.

"Ones best success comes after their greatest disappointments."
-Henry Ward Beecher

"Success usuallly comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it."
-Henry David Thoreau

"Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful."
-Albert Schweitzer

"Success is the good fortune that comes from aspiration, desperation, perspiration and inspiration."
-Evan Esar

"Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."
-Peter F. Drucker

So there you have it-you will look knowledgable. Trust me!

facebooklover

I think i'm starting to love to hang out at facebook.com. For the last few months i thought facebook is quite similar to friendster. Now i realize it's more fun to be at facebook though. Or maybe i was too busy finishing my work loads that i don't even have time to spend with my pc... Luckily the semester break has started, so i will take this opportunity to be one of the facebooklovers! Yee haa...

my HUT and my SOLE

Dearest mum... your are my hut and sole. Happy M0thers' Day to all mothers out there!!!

I mis u April!!!

but not forgetting our beautiful ex-supervisor before Mr. Man took over... Ms. April, i really mis the good old days with you at MiTV.

ManToi

... and this is the coolest supervisor that we ever had in our group at MiTV. Sorry Mr. Man, we snapped this pic without you knowing about it. But we didn't mean to insult you, it's just to show how cute you are when you sleep in working hour you know :-P

Mis u guys so much la...

u guys always make me happy at MiTV, thanks ya!

Just to share with you...

"MiTV-change your view"... I still remember the tagline of the first company that i joined somewhere in august 2005.. where i first met all my beloved friends (Marlia, Kak Dah, GG and all)... i miss them much. One of my best friends used to joke "MiTV-change your job"... hehehe and what he said was true. We were all got retrenched by the company one month after he said that. (i think GG got sixth sense la) :-P

Welcome to MY HUT

Helo everyone.. there's nothing to say today as this is the 1st time i enter this blog world.. heheh.. half of my colleagues went to TOT course at Machang yesterday til this Friday. So i can see a lot of empty cubicles and i think i hear the sound of crickets too.. ihik