Summary Of Past Experiences And Future Attitudes In Literacy By Erika Peterson

In the article “Past Experiences and Future Attitudes in Literacy” by Erika J. Peterson, she explains how our experiences affect our learning of reading and writing and even the future. Everyone has their own different experiences growing up whether you were praised for it or not. As children, they are more sensitive from the feedback given from their leaders such as their parents and teachers. This feedback affects their confidence whether it be negative or positive. Erika ties in an experiment done by Rick Evans and Alisa Belzer in which they interviewed and conducted questionnaires on a group of middle-class college students on how they learned to read and write. Peterson does a similar experiment on a group of different ages in which she tries to

Unlike the Evans and Belzer experiment, they did not include the psychological side of all this. The neurotransmitter, Dopamine, plays a role in remembering these very specific moments in each one’s past acccording to “Getting the Brain’s Attention”.Because of this, it’s probably the reason why the memories are still there clear and perfect because of the emotional connection. The pattern that was found was that when students were praised for certain literacy skills, they have a bigger growth in literacy. For example, even though a fifth grade girl didn’t get much feedback from her writing, she was still praised for her joy in reading. There’s also other cases where students were praised not only for their achievements but their interest and effort put into something such as entering a Disney essay contest or actually winning an award on a writing. Another example of a participant of the experiment was a memory of his mother that would buy him books instead of candy. However, what all these students had in common was the praise and support system they all had growing up whether it be family and/or