Write a 2 pages paper on cognitive development: information processing. How important is “rote/drill” in teaching? How important is discovery -based teaching/learning important over direct teaching?

Rote/drill in teaching is simply defined as making the students to memorize the information by mere repetition. Most of the teachers in the today’s world employ this technique without even realizing the fact that they indeed are employing this technique. The biggest examples of rote learning are the alphabets, mathematical tables and statistical formulas. Rote/drill way of teaching indeed plays an important role in the today’s learning climate. It is the most easiest and efficient way to instill knowledge in students. It forms a solid foundation and base within students on which one can build intellectual superstructures. There is no way to learn arithmetic facts other than rote learning. It is also important in learning to read, for example helps read an alphabetic writing system to produce a phonetic reflex. Most of the time, rote/drill learning is used by teachers to make students learn difficult poems, drama scripts, music lyrics and symbols. Thus, it may be considered as an ancient technique, it is still prevalent in the today’s education system (Blumenfeld 34).

Discovery learning. an instructional and student driven model, provides an active and hands-on learning opportunity for students as compared to direct learning. teacher based, doesn’t involves students to a larger extent and is already formulated according to the teacher’s will. On the other hand, in discover learning, the students take on an active role to create, generate and integrate knowledge. This type of learning further aids students to learn at their own pace. Thirdly, students are made to learn new knowledge by affiliating scenarios with their past experiences ( Castronova 2).

2. What are the common learning disabilities that you find in your classrooms? Do you think culture has a role in terms of identifying and labeling disabilities?

Every now and then, we hear about students suffering from learning problems/disabilities in their respective classrooms. Some of the common learning disabilities are as follows. Dyslexia is defined as difficulty in reading, dyscalculia relates to difficulty with doing math’s, dysgraphia is recognized as students facing difficulty with writing, dyspraxia relates to difficulty with fine motor skills of students, aphasia is known as difficulty with language, auditory processing disorder is defined as problems in hearing differences between sounds and visual processing disorder relates to difficulty in interpreting visual information. All these are some of the renowned learning disabilities students’ face in their classrooms (Kemp, Smith and Segal 4).

Culture indeed has an effective role in terms of identifying and labeling disabilities. It greatly depends upon the society’s culture how they view different kinds of disabilities. They are various stereotype societies whose culture consider LD students as stupid and retard which actually is not the case. The society’s culture should inculcate “cure and relief” for all the people having disabilities rather than treating them as mentally retarded students. Culture can make or break students having learning disabilities so it should play a positive role instead of de-motivating such students (Bakken, Obiakor and Rotatori 50).

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