Cognitive Processing
Respond to the following topics:
Tracey & Morrow: Ch. 9
1. What are the general characteristics of cognitive-processing perspectives?
It wants to explain the workings of the mind during the reading process.
2. What are information-processing theories? Theories that try to explain how the brain processes information and words and letters and sounds while reading.
3. Explain Gough’s Model. It starts where the reader screens the words and captures the input of each letter, trying to match it quickly with something it has seen before. Much like the victims sift through those large picture books of criminals on Law and Order, while they are in the Police Station. The brains looks for curves and patterns to identify - then it registers as a character - then identifies it as a letter, then decodes from the available sounds in the brain, and finally attaches that sound to the letter.
4. Describe LaBerge and Samuel’s automatic information-processing model. This model is a bit more detailed that Gough’s Model. It has 5 components: visual memory, phonological memory, episodic memory, semantic memory, and attention.
5. What are interactive and interactive-compensatory models?
Interactive Model says that reading isn’t linear at all, and is more like a bell curve, a mountain, or like an exponential curve. You know how you like learn this 1 thing and then your learning of the rest of stuff in that category takes off like a rocket? That’s the exponential curve. I like this one, it makes sense to me. If reading was linear, then we would all learn it in the same predictable way and would be able to predict all of the problems we encounter with learning to read.
6. What is the dual-route cascaded model? This is the fork in the road. When you meet a word, it either goes into the ‘words I know’ section or the ‘what the heck is this? section’. So true. I’m still struggling with pronouncing ‘epistemological’. I keep reading it as episiotomy, which I imagine is perfectly normal after 4 children!
7. What is the relationship between neuroscience and education? It’s the study of higher patterns of brain functioning through brain imaging technology. I Imagine this as brain graphs when you are thinking, and it truly excites me. It’s like the math of reading :-)
8. How could each of these theories be applied in a reading educational setting? I suppose you could try to match which theory each student is working with in an effort to get in there and fill in those gaps on the road to becoming a more fluent reader. But, I’m stuck on the 144 grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules of the Dual-Route Cascade Model and I’ll be looking for all 144 and how they came up with this. It’s like when I learned that all the words in English are made up of less than 50 sounds; that’s it. Amazing!
9. How could each of these theories be applied in a reading research?
Information processing theory lens can be used to explain individual reading differences. It’s like peeking in the brain to see what’s happening in there, since we can’t see and the student surely won’t be able to articulate their inner workings.
Gough’s beginning reading types of instruction and how we thought we understood how the reading process occurs. We can look at the relation between reading fluency and the type of instruction to best accelerate reading.
Automatic information processing model is likened to the father of oral reading fluency. Because of the framework of LaBerge and Samuel, we now use ORF as a baseline indicator of reading competence. Good classrooms use it monthly and great ones weekly. Best used to study how the words are processed on the road to fluency.
Side Note: You’d be shocked to know how many places that call themselves ‘schools’ don’t test for fluency, or utilize running records for the students. Sad. Guess where the majority of these schools are located? Yup… doon doon doon doon doon