Cognitive

[ref: Ormrod, J.E. (1999). Human learning (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.]

Since the 1960's cognitivism has provided the predominant perspective within which Learning Research has been conducted and theories of learning have evolved.

Edward Tolman proposed a theory that had a cognitive flair. He was a behaviorist but valued internal mental phenomena in his explanations of how learning occurs.

Based on his research of rats, Tolman proposed that rats and other organisms develop cognitive maps of their environments. They learn where different parts of the environment are situated in relation to one another. The concept of a cognitive map also called a mental map has continued to be a focus of research.

Gestalt psychologist emphasized the importance of organizational processes of perception, learning, and problem solving. They believed that individuals were predisposed to organize information in particular ways.

2. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. They believed that human experience cannot be explained unless the overall experience is examined instead of individual parts of experience.

3. The organism structures and organizes experience. The German word Gestalt means "structured whole." This means an organism structures experience even though structure might not be necessarily inherent.

4. The organism is predisposed to organize experience in particular ways. For example, the law of proximity is that people tend to perceive as a unit those things that are close together in space. Second example: similar people tend to perceive as a unit those things that are similar to one another.

Problem-solving involves restructuring and insight. It was proposed that problem-solving involves mentally combining and re-combining the various elements of a problem until a structure that solves the problem is achieved.

Besides psychology, Piaget was interested in epistemology. Piaget used something he called the clinical method. This was research in which he gave children a series of tasks or problems, asking questions about each one. He then tailored his interviews to the particular responses that each child gave. His follow-up questions varied from child to child. This methodology was very different from the methods of contemporary behaviorist research.

People are active processors of information. Instead of being passive respondents to environmental conditions, human beings are actively involved and interpreting and learning from the events around them.

Knowledge can be described in terms of structures that change with development. Piaget proposed the concept of schema. As children develop, new schemes emerge, and are sometimes integrated with each other into cognitive structures.

Cognitive development results from the interactions that children have with their physical and social environments. As a child explores his world, and eventually they began to discover that they hold a perspective of the world uniquely their own.

The process through which people interact with the environment remains constant. According to Piaget, people interact with their environment through to unchanging processes known as assimilation and accommodation.

In accommodation, an individual either modifies an existing scheme or forms a new one to account for the new event.

In assimilation an individual interacts with an object or event in a way that is consistent with an existing scheme.

People are intrinsically motivated to try to make sense of the world around them. According to this view, people are sometimes in the state of equilibrium, they can comfortably explain new events in terms of their existing schemes. However at times they can encounter events they cannot explain our make sense of this is called disequilibrium, a mental discomfort. Through reorganizing thought people are able to then understand the previously un-understandable and return to equilibrium.

Cognitive development occurs in distinct stages, with thought processes at each stage being qualitatively different from those and other stages.

Sensorimotor stage: from birth until about two years of age. At this age children are only aware of objects that are directly before them, thus the saying, "out of sight, out of mind." (Example: The game of "peek-a-boo" is enjoyed only by infants. Their joy in this game comes from their "finding" the adult -- who"hides" by blocking the child's view and thus "disappears" and "re-appears" as the child experiences it.)

Preoperational stage: emerges when children are about two years old until they are about six to seven years old. This is the stage of language development. Expanding childrens’ vocabularies reflect the many new mental schemes that are developing. This stage is characterized by a logical thinking, but not according toadult standards. A classic example is how young children cannot understand conservation of liquid. They will usually think that a taller glass has more water than a short glass even though both have been demonstrated to have the exact same amount of water.

Concrete operations: this third stage of cognitive development appears when children are six or seven years old and continues until they are about 11 or 12 years old. Children begin to think logically about conservation problems and other situations as well. However, they typically can apply their logical operations only to concrete, observable objects and events.

Formal operations: the fourth and final stage usually appears after children are 11 or 12 years of age and continues to evolve for several years after that time. During this time the child develops the ability to reason with abstract, hypothetical, and contrary-to-fact information.

1. Complex mental processes began as social activities. As children develop, they gradually analyze these processes and can use them independently of those around him. Vygotsky called this process of social activities being internalized as mental activities "internalization."

2. Children can often accomplish more difficult tasks when they have the assistance of other people more advanced and competent than themselves.

3. Tasks within the zone of proximal development promote maximum cognitive growth. This is the zone of learning for a child where he can learn something with the assistance of others. Without such assistance he would not be able to learn the subject.

4. The idea of scaffolding learning comes from Vygotsky's zone of proximal development theory. Scaffolding refers to learning situations in which adults and other more competent individuals provide some form of guidance or structure that enables students to engage in learning activities within their zone of proximal development.

<>Verbal learning research is another area that has affected cognitive theory. Verbal learning research studied serial learning and paired social learning. Serial learning is characterized by a particular pattern. People usually learn the first few items and the last few items first of a list (i.e., they are more likely to forget items from the middle of the list than the beginning or the end).

Overlearning is learning something to the level of mastery and then practicing additionally. Overlearned material is more easily recalled at a later time.

Distributed practice is easily more effective than massed practice. This is the idea of spreading study out over time instead of into one long cram session.

Learning in one situation often affects learning and recall in a later situation.

The characteristics of the material affect the speed with which people can learned it. For example, items aremore quickly learned when they are meaningful, pronounceable, concrete rather than abstract, or able to be mentally visualized.

People often use coding strategies to help them learn. (Examples: mnemonics -- like the strategy of remembering "HOMES" as a mnemonic for the names of the Great Lakes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior; or a rhyme, like "In 1492, Columbus sailded the ocean blue" to remember that date)

1. Some learning processes may be unique to human beings. (Example, complex language.)

2. Cognitive processes are the focus of study. Mental events are central to human learning and they must therefore be incorporated into theories of learning.

3. The objective, systematic observations of peoples' behavior should be the focus of scientific inquiry; however, inferences about unobservable mental process can often be drawn from such study.

4. Individuals are actively involved in the learning process. They are not passive receivers of environmental conditions, they are active participants in that learning process. In fact, they can control their own learning.

5. Learning involves the formation of mental associations that are not necessarily reflected in overt behavior changes. This is very contrary to the behaviorist position, where no learning can happen without an external behavior change. This is contrasted with behavioral objectives.

6. Knowledge is organized. An individual's knowledge is self organized through various mental associations and structure.

7. Learning is a process of relating new information to previously learned information. Learning is most likely to occur when an individual can associate new learning with previous knowledge.

This theory focuses on how people process the information they receive from the environment; how they perceive the stimuli around them, how they put what they've perceived into their memories, and how they find what they have learned when they need to use the knowledge.

In the last 30 years, it has become apparent that people don't just receive information at face value. Instead, learners do a great deal with the information they acquire, theyt actively organize and try to make sense of it. This is often done in a unique and special way. Most cognitive theories now show learning as a construction of knowledge rather than just a reception or absorption of knowledge from the surrounding world.

Several cognitive theories have emerged that place considerable emphasis on the importance of the immediate environment (i.e., the context) in learning and behavior. This view includes the zone of proximal development. Contextual use of learning has many labels, such as situated learning, situated cognition, and distributed intelligence. Distributed intelligence is shown when we think about and discuss ideas with others and think more intelligently than when we think alone.

2. Learning difficulties often indicate ineffective or inappropriate cognitive processes, especially for children with learning disabilities, who tend to process information less effectively. Therefore, teachers need to be aware that all students are trying to learn something, as well as what they are trying to learn.

3. As children grow, they become capable of increasingly more sophisticated thought.

4. People organize the things they learn. Therefore, teachers can facilitate students' learning by presenting information in an organized manner. This organization should reflect students' previous knowledge and show how one thing relates to the other (i.e., helping students understand and make connections).

5. New information is most easily acquired when people can associate it with things they have already learned. Teachers should then show how new ideas relate to previous learning.

5. People control their own learning. Ultimately students, not their teachers, determine what things will be learned and how they will be learned.

Cognitivism is currently the predominant perspective within which human learning is described and explained. Contemporary cognitivism emphasizes mental processes and proposes that many aspects of learning may be unique to the human species. Cognitivism has affected educational theory by emphasizing the role of the teacher in terms of the instructor's effectiveness of presentation of instructional material in a manner that facilitates students' learning (e.g., helping students to review and connect previous learning on a topic before moving to new ideas about that topic, helping students understand the material by organizing it effectively, understanding differences in students' learning styles, etc.)