Chapter 8

What I learned from this chapter was that language isn't just the spoken words but also the written dialect and the meanings of different symbols and gestures put together. If you wanted to teach someone more than one language the best age to get that done by is the age of seven because after that it is more complicated for the brain to grasp the concepts of the symbols and meanings of words for those different languages. Also, I learned that hueristics are not the most promising forms of making things more simple to learn, they just make them faster. Babies can understand there mother's native language more than they will pick up on another language because they are used to their mother's voice and so they will tune into the sound of it more and put together their actions or gestures and tones used.

Chapter 7

I learned the differences between short term and long term memory in this chapter along with many other things. Short term memory only holds information for a short amount of time, usually about 10- 15 seconds unlike long term memory which the information is stored almost permanently. Memories can decay which means fade away over time which results in causing us to forget things or maybe less clearly remember things. I also learned that a great way to remember things is by chunking. Chunking is when you get a set of information and instead of just repeating the order of it all over and over again you group things up that are related in some way or make some sense to you and then it usually helps you remember more and it is an easier way of doing so. The average person's memory can hold about seven things at a time in short term memory for example if you see a list of ten items for a brief period of time then you have to recite them all from just remembering what you saw in those few seconds, usually most people can only remember about seven of the things form that list. Those are a couple things that I learned from reading this chapter seven.

Exam 1 Results

This first test that we took was a little on the tough side for me. I studied by myself, I reviewed a little bit with a friend, and I went to the review session for as much as I could, which actually helped quite a bit. I honestly thought I was going to get lower than fifty percent but I ended up with a C+ after correcting that one answer that was actually right but got marked wrong. I was happy with that because it exceeded my expectation. Now that I know how these exams are going to be I think I am more aware of what I should study more, like the powerpoints from lectures, and so on. I definately know that I can and will do better on my next exams so I think that this one was a good overview on what the rest will be like.