Summary: Recency bias is type of cognitive bias that gives emphasis or greater importance for events that happened recently over ones that took place a long time ago. Examples may include the recent performance of stocks compared to ones from several years ago.
Originator: Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman [iii] in the early 1970s.
Keywords: recency bias, cognitive bias, recency effect
Plagiarism is a serious problem in education. The good news is that it is easy to detect and avoid. Read our guide to learn more about the issue and our recommended tools for both teachers and students.
What is Plagiarism?
It can be defined as the use of other peoples’ ideas, concepts, words without giving them the credit that they deserve, or presenting other peoples’ work as your own; in other words, stealing the work or ideas of others and misleading people into the possible thinking that the thoughts are yours (when they actually come from other people).
In education and in academic writing, plagiarism happens when a person uses others’ work without giving them a proper citation. This can happen by accident or on purpose.
Even when plagiarism occurs “by accident,” there can be very serious consequences for students; punishment can occur, including academic probation or even kicking a student out of school.
How to Avoid Plagiarism?
The good news is that it’s easy to avoid plagiarism. If you found a paper or reference online and wish to use the idea in your own writing, simply give them credit (proper attribution) using a citation. The most popular citation formats include American Psychological Association (APA), MLA, or Chicago Manual of Style. There are excellent guides on how to correctly cite or reference academic papers, books and websites, including Purdue OWL’s APA Formatting and Style Guide (for APA format) and other excellent APA Citation Guides.
We recommend carefully keeping track of all useful materials using bibliographic software, such as Mendeley, Papers, EndNote or other tools. This way, it is easy to search and find the papers that you would like to reference and generate citations for them.
How Educators Detect Plagiarism
Teachers can detect plagiarism easily, both by reading student writing and comparing it to your other work or by using online tools. Automated plagiarism or similarity checkers such as TurnItIn can calculate how similar a student’s paper is to another paper; educators frequently use these tools to quickly detect if a student is cheating or not.
What to Avoid
There are several paid services that offer students completed essays for assignments. NEVER use these. We strongly feel these businesses are a terrible idea that can put your own academic standing at risk. In order to be able to generate papers so quickly, it is almost certain that these services rely heavily on plagiarism. Don’t do it! Teachers can easily tell when work is not your own. It is better to practice your own research and writing skills and find your own voice. You will be proud of the finished product — and your writing will improve over time.
As an educator, sometimes you need a good icebreaker for the beginning of the semester to help improve classroom dynamics. We wanted to share our recommendations! Our favorite resource comes from our good friends over at Icebreakers.Ws. They’ve collected over one hundred of the best icebreakers and team building activities (wow!). The best part is that the guide is totally free and don’t require any expensive materials or technology. They are perfect for your next event, whether to improve chemistry or to spark better discussion. They also have a new collection of Zoom and online icebreakers for remote learning as well.
Featured activities that your group can try include a twist on the classic Two Truths and a Lie Game involving a dream wish or hope for the semester, and also games involving sharing unique experiences or diverse perspectives, like Candy Introductions and Four Corners.
Activities are organized by event purpose (classroom, sharing, action-oriented, teambuilding) and by group size (small, medium, large, and extra large) size. Step by step instructions are provided along with a list of required materials. These are usually ordinary items that you already have around the house or office, such as paper and notecards or other common goods.
Click here to check out their 100+ featured icebreakers.
The Dunning-Krueger Effect is a cognitive bias that provides people with limited competence the illusion that they are better than they actually are; in other words, people naturally overestimate their own lack of ability (one is blind to their own foolishness) in “Mount Stupid.”
Originators: Social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger (1999)
Summary:
A quote often attributed to Aristotle is that “The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.” Social psychologists Dunning and Kruger identified in a 1999 study entitled “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” this phenomenon of “illusory superiority.” In four experiments, the researchers found that those who performed worst on tests were overconfident — they actually believed they had done well. For instance, in a humor-oriented test, 65 participants were asked to rate how funny different jokes were. They were extremely poor at being able to determine what other people would find humorous – and yet they described themselves as being excellent judges of humor.
This effect, unfortunately, can have major implications on human decision-making and actions.
References
Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of personality and social psychology, 77(6), 1121.
Summary: Situated Learning Theory posits that learning is unintentional and situated within authentic activity, context and culture.
Originator: Jean Lave[1]
Key Terms: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP), Cognitive Apprenticeship
Social Learning Theory, theorized by Albert Bandura, posits that people learn from one another, via observation, imitation, and modeling. The theory has often been called a bridge between behaviorist and cognitive learning theories because it encompasses attention, memory, and motivation.
People learn through observing others’ behavior, attitudes, and outcomes of those behaviors[1]. “Most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others, one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.” (Bandura). Social learning theory explains human behavior in terms of continuous reciprocal interaction between cognitive, behavioral, and environmental influences.
Attention — various factors increase or decrease the amount of attention paid. Includes distinctiveness, affective valence, prevalence, complexity, functional value. One’s characteristics (e.g. sensory capacities, arousal level, perceptual set, past reinforcement) affect attention.
Retention — remembering what you paid attention to. Includes symbolic coding, mental images, cognitive organization, symbolic rehearsal, motor rehearsal
Reproduction — reproducing the image. Including physical capabilities, and self-observation of reproduction.
Motivation — having a good reason to imitate. Includes motives such as past (i.e. traditional behaviorism), promised (imagined incentives) and vicarious (seeing and recalling the reinforced model)
Bandura believed in “reciprocal determinism”, that is, the world and a person’s behavior cause each other, while behaviorism essentially states that one’s environment causes one’s behavior[2], Bandura, who was studying adolescent aggression, found this too simplistic, and so in addition he suggested that behavior causes environment as well[3]. Later, Bandura soon considered personality as an interaction between three components: the environment, behavior, and one’s psychological processes (one’s ability to entertain images in minds and language).
Social learning theory has sometimes been called a bridge between behaviorist and cognitive learning theories because it encompasses attention, memory, and motivation. The theory is related to Vygotsky’s Social Development Theory and Lave’s Situated Learning, which also emphasize the importance of social learning.
Dear Learning Theories Family,
We hope you and your family are staying safe and healthy during this very challenging time. As we need to practice “social distancing” — that is, the need to “flatten the curve” by staying at home — education has shifted online. This can be an additional burden to need to spend your entire day in isolation at home.
Do you need activities to play? Games can be one of the best ways to connect with friends as a social experience and to enjoy quality time with family.
We wanted to provide a collection of some of the best FREE activities that are fun, social and engaging that you can play online with friends and family.
In no particular order, here is our list:
Play Board Games Online with Others
Drawing Games
Acting Games
Guessing
Social Deduction Games
Activities
Quiz Games
Free Games
Note that we recommend connecting to a videoconference tool like Zoom, Google Hangouts, etc.) while playing the game so that you can more easily talk and see faces.
Do you have more recommendations? Let us know! We’ll keep updating this list.
Summary: A cognitive theory of multimedia learning based on three main assumptions: there are two separate channels (auditory and visual) for processing information; there is limited channel capacity; and that learning is an active process of filtering, selecting, organizing, and integrating information.
Originator: Richard Mayer (1947-)
Key terms: dual-channel, limited capacity, sensory, working, long-term memory
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (often represented as a pyramid with five levels of needs) is a motivational theory in psychology that argues that while people aim to meet basic needs, they seek to meet successively higher needs in the form of a pyramid.
Abraham H. Maslow felt as though conditioning theories did not adequately capture the complexity of human behavior. In a 1943 paper called A Theory of Human Motivation, Maslow presented the idea that human actions are directed toward goal attainment[1]. Any given behavior could satisfy several functions at the same time; for instance, going to a bar could satisfy one’s needs for self-esteem and for social interaction.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs has often been represented in a hierarchical pyramid with five levels. The four levels (lower-order needs) are considered physiological needs, while the top level of the pyramid is considered growth needs. The lower level needs must be satisfied before higher-order needs can influence behavior. The levels are as follows (see pyramid in Figure 1 below).
Figure 1. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Pyramid.
The first four levels are considered deficiency or deprivation needs (“D-needs”) in that their lack of satisfaction causes a deficiency that motivates people to meet these needs. Physiological needs, the lowest level on the hierarchy, include necessities such as air, food, and water. These tend to be satisfied for most people, but they become predominant when unmet. During emergencies, safety needs such as health and security rise to the forefront. Once these two levels are met, belongingness needs, such as obtaining love and intimate relationships or close friendships, become important. The next level, esteem needs, include the need for recognition from others, confidence, achievement, and self-esteem.
The highest level is self-actualization, or the self-fulfillment. Behavior in this case is not driven or motivated by deficiencies but rather one’s desire for personal growth and the need to become all the things that a person is capable of becoming[2][3].
While a useful guide for generally understanding why students behave the way that they do and in determining how learning may be affected by physiological or safety deficiencies, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs has its share of criticisms. Some critics have noted vagueness in what is considered a “deficiency”; what is a deficiency for one is not necessarily a deficiency for another. Secondly, there seem to be various exceptions that frequently occur. For example, some people often risk their own safety to rescue others from danger.