POSC 100: Introduction to American Government Professor Brett Murdock Instructions, Format, and Sample of Discussion of Current Event At each class session, a group of students will be assigned to briefly analyze a current political event of their choice and post their analysis on Titanium. The next week, that same group of students will be required to post on Titanium a comment on (or “reply” to) another student’s analysis. Then, time permitting, we will have an active discussion and debate about the more interesting Titanium discussion posts in class. Please make sure your discussion and posts are submitted within the required timeframe to receive credit. Instructions for Discussion of Current Event: Find and read an article or two online, in the newspaper, in a magazine, etc. that deals with a government/political issue that interests you. Write one paragraph that summarizes the key points and facts of the article(s). Then write one paragraph about your opinions, views, and analysis of the article. Format: 1 - Basic subject matter of your current event in the “subject” field of your post on Titanium 2 - Name of Student 3 - Title of Article(s) 4 - Source of Article(s) 5 - Link to Article(s) (if online) 6 - 1 Paragraph summarizing the key points and facts of the article 7 - 1 Paragraph about your opinions, views, and analysis of the article. Sample: Jane Q. Student Exclusive: U.S. delays deadline for finalizing Obamacare health plans Reuters http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/28/us-usa-healthcare-obamacare- idUSBRE97R04X20130828 Agenda - Health Care, The Obama Biden Plan Change.gov The office of the President-Elect http://change.gov/agenda/health_care_agenda/ President Obama’s healthcare plan was formed to create affordable, accessible healthcare for the citizens of the United States. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has recently changed the dates on which they will be signing agreements with insurance companies to begin implementing President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). The original date for the HHS to reach agreements with insurance companies was set for the first week of September. The plans to meet in the upcoming week are no longer going to happen, with the HHS giving no reason for the change of plans. However, a spokesperson from the HHS has given a statement ensuring that agreements will be reached shortly. Critics of this health care have been voicing their opposition, and even gone as far as to form coalitions to put a stop to the funding of this bill. Attempts to defund “Obamacare” have created a great deal of controversy, not just between Democrats and Republicans, but within the parties as well. Republicans have been successful in defunding over $1 billion just this year. States have begun to discuss their own implementation plans. For example, last week California discussed a slow implementa.

1. POSC 100: Introduction to American Government
Professor Brett Murdock
Instructions, Format, and Sample of Discussion of Current
Event
At each class session, a group of students will be assigned to
briefly analyze a current political
event of their choice and post their analysis on Titanium. The
next week, that same group of
students will be required to post on Titanium a comment on (or
“reply” to) another student’s
analysis. Then, time permitting, we will have an active
discussion and debate about the more
interesting Titanium discussion posts in class.
Please make sure your discussion and posts are submitted within
the required timeframe to
receive credit.
Instructions for Discussion of Current Event:
Find and read an article or two online, in the newspaper, in a
magazine, etc. that deals with a
government/political issue that interests you. Write one
paragraph that summarizes the key
points and facts of the article(s). Then write one paragraph
about your opinions, views, and
analysis of the article.

2. Format:
1 - Basic subject matter of your current event in the “subject”
field of your post on Titanium
2 - Name of Student
3 - Title of Article(s)
4 - Source of Article(s)
5 - Link to Article(s) (if online)
6 - 1 Paragraph summarizing the key points and facts of the
article
7 - 1 Paragraph about your opinions, views, and analysis of the
article.
Sample:
Jane Q. Student
Exclusive: U.S. delays deadline for finalizing Obamacare health
plans
Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/28/us-usa-healthcare-
obamacare-
idUSBRE97R04X20130828
Agenda - Health Care, The Obama Biden Plan
Change.gov The office of the President-Elect
http://change.gov/agenda/health_care_agenda/
President Obama’s healthcare plan was formed to create
affordable, accessible healthcare for
the citizens of the United States. The US Department of Health
and Human Services (HHS)
has recently changed the dates on which they will be signing
agreements with insurance

3. companies to begin implementing President Obama’s Patient
Protection and Affordable Care
Act (PPACA). The original date for the HHS to reach
agreements with insurance companies
was set for the first week of September. The plans to meet in
the upcoming week are no longer
going to happen, with the HHS giving no reason for the change
of plans. However, a
spokesperson from the HHS has given a statement ensuring that
agreements will be reached
shortly. Critics of this health care have been voicing their
opposition, and even gone as far as
to form coalitions to put a stop to the funding of this bill.
Attempts to defund “Obamacare” have
created a great deal of controversy, not just between Democrats
and Republicans, but within
the parties as well. Republicans have been successful in
defunding over $1 billion just this
year. States have begun to discuss their own implementation
plans. For example, last week
California discussed a slow implementation of the healthcare
act in order to accommodate to
the state residents.
In my opinion, it seems that everything that Obama predicted
(or promised) this law would do,
is turning out to be false. Both Obama and congressional
Democrats vowed that the Act would
lower premiums for the typical American family. While
insurance premiums will lower for some
Americans, they are predicted to rise for other consumers, likely
those younger, healthier
Americans who purchase inexpensive plans. As someone who

4. falls into the category of a
young and healthy consumer, I do not think that it is fair to
force Americans to begin paying for
a law that is nowhere near implemented and is not expected to
fulfill the promises made.
These factors have both been publicly acknowledged by the
Obama administration, yet there
is no urgency to correct the errors and proceed in a way that
would not put the burden on
American families.
Directions to Post Your Discussion on Titanium:
1 – Click on the “Current Event Discussion Board” link on the
class Titanium home page
2 – Click “Add a new discussion topic”
3 – Write the basic subject matter of your current event in the
“subject” field of your post on
Titanium
4 – Write your discussion in the “message” field
5 – Click “Post to forum”
Instructions for Commenting on Another Student’s Discussion
Post:
First and foremost, please be respectful and open-minded to
your classmates’ perspectives.
Insulting, rude, or disparaging remarks will NOT be tolerated.
Please write a paragraph on
how and why you agree or disagree with a discussion post. This
will require some analysis of
the discussion post you have chosen to comment on as well as
some backup facts and
reasoning for your position.

5. Reflection (1)
This chapter discovers techniques of helping students learn
intensely from prose and is mainly concerned with instructional
techniques that can make text more comprehensible. I have
learned from this chapter a lot especially here the promoting
means learning from prose including adjunct questioning,
signaling and advance organizers. The basic query resolved in
this chapter is, How to improve textbook lesson with the help of
three major techniques i.e. cognitive theory of instruction,
adjunct question, signaling, and advance organizer?
Cognitive theory can be divided into two groups. The
first group consists of information theory. In teaching them is
considered a form of information process. In fact, the human
cognitive activities identified with the processes occurring in
the computers with which we cannot agree. The second group of
representatives of the cognitive approach to the teaching
process remains within psychology and seeks to describe the
process using basic mental functions: perception, memory,
thinking, etc. Currently, the cognitive approach to learning is
still no coherent theory of learning, but at the same time
contains a number of important results. In his studies, he also
draws attention to the relationship of knowledge and skills.
Describing the process of mastering the subject, he identifies
three processes that, in his opinion, occurs almost
simultaneously; a) the acquisition of new information, and b)
the transformation of existing knowledge: their expansion,
adaptation to new challenges, etc., and c) the validation of the
methods used to the task." Instructional techniques make up the
structure of the method, representing a step-unit operation that
performs teacher and student, realizing one or another method
of teaching law.
There is a great variety of instructional techniques used
in the classroom right. Among them are traditional techniques
(for an explanation, reasoning, characterization, narration,

6. description, a variety of techniques for working with
educational text, etc.) and more recently becoming popular
interactive techniques. Approach to teaching as an activity also
requires consideration of a fundamentally different relation of
knowledge, skills. Knowledge should not be opposed skills, and
considered as a component part. Knowledge can neither be
learned nor kept out of student actions. So, quality of learning
determined by the variety and nature of activities in which
knowledge can show its proper function.
To answer the question: how to create a project
(problem)-oriented learning environment in the domain of
knowledge (for example, teaching physics) in modern
conditions. It is assumed that the solution of problems in
physics with an emphasis on project work synergistically
students ensures the unity of social and natural science content
in engineering education. The latter is necessary in connection
with the transition to a two-tier education system engineers.
Reflection (2)
The author has laid down the theories of cognitive development
in the chapter. The most widely accepted and established theory
of cognitive development is of Jean Piaget’s theory called
“Genetic Epistemology”. Jean Piaget in his theory has classified
knowledge into three types: -a) Physical knowledge carrying
physical attributes of an object, b) Logical mathematical
knowledge which is the abstract knowledge based on object
actions and c) Social knowledge that is the knowledge made by
the people and is culture specific.
A child gathers all these knowledge during an invariant
sequence of four stages which reflects the qualitative
differences in child cognitive abilities. Each stage includes the

7. cognitive structure and abilities of the preceding stage and they
form the foundation in the later stage. This makes each stage
more adaptive and adequate then the preceding one. The stages
in the order of appearance are: a) Sensorimotor (0-2 yrs.), b)
Preoperational (2-7 years.), c) Concrete operational (7-11
years.) and d) Formal operational (11 years. onwards)
Piaget has stated three processes responsible for children
progression from one stage to another. These processes of
assimilation, accommodation and equilibration are critical for
the development. As per Piaget, in the process of assimilation,
children and adults tend to apply any mental structure that is
available to assimilate a new event and they actively seek to use
a newly acquire structure. In the process of accommodation,
existing schemes or operations are modified to account for a
new experience. The process of assimilation and
accommodation influences each other. Equilibration is however
a master developmental process encompassing both assimilation
and accommodation. Within each stage, anomalies of experience
create a state of disequilibrium which is resolved only by more
adaptive and sophisticated thought and this is called the stage of
equilibration.
The theory of genetic epistemology has been criticized on the
grounds that the children learn more in a stage than as thought
by Piaget. Further, all cultures do not reach formal operations
sequence of the stages is invariant as is envisaged in the theory.
The process of reasoning has also been criticized on the ground
that it is domain specific and is not always consistent within a
stage.
More recent theories have provided alternative information
processing approaches but based on few Piagetian suppositions.
They presume that the children’s knowledge is most likely
represented by some sorts of sematic networks and memory
connections as adults’ knowledge. Information processing
theorists have demonstrated that learning plays significant role
in development. Expertise implies a process of building rich
conceptual structures –mental models that restructure with

8. experience.
Reflection
After viewing the previous chapter by Driscoll (2005),
concerning the situated cognition and how the nature of
knowledge is approached, this week’s chapter is concerned with
cognitive knowledge and development. In this chapter, the
author is addressing several questioned concerning the cognitive
knowledge and how children learn. Driscoll (2005), wanted to
come to the conclusion of whether children learn in a different
manner than adults do and how this process of learning differs
from one another? The definition of cognitive development by
Driscoll (2005), is “the transformation of the child’s
undifferentiated, unspecialized cognitive abilities into the
adult’s conceptual competence and problem-solving skill” (p.
189). In this development, Driscoll (2005), was trying to figure
out how children develop their thinking skills and cognitive
knowledge. This argument led to the genetic epistemology view
of Jean Piaget’s. According to Driscoll (2005), Piaget had a
view about knowledge that involved interpretivism and
suggested a compromising between nativism and empiricism.
This view was called as both interactionism and constructivism.
Piaget believed that a child will acquire knowledge by actively
reacting to their surrounding environment. There are three kinds
of acquired knowledge according to Piaget for children and
these kinds are physical, logical-mathematical and social
knowledge (Driscoll, 2005). The first kind is physical
knowledge, and it is concerned with objects in the world in
which children can gain knowledge through interacting with
their physical surroundings. The second kind of knowledge a

9. logical-mathematical one. This kind is mainly concerned with
abstract knowledge in which children construct thoughts for the
sake of knowledge development. The third kind is social
knowledge. This kind of knowledge is gained through
interactions with other people within the social group.
Moreover, Driscoll (2005), discusses the stages of development
by Piaget in which development of knowledge is established.
These stages are divided by the ages of children in which the
first stage called sensorimotor, and it is concerned with children
up to the age of 2 years old. The second stage is the
preoperational for children from the age of 2 up to the age of 7
years old. The third stage is the concrete operational for
children from the age 7 up to the age of 11 years old. The fourth
stage is formal operational which is concerned with any age
after 11 years old. All these stages are set by Piaget and the
development of cognitive thinking takes place gradually for
each stage to come. As a result of these four stages of
development, Piaget considers three processes of development
in which children use to reach the required knowledge. These
three processes are assimilation, accommodation and
equilibration (Driscoll, 2005). Each process is important for the
development of cognitive knowledge. The Piaget’s genetic
epistemology view has some good points considering different
ages of learners and the shifting of development in each group,
but this view has been criticized as well for failing to take into
consideration some other points found in children’s way of
learning. One of these points is mentioned by Driscoll (2005),
in which children might learn more in one stage rather than
develop gradually. Later on in this chapter, Driscoll (2005),
explores different view than Piaget’s concerning the
development of cognitive thinking. In an attempt to further
explore Piaget’s view, Klahr and Wallace focused on building a
model that considered only a quantitative development
approach. The theory of Piaget did a great job in shedding the
light on the different mechanisms found within each child
cognition development. Unlike the information-processing

10. theorists, Piaget did serve this purpose of development greatly
in his theory and proofed to be of high value when it comes to
cognitive and knowledge development in a child life.