Evaluating and Identifying Online Resources

In searching for resources related to brain and learning and information processing theory, I came across a large number of sites. I have chosen two resources from these.

The first is an article entitled Problem solving skills in education and life. The site is www.asa3.org. It is wealth of information. It provides descriptive and thought provoking articles on various topics like creative thinking, critical thinking, multiple intelligence , problem solving in design and science and teaching problem solving skills in education. The site makes good use of keyword tags to allow quick jumps to related content. It gives lots of ideas to combine creative thinking and critical thinking to think more productively which is an important goal of education .

The next resource I have chosen is www.chiron.valdosta.edu . This site is simple. It does an excellent job of summarizing theories and models behind information processing theory. This gives an idea of the information processing approach to cognition. It clearly explains the most widely accepted Stage theory model of Atkinson and Shriffin (1968), levels of processing theory of Craik and Lockhart (1972) , Parallel distributed processing model and the connectionist model( Rumelhart and Mc clelland ,1986).

From this article we can understand that even though there are widely varying views within cognitive psychology most cognitive psychologists agree with some principles in information processing. Here specific principles are outlined correlating to specific examples of activities that can be used in the classrooms.