Marcel LaFountain

Educational Psychology
Dr. Reid Riggle
5-10-15
Learning Event #5
For my Educational Psychology class, I volunteer at Sullivan Elementary School. My
duties there vary on a day to day basis, but mainly consist on reading with students, helping
students with their homework, and being a part of their enrichment time and helping them grow
as students. On one particular day, an event occurred that has stuck with me.
One day while I was volunteering, I was helping a student, whom I shall call Reginald,
with his math homework. On this day when I was helping Reginald, his math homework had to
do with division. He was having a very hard time with the division and told me so himself. I sat
down with him and went through how he did the first few problems on his worksheet and he
explained that he just kept counting up to get the answer. For example, when 64 divided by 8
came up, he would count groups of eight on his fingers until he got all the way up to 64, and he
got the correct answer of 8. Reginald did the same thing for each of the other problems that he
had already completed, but got a couple of them wrong. I used the ones he got wrong as
examples.
The first thing that I did was ask him if he knew his multiplication tables and he said yes.
So I asked him a few questions on multiplication and he got them all right. After that, I started to
look back at his worksheet with him and I would ask him what the answer multiplied by the

number that did the dividing was. After a while of getting the answers right, he figured out that
the number being divided was the product of the divider and the answer. After this point in time,
Reginald understood that to divide, he needed to multiply to find the answer. So, I worked the
next few problems with him with this concept in mind. The next problem was 56 divided by 7.
He quickly got 8 as an answer and I asked him how he did it. Reginald told me that he just
thought to himself, what times 7 equals 56. By doing this, he said, he could quickly get the
answers that he needed and I told him that he was completely right! Soon after, he quickly
finished his assignment.
This assignment is an example of a formative assessment (Garrison, 2014). A formative
assessment meant to aid learning, not to measure how much has been learned. With this math
assignment, the teacher was trying to get Reginald and his classmates to practice what they had
learned in class. The assignment was only worth 10 points, so overall it wouldnt affect their
grade too much. The goal of this assignment wasnt for the teacher to be able and see if the
students completely understood the material and they could all move on, but rather to see if the
students were beginning to understand and to see how much time the class needed to spend on
the subject.
A theory seen here is part of Self-Efficacy. (Riggle, 2015) Self-Efficacy is refers to the
beliefs in ones capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce
given attainments. The part of Self-Efficacy seen is enactive mastery experience. (Riggle,
2015) Enactive mastery experience is the students own success or failure at a certain task. For
Reginald, his efficacy was created from his enactive mastery experience in doing the problems
before I came over. When I told him that he got a few wrong, he felt worse about his ability to
complete the problems. This made him want to give up on his homework and decrease his

productivity levels. Also, his psychological state (Riggle, 2015) played a role in his unsuccessful
attempts at his assignment. Psychological states are states of mind that come from a gut feeling
of the person doing a task and dictate how well the person will do at the task. This gut feeling
sets up a mood that carries on throughout the rest of the task. For Reginald, his gut feeling was
that this was a new topic and he was going to fail, which is why at first, Reginald did fail.
The information processing theory (Orey, 2001) also plays a part in Reginalds learning.
The information processing theory talks about how different children retain information, like a
computer. This theory has a lot to do with memory (Orey, 2001) and how people best retain
memory. Two of the best ways used to retain memory of a subject, and used in Reginalds case,
are giving meaning to the concepts (Orey, 2001) and repeating the information over and over.
(Orey, 2001) I tried to give him meaning by not just telling him how to do division, but by
comparing it to multiplication, something that Reginald already knew. Also, the worksheet
makes him repeat the concept of division over and over, which helps him to memorize the
process of division.
The last concept used in this learning event was metacognition (Livingston, 1997).
Metacognition is thinking about thinking. I asked Reginald about how he thought he did on his
assignment. He thought that after he knew what he was doing, he did a very well job. This is
one part of metacognition because he is thinking about how well he did. I also made Reginald
think about what his mental processes were, by asking him how he did what he did. He
responded with doing multiplication backwards, in order to find what times what would equal
the number being divided. The last thing I made him think about was how he learned. Reginald
said that what he learned in class at first wasnt helpful, but what I told him to do came up the
very next day in class, which solidified this concept of division in his mind. Through multiple

teachings of the lesson and multiple examples to learn from, Reginald was able to master this
type of division.
This learning event really allowed the attribution theory to shine through and also showed
metacognition and spiral curriculum off. There were many other learning events that I could
have written about, but this on in particular I thought showed off some concepts that havent
been elaborated on in the past. With this being the last learning event, I wanted to make sure that
concepts that havent been talked about in the other papers were covered in this paper, and if they
have been covered, I wanted to be sure that they received the credit they deserve because they
are very important to me.

References

Garrison, C. (2014). Formative and Summative Assessments in the Classroom. Retrieved

May 10, 2015, from
http://www.amle.org/BrowsebyTopic/Assessment/AsDet/TabId/180/ArtMID/780/ArticleID/286/
Formative-and-Summative-Assessments-in-the-Classroom.aspx
Livingston, J. (1997, January 1). Metacognition: An Overview. Retrieved May 1, 2015,
from http://gse.buffalo.edu/fas/shuell/cep564/metacog.htm
Riggle, R. (2015a). PowerPoint Presentation Self-Efficacy. Retrieved May 5, 2015,
from http://education.snc.edu/ed120/attribution.ppt.htm
Orey, M. (2001). Information Processing. In M. Orey (Ed.), Emerging perspectives on
learning, teaching, and technology. Retrieved May10, 2015, from http://epltt.coe.uga.edu/