Reference no: EM133190979

First: Share three "take-away" elements of the course that added to your understanding of cognitive psychology and that you believe will serve you well in the future in both your personal and professional lives and explain why. 

Second: Describe the most meaningful three experiences you had while participating in the course discussions with your classmates, focusing not on the forum topics but rather on what was meaningful about building knowledge via dialogs with your fellow learners.

Third: Complete the sentence below. In filling in the blanks, think about information that you learned in completion of the course rather than a preformed opinion in place at the time we started 8 weeks ago and elaborate in the space following the word "because" about why you picked what you did (just one pick; no hedging with multiple ideas).

If I could pick just one thing that the world would be well served to better understand about cognitive psychology, it would be ________________. I chose this because ________________.

Minimum 300 words answer

Classmate #1:

Hello Class and Professor M!

Part One: 

I can't believe this is week eight!  This class has gone by so fast!  Thank you all for making it so memorable and eye-opening.  I have enjoyed the forums very much!  This week's forum is focused on the take-aways from the course.  It is hard to choose!  I think the my first big take-away from this class is learning more about memory, from the different types of memories, understanding how information is processed, and the various types of memory errors that can occur.  Everything in this course will help me in my hopeful future career path in psychology, however, having an awareness about memory is helpful in general because it affects just about every aspect of our lives.  Another big take-away was studying motivation, and the different theories that surround it.  I particularly enjoyed looking deeper into Maslow's hierarchy of needs and contemplating where I was in relation to self-actualization.  Continuing to consider this will serve me well in the future because I believe as humans, we should continuously strive to be our best selves, and understanding our motivation can give us great insight.  Lastly, the lesson about creativity  is something that will definitely stick with me.  It offered insight about how creativity could be defined or potentially measured, which was something I had not considered before.  As a creative person, it will continue to serve me to have a better understanding of the nature of creativity and to consider what it is that makes a person creative.  I have found that I find the subjects of both Learning and Cognition incredibly interesting, and I feel fortunate that I was able to take this class.

Part Two:

I had many meaningful experiences discussing course material in the forums with my classmates.  The first is that it made me consider perspectives that I hadn't thought of before.  It is interesting to see how differently people understand and process information, and I felt I learned a lot by seeing things from new angles.  The second is that the forums showed real-world examples of the topics we are studying.  It was helpful to read my classmate's posts where they explained how the topics related to their own lives or experiences.  This helped give me a better understanding of what we were discussing.  The third is that it gave the class a positive atmosphere for learning.  I felt a sense of community.  When I was first in college 25 years ago, all my classes were in buildings where I sat with my fellow students.  It was rare that we had any interaction at all.  It is interesting that an online school would offer a much greater sense of community, but that has been the case, at least for me.  This has been a meaningful experience because I felt that it was a shared experience that we all took part in.  Building knowledge together as a class in general is a wonderful opportunity because you can also bounce ideas off one another and benefit from reading the thoughts and ideas of the other classmates.

Part Three: 

If I could pick just one thing that the world would be well served to better understand about cognitive psychology, it would be that everyone perceives life and experiences differently.  I chose perception because I feel that many times, people have difficulty relating to one another and can't understand why people think or behave the way they do.  Humans do not always interpret stimuli the same way.  Two people can witness the same event or go through the same situation and have a completely different experience.  When we understand this, I think it allows for more compassion and acceptance because we have awareness that other people see the world in a different way.  I think this is a concept that many people fail to realize. 

I wish you all so much luck in your classes!  Thank you for making this course such a positive experience!

Cher

Classmate #2:

Hello Class,

As we finish up this course, I would like to say thank you for all the feedback! This week we were able to reflect on everything we learned and how we are going to take this information and apply it to our careers. I felt that week two, "Working capacity memory" taught me more than I thought I knew. I felt that it allowed me to learn about myself and how my memory was far from perfect. I felt that this was linked to other things such as stress and anxiety that I have felt with over the years. I also learned the difference between memory loss and forgetfulness, as each one is different in its own way, I read more about how I have became more forgetful over the years due to the stress caused by other factors and everything else that was going. This can be used to help patients, and see how their forgetfulness or memory loss is linked to there diagnosis.

During this course, I learned about others peoples though processes and ideas on the topics we learned each week. It was interesting to see how everyone had their own input and experiences that related to each topic. I also felt that some of this information was new to me as we went into depth into the topics each week.

If I could pick just one thing that the world would be well served to better understand about cognitive psychology, it would be our thinking and learning processes. I chose this because I feel that not everyone is educated on the way  information is received, and how the brain processes it. The patterns one shows can show a lot, and help them with learning about the mental health issues they may be concerned about. Cognitive psychology can help with more effective learning techniques. And I feel that this can open more information and education on things people might be concerned with. Once again, thank you for the great night and feedback throughout this course!

Classmate #3:

Hello Classmates and Professor, 

I can not believe it is already the last week of the class!!! Throughout this class there has been many things that I have gained better understanding about, but the three that I think will benefit me in the future will be the information that I gained on motivation, decision making, and memory. The reason I chose these three is because they are things that when working with people and especially when supervising, I think that the knowledge gained from these topics will bring new insights in the future. The forums were something I talked about in my very first post for this class and have been something that I have struggled with for every class that I have been in so far. For me the forum post is a great place to have engaging conversation, and I start that conversation and then never make my way back to finish the conversation. In this class I did continue to struggle with this, but I appreciated the amount of effort that everyone was putting in to making the conversation active. The alternative perspective that were presented within the forum posts were one of my favorite part and the ability to challenge one another and learn to grow from these challenges. 

If I could pick just one thing that the world would be well served to better understand about cognitive psychology, it would be the process for thinking. I chose this because the thoughts that people have are what motivate their actions and their words. The thought process beings through perceptions and the gathering of information but I think that if a person could become more aware of the way the thought process works then they would have a better insight to how important some of the thoughts that they are having might be.