Imagine that you are a seventh-grade English teacher. Your class has been learning how to develop a five? paragraph essay. Last week your students wrote essays about littering in longhand. Today you want them to compose essays about raccoons using a word processing program in the computer lab. As you look around the room you see that several students are having difficulty doing this assignment

Question

Use an information processing perspective to identify at least three possible sources of difficulty that the students may be having.

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The response should include three potential difficulties consistent with information processing theory. Following are examples of points that a response might include:
? Some students may be easily distracted by what other students in the room are doing; this may be especially true for students with learning disabilities or ADHD.
? The assignment may exceed students' working memory capacities. There is much to think about when writing an essay—not only effective ways of communicating one's ideas, but also appropriate spelling, punctuation, and grammar.
? Students may not have automatized keyboarding skills, putting a further strain on working memory.
? Students may not have sufficient information about raccoons in their long-term memories to write a good essay.
? Students may have insufficient self-regulation skills to allocate their time appropriately and keep themselves on task.