Week 2 application

This week's topics are the brain and learning, information processing theory, and problem-solving methods during the learning process.  Here's two resources that expands the discussion on these concepts and comments on their value from my perspective of teaching secondary students.

http://pequotlakes.k12.mn.us/userfiles/file/AEP04_2_6-1.PDF
This is a pretty easy to digest article that gives some general information about how the brain is structured and functions.  Judging from the source, I would bet it gets used in a high school level psychology class and would be a good resource for that age group.

What really interested me about the article is the comparison of the brain's capacity to the Internet, especially when you consider the date of the article from ten years ago.  According to the author, "The brain's interconnections exceed the Internet's by an astronomical number."  I wonder if this is accurate today or will the Internet exceed the human brain in this area in the near future?  It is a fascinating, science fiction like question, what will happen when our tools reach levels greater than our own?

The next article I looked into was "An Informational Processing Theory of Ambivalence" which I found using the Walden Library search features.  I had mixed feelings about how this article could be used in a secondary education situation. (Pun intended)

Basically the authors wanted to analyze the sources of ambivalence towards political parties.  With how polarized the political world seems today I felt this would be an interesting application of information processing theory and great way to blend civics/government with psychology.  This is a very complex article, especially compared to the other and I would be hesitant to use it for high school learners unless they were very advanced.

Content wise, their study had some interesting points that grabbed my attention.  First, they acknowledged previous studies that showed that systematic processing requires motivation.  To define a problem, identify alternative solutions and then select the best choice requires a lot of work.  You need to enjoy being engaged in thinking in order to be systematic about your political choices.  Because of this the authors believe that when we have mixed feelings about something, ideologically based voting tends to increase.  The current political climate seems to bear this out.  Voters are getting polarized because of the lack of clear solutions makes it difficult to choose a good candidate, so instead voters are turning towards ideological choices.

I believe you can find the article here...although I have never posted something from ebscohost, so it may be blocked.  Your welcome to let me know if the link works.
http://web.ebscohost.com.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=2039bdc4-c196-4f28-b07d-179d65c7be56%40sessionmgr110&vid=4&hid=112