Jessica+Huff


 * 10/28**

I learned about learning and cognition this past week and a half. Learning, according to the book, is a long lasting change in behavior resulting from experience. Russian psychologist, Ivan Pavlov, found that dogs learn to salivate to simply the sounds that they regularly hear before being fed. From this finding he developed classical conditioning, ​neutral stimuli associated with stimuli such as food will produce similar responses as the old stimuli. Then I learned about the classical conditioning process. I learned that ineffective learning methods include, trace conditioning, simultaneous conditioning, and backward conditioning.

Cognition is about memory. I learned about several different types of memory. Memory is any indication that learning has persisted over time. Sensory memory is the first stop for external events. It is memory form the senses. Iconic memory is a split second perfect photograph of a scene. Echoic memory is a 3-4 second picture of sounds. The working memory holds all the information that you are currently thinking. Long term memory is our permanent storage and it is unlimited.


 * 10/16**

I have been continuing doing AP Psych and have done chapters 4 and 5 over the last week and a half. Chapter four talks about transduction, which is sensory messages are transformed into neural impulses ​then sent to the thalamus, which sends them to other parts of the brain, with exception to smell. Sensory Adaptation decrease responsiveness to stimuli due to constant stimulation. ​Sensory Habituation is our perception of sensations, and how it is partially due to how focus. Chapter 5 talks about dualism vs monism. Dualism means that humans consist of thought and matter. Matter is everything that has substance and thought it non-material. Then the chapter talks about consciousness and levels of consciousness. Our level of awareness about ourselves and our environment is consciousness. The sleep cycle talks about circadian rhythms and how they regulate our sleep patterns. I will continue to study AP Psych.


 * 10/5**

I've been continuing working on AP Psych this last week and a half. I didn't do stuff some days because it was homecoming week and I got distracted. I did get some done though. I looked at chapter 3 Biological Bases of Behavior. This talked about nueroanatomy. This is the study of the parts and functions of nerves. Then it begins to talk about neurons and there structures. Neurons are individual nerve cells. Dendrites are the roots like parts of the cell. They grow to make synaptic connections with other neurons. The cell body of the neuron (soma) contains the nucleus and other parts of the cell. The axon extends from the cell body and forms a wire like structure. The myeline sheath covers the axon no some of the neurons to speed up the impulses. Neurotransmitters are what travel though the neurons to communicate the message. They travel form the terminal ends of one neuron through the synapse and into the dendrites of the next neuron. Then the chapter went to talk about how the neurotransmitters "fire". It went and connected it to the nervous system and then talked about how it goes Md connects to the brain. I knew a lot of this information already from AP bio last year. We talked a lot about neurons and neurotransmitters. This was a good review of the stuff I learned from last year.


 * 9/23**

This past week and a half Mandy and I have studied and read up on chapters 1 and 2. Chapter one focused on a lot of the history and approaches of psychology. Wilhelm Wundt set up the first psychological laboratory in 1879 in Germany. With this laboratory he developed a theory of structuralism, which stated that the mind operates by combining subjective emotions and objective sensations. William James published the first text book for psychology "The Principles of Psychology" in 1890. This chapter also touched on approaches, one I found interesting was behavioral perspective. This is looking strictly at observable behaviors and what reactions organisms get in response to them.

Chapter 2 was about methods. This talks about applied and basic research. Applied research has clear and practical applications. Basic research explores questions that are of interest to psychologists. Some terminology in his chapter was hypothesis, variables, theory, operational definitions, validity and reliability, participates, etc. Some that were new to me included operational differences which are explanations of how variables will be measured. Next week we will start on chapter 3.

​​
 * 9/11**

This year in independent study I am doing AP Psychology with Mandy. By the end of this first semester we plan to have learned all of the material. And then next semester we will do practice tests and review for the exam. We are using Ms. Basia's wikispace which has a lot of resources we can use throughout the semester. Here is our tentative outline for the semester:

September 14-18 Ch. 1: **History and Approaches** September 21-25 Ch. 2: **Methods** September 28- October 2 Ch. 3: **Biological Bases of Behavior** October 5-9 Ch. 4: **Sensation and Perception** October 13-16 Ch. 5: **States of Consciousness** October 19-23 Ch. 6: **Learning** October 26-30 Ch. 7: **Cognition** November 2-6 Ch. 8: **Motivation and Emotion** November 9-13 Ch. 9: **Developmental Psychology** November 16-20 Ch. 10: **Personality** November 23- December 4 Ch. 11: **Testing and Individual Differences** December 7-11 Ch. 12: **Abnormal Psychology** December 14-18 Ch. 13: **Treatment of Psychology Disorders** January 4-8 Ch. 14: **Social Psychology** January 11-22: **Presentation Preparation**

**2014-2015**

Through out this semester I decided to do math enrichment for my independent study. For the first half of the semester I did PSAT/SAT prep. I used apps and college board to do this. I did practice tests online to. This prepping did help me for the PSAT that I took in October. My scores were better than last year. For the second half of the semester, I used khan academy. I learned things from pre-calc that we don't talk about much or don't tLk about at all. Some of the things I learned about include vectors, matrices, hyperbolic functions, and Euler's formula. I learned about scalers, and how they transform vectors, how to add vectors, and how they can be used with Pythagorean theorem. With matrices I learned about adding, subtracting, multiplying and using scalar with matrices. I also learned about zero, identity, transformation, matrices. Hyperbolic functions and Euler's formula was harder for me to understand. Overall for this semester I could have done a lot better. I learned that it's actually kind of hard to set your own schedule. I tended to not do as much work in class as I could of. I also learned that teaching yourself, is a lot different than being taught material by a teacher. It's was harder for me because I didn't have a set of things I had to do, so I would just procrastinate. This week I looked hyperbolic functions, which I had no idea what they were, or even heard of them before now. The video first talked about Euler’s formula. E to the i theta equals the cosine of theta plus I sin of theta. Then it talked about how you can isolate and show how to show sin or cosine, in new ways because of the formula. The video then got into a whole bunch of negatives and I started to get really confused. It made more sense later when he showed that adding the positive formula with the negative formula made it easier to isolate the cosine of theta. Because of this cosine of theta equals e to the i theta plus e to the negative i theta, all over two. You can also do the same thing for the sin of theta. Sin of theta is equal to the same thing as the cosine of theta, except it is over 2i and you subtract the numerators instead of adding. The rest of the video really confused me, and I still don’t know what a hyperbolic function is. The next video next video continued talking hyperbolic functions. It started off with talking about the unit circle; this made me happy because I know about that already. It then talked about a unit hyperbola, which he said is similar to the unit circle. It said that x^2 – y^2 = 1 was the “unit” hyperbola. He began talking about the unit circle and how it has asymptotes and then I started to get lost. I will try to get it straight by my next journal.
 * 1/15/14**
 * 12/19/14**

I have continued to study matrices. Zero and identity matrices was one of the first videos I watched since my last entry. It talked about that matrices have the identity property. To multiply a matrix by another and get the same matrix back you have to use an identity matrix. Identity matrices must be the same dimension as the original matrix. They have 1’s going down the diagonal. Starting in the top left with a one, and down to the bottom right. This creates a matrix that allows you to multiply another matrix of the same dimension and get the same matrix back. Zero matrices are matrices that can be multiplied by any matrix and you will get another zero matrix back. Zero matrices are matrices of the appropriate dimension, and are composed with on zeros. You can multiply this by any matrix and will get a zero matrix back, but it does not have to be the same dimension.
 * 12/9/14**

Transformation matrices can be used to transform the position of vectors on a graph by multiplying them together. If you have a vector which is basically a 2 x 1 matrix and multiply it by a transformation matrix, like a 2x2, then you will get a transformed vector from the original. You can also use transformation vectors in triangles. If you multiply the transformation matrix by each vector in the triangle you will get 3 new points. These are the vertices of the new transformed triangle. The video explained that the power of transformation matrices is very important in computer graphics.

I have started looking at matrices in Khan Academy. A Matrix is just a rectangular array of numbers. The numbers in a matrix are called entrees in the matrix. A matrix can be called by the number of rows and columns it has. For example a matrix with 2 rows and 3 columns is called a 2 x 3 matrix. Matrices is just a representation of numbers. They are very useful in computer graphics. You can add, subtract, multiply, take the inverse, etc. of matrices. You can use matrices to represent data in real world problems. For a matrices to “contain the same information” as another, the numbers need to be in the same row and column as the data related to it, so it may be opposite as the other. A certain number can be represented in a matrix by G2,1, 2 is the second row, 1 is the first column. If you multiply a matrix by a number (scalar) it is called scalar multiplication. To do this, you multiply the scalar by every entry in the matrix. To add matrices of the same dimension you add the corresponding entry. The order you add matrices does not matter. To subtract matrices of the same dimension, you subtract corresponding entries. Adding and subtracting matrices of different dimensions results in an undefined answer.
 * 11/21/14**
 * 11/14/14**

I have been continuing with the pre-calculus Khan Academy videos. I have more videos about vectors. Scalars are numbers that can be multiplied by the the vectors. If you multiply a vector by 3 it increases the vectors magnitude by 3 times. The vector still goes in the same direction. If you use a negative scalar the vector will go in the opposite direction. the next video talkedabouut adding vectors. it showed three vectors. for example, vector a's head was connected to vector b's tail, then vector c's tail was connected to a's tail, and c's head connected to b's head. they made a triangle. then the video explained that you could say that vector b plus vector a equals vector c. A later video explained adding vectors using the coordinates. If you want to add vector a and vector b you would take the top coordinate and add them, and take the bottom, and add them, giving you another two dimensional vector. when two vectors are added the third will allow them all to form a triangle.


 * 10/27/14**

Since PSAT's are over I am starting to expand on my pre calc skills. I am using Khan Academy to do things that we don't touch on very much in that class. There are videos and lessons to watch and learn the different topics. Things like vectors and matrices are on there. I have watched several videos and they are very good at explaining the topics. The first lesson I covered was on vectors. Then I watched 2 of the videos they touched on the general basis of them. I learned that vectors can not be represented by just a number, like 5 or 10. They can not be represented by an angle measure like 5 degrees. vectors can be represented as a point like (5,5). the endpoint would be at the origin, and would cross through this point. this gives a magnitude and a direction. in another video I watched I learned that the magnitude of vectors in their length. They can be determined through Pythagorean theorem.


 * 10/15/14**

This Saturday I will be taking the PSAT's. I have been preparing for them by taking practice tests on my iPad. My scores have been averaging between 80-85%. I think I would score better in the app, but I often get distracted. I have done research on the PSAT, although I took them last year I forgot the format of them. There are three sections, critical reading, math, and writing skills. The critical reading section has two 25 minute sections. The types of questions include sentence completion questions, and questions based on passages. The questions measure how well the student comprehends and analyzes what was read. The math section also has two 25 minute sections. The types of questions are multiple choice and grid ins, which I have been practicing. the questions measure algebra and geometry arithmetic, and ability to solve familiar and unfamiliar problems. The last section is writing, which is just one 30 minute section. The types of questions include improving sentences and paragraphs, and identifying errors. I feel prepared for the PSAT and am ready to do my best.

Over the last two weeks I have continued preping for the PSAT's that I am taking in about two weeks. I have downloaded several apps including SAT up, SAT flash cards, SAT math, Ace the SAT, and multiple others. I have been using these apps in and out of school. The problems range from very simple to more complex. The apps are nice because they give explanations to the answers so that if you get it wrong you can go back and see why another answer is correct. I have found that I spend to much time thinking about the problems, and that am wasting it. I need to work quicker since there is a time limit for the PSAT and the SAT.
 * 10/2/14**

This past week and a half I have been working on preparing for the PSAT's which I am taking this fall. I have been using the practice booklet that was provided to me. I have also found practice problems from collegeboard.com. I have done a lot of different types of questions from multiple choice to free response. In doing these problems I have found that I make a lot of stupid mistakes. I rush through and mess simple things up. I have also found that when I go to figure out the problems I make them more complicated than they really are. Some problems come very easy to me, while others are more difficult. O verall I have done well on the problems and I hope it helps to improve my scores. Over the next week or so I want to continue to do practice problems and find some more resources. I want to start working on more difficult problems too.
 * 9/16/14**

Are there any types of problems that you need help with?

This semester I plan to enhance my math skills. Also, I want to be able to improve my problem solving skills. I plan to achieve this by finding practice problems online. I want this to help me improve my math SAT scores. I plan on finding practice problems online, and finding apps to help me with this. I also plan on using the math contests books. For my final project I'm not sure what I am going to do still. In doing this independent study I wish to have gotten better at math problems to help me on the SAT and in other math classes.
 * 9/4/14**

What resources will you use for your independent project? Create an outline of what you intend to accomplish week-by-week.