Question

Choose a concept with which you are familiar, and imagine that you have to teach that concept to a classroom of students. Describe the concept that you will teach, then explain five specific things you could do to help students learn the concept.

Describe what contemporary psychologists mean by the terms schema, script, personal theory, and worldview, and explain how each of these can influence learning and memory. Use concrete examples to illustrate your discussion.

Answer 1

The concept chosen is deviance and society.

Social control is defined as techniques as well as strategies in which deviant human behaviors could be controlled. This occurs at many levels, in peer groups, in families, as well as governments. People are supposed to act in a “proper” manner in order to be acceptable by the society. An example of social control is when an individual acts such that they would not break any laws if the society or commit any wrong act. People moving on such paths are considered to be deviant by the society.

Stigma had been put forward by Erving Goffman where the labels are added to particular members of the society who belong to a particular social group are employed so as to devalue these members.

It is related to deviance since once a person is stigmatised, they continue hearing negative connotations about themselves it leads them to the paths in which they continue becoming tagged. Constant negative labelling makes a person low on self esteem and deviate towards directions that are similar to the falsified thoughts.

Crime and deviance and related to genetic factors or not is a debatable topic. There are two theories that account for crime and deviance and these are known as nature vs nurture. The nature part is that defines the presence of biological factors that result in deviance. Though studies show that if a person has a newer environment or a changed environment, they tend to learn new things which might over ride the genetic pre-disposition of an attitude. It has been noted that people who have genetic factors, have an edge over carrying out such deviant activities and are more inclined to commit crimes due to greater aggression and violence. Treatments may be in the form of counseling and cognitive behavioural therapies.

schema, script, personal theory, and worldview

Schema is the development of thought patterns, which occur best in the critical periods in children and visual cliff was developed to study the depth perception in children. All the knowledge that we have are in the form of representations that are located in the long term memory and this is also referred to as schema. Memory helps in forming a representation of the knowledge that has been learnt and allows us to retrieve this representation amalgamated with the reality.

Critical period is the time where the children begin to develop their thinking as well as thought processes. In order to identify if the children have a developed schema (imagination and thought processes) and visual cliff experiment was developed to check the amount of cognitive development in the children till their critical period.

In the same period when children begin to develop their thought processes or the scheme, they tend to take make their own perceptions and thoughts. Initially these thoughts may be representative of the personal views or personal theories, but as the child begins to grow, this personal theory begins to coincide with the worldview.