Education Essay Example for Free

Education Essay As I reflect on the knowledge I have attained in this Educational Psychology course, I feel confident enough to say that I have learned an immense amount of information that I believe will be beneficial in my future classroom. In addition, some of the information that we have covered as a class was information that I had previously learned while at the University of Guam. I greatly appreciate the amount of knowledge I have attained in this course, and I would like to focus my reflection on three main topics: long-term memory; the cognitive process of attention, perception, encoding, and retrieval; and the four theories of motivation (behaviorist, cognitive and social cognitive, sociocultural, and humanistic). These are just three of many learning experiences that I believe will play an important role in my future career. I decided to focus on long-term memory because this type of memory plays an important role in each of our minds. According to Eggen and Kauchak (2010), long-term memory is the permanent information store in the model of human memory. What a child learns at a young age will most likely be kept in his or her long-term memory until further notice. In my experience while in this ED 300 class, several of the topics that we have discussed has brought up information from my long-term memory; thus I was able to further comprehend such topics. I was able to retrieve specific information based on what I had learned previously. Being able to retrieve information gives me an â€Å"aha!† moment in which I felt confident in answering questions and further discussing such topics with my peers. Retrieving information is just one of four steps in the cognitive process. Throughout the semester I have tried to focus on the four steps of the cognitive process (attention, perception, encoding, and retrieval) with my studies. As a college student, I have had my days where it was hard for me to even pay attention to the class lecture. However, after taking the time to reflect on what I have learned in this course, we practice the four steps of the cognitive process each day. The lecture is compatible to the first step of attention; perception is understanding the information; encoding is similar to memorizing the information; and retrieval is compatible to the reflections we each share at the end of the class. Finally, what I believe to be the most important topic that I have learned from this course are the different types of theories of motivation. As a human being there is more than one type of influence that motivate us to behave the way we do. From this Educational Psychology course, I have learned about the different theories of motivation, each of its meanings, and relating it to my own life. After learning about the different theories of motivation, I took into account my behaviors and where these behaviors originated from. Furthermore, I took into account the amount of motivation that it has given me. For example, as a Chamorro it is an old custom that women are to take care of the household. However, I was motivated by my mother to study hard and to make my dreams come true; and I believe that some outside influence had motivated her to break this old Chamorro custom. In conclusion, I believe that I have learned an immense amount of information throughout this semester. I have taken the time to reflect on the amount of knowledge we have shared in the classroom. I have taken into account the opinions of others; and I have reflected on the different types of motivations that have influenced me in my twenty-one years of life. I hope to one day be able to retrieve the information that I have learned in this course and apply such knowledge and theories in my future classroom.