- How are you exploring your essential question; is it different from what you expected? If you don’t feel like you’re answering your essential question, what is happening that’s different from what you expected?
My initial Essential Question was, “How can learning through different mediums, like hands-on settings with others or individualized learning done online, lead to more productive learning?” Right now I am exploring my essential question in two ways, one through research and the other through an experiential process. Initially, I expected most of my time to be caught up in the experiential portion of my project (teaching myself how to code, completing music production, and interning at an experiential learning center; however, I have become fascinated with the neurological science behind learning and the overall brains function in memory and recalling information. I am now more curious about “learning how to learn” and discovering what it means to “maximize one’s learning potential.”
- Are you surprised by any of the challenges that you’ve faced so far? How have you met those challenges and what can you do going forward to deal with them?
I am extremely surprised about the lack of time I have for other portions of my project. I spend most of my time at my internship (I believe it can be arguably the most beneficial to my senior project) but I still wish I had more time for the other portions of my project. I have told myself numerous times that my senior project was a little overambitious. I could make a project in and of itself solely about researching learning, let alone having an experiential portion of the project. Moving forward I think I will have to lower my expectations for each portion of my project. In order to not get caught up in doing only research or only my internship, I need to tell myself it’s okay that my “products” for this project aren’t perfect – after all this is an experiential-based project, not a product-oriented one. Moving forward I hope that these experiential and not product expectations will allow me to experience less stress and anxiety about my music and coding portion of the project.
- Writing on your essential question: What have you learned about your essential question so far? What further questions do you have? and/or Has your essential question changed? If so, how? What do you want to know more about?
I have learned that the neuroscience behind learning and memory is still widely unknown, but there is still a lot I can learn from (from previous psychological experiments). I have learned about the theory of disuse and the forgetting curve, the difference in the sections of the brain for organizing and dealing with different types of information, Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory, and much more. I want to adjust my essential question to encapsulate this type of research, but I’m unsure how to change my question. I want to know more about learning methods as well as experience learning through different mediums and styles. I’m also learning about the instructional pedagogy of one experiential learning community center (HRCS.) I have been interning there and have been learning about how they change the model of learning for each student. They acknowledge that some students learn better through different mediums and therefore need to tailor the types of lessons based on that class.
Moving forward I plan to designate more time for my music and coding portion of my project and especially my research portion. My hope is that after learning about methods of learning and different psychological breakthroughs behind memory I hope to incorporate those findings in the way that I learn and teach myself coding and music production.