Forum 12 – Lesson 12
L12-Q1 Social Information Processing Model Question
Instructor: Tom Anderson
Submitted by Kim Fitzer
Often, when the
instructor gives a directive in class, students may exhibit any number of
behaviors. Some students will jump to
action, some will begin to work on getting the action completed, others will do
something else, and some will do nothing at all. This complex set of reactions to what seems
to be a rather simple request can be frustrating and
irritating for the teacher. Many times,
the frustration may lead to punishment or reprimand for the students whose actions
have failed to achieve the desired result, but is this the appropriate response
for the teacher to take?
In order to
understand why students behave the way they do in the classroom it may be
helpful to understand what is going on in their minds.
Students process
information by constructing meaning from a multitude of sensory inputs, stimuli
that is often contradictory and simultaneous. This stimulus must be sorted and
processed according to what the student already knows, what the student
projects as needing to know, and how the student’s emotional response is
stimulated by the past, present and future outcomes (Anderson, 2001). In other words, all information is cognitively weighed according to what happened and worked
in the past, how it relates to new information, and what emotions were
generated then and now. Anything that is
interpreted as being unimportant or simply doesn’t fit
with past, present and future patterns, is rejected. This may explain why students fail to produce
the desired response to a teacher’s directive in the classroom. Some students may simply have “a lot on their
minds,” and have no room for new stimulus.
Ignoring new stimulus, such as the teacher’s request to clean-up their
desk, may have worked in the past (the request was ignored before), did not
have undesirable consequences (no severe punishment was received), and the
overall feeling was good (the desk remained dirty, nothing bad happened, life
went on). Thus, the student sees no
immediate need to respond to the teachers request.
So how, without
resorting to reprimands and punishment, does the teacher get the student to
clean her desk? The answer may be in
looking at which student goals, instructional goals, and classroom goals
coincide, and which may be contradictory.
Students have three
primary sets of internal and external goals that are likely to be influencing
their actions at any time. They are
Bio-psychological personal goals (appearance, health, basic biological needs
such as food, water, sex, etc.), Social and Psychological Person Goals
(acceptance, fun, conflict resolution with others, avoidance of conflict,
support of friends, classmates, asking for help) and Cognitive Life Personal
Goals (to learn a variety of important things, to graduate, to get a good job,
to make money, etc.) (
References
Anderson, Thomas
H. 2001. A Social Information Processing Model. Retrieved from the World
Wide Web on