COGNITIVE THEORIES OF LEARNING

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COGNITIVE THEORIES OF LEARNING

• Introduction
• Meaning of Cognition
• Information Processing Approach

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Introduction

• Cognitive psychology re-emerged in 1960s.
• By then, Cognitive learning theories started to
  dominate ideas about learning and criticized
  behavioral learning theories.

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What is cognition?

• Cognition, according to Hamilton, I (199520) in
  the Dictionary of Cognitive Psychology is the
  understanding, acquisition and processing
  knowledge, or more loosely thought processes.
• Cognitive learning theories deal with the way
  human being acquires and understands knowledge
  through thinking.
• All explanation about how human being acquires
  and understands knowledge through thinking.

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Information Processing Approach

• Information processing approach is the first
  serious movement of cognitive psychology.
• It is concerned with how
• human being acquires, processes, retains and
  retrieves information.
• people remember and forget information.
• Psychologists work on different aspects in this
  approach. For example, Siegler worked on
  attention in memory formation and Flavell worked
  on expansion of memory capabilities (Passer and
  Smith2001467).

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• Related to learning, it studies how the learner
  receives information from the environment and
  uses it in the learning process.
• Understanding how students acquire, process,
  retain and retrieve information will enable the
  teacher to help learners learn effectively.
• Remembering is an important condition for
  learning.
• If learners remember what they learn, their
  learning will be incapacitated.

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Concept of Memory and its storage systems

• Memory keeping facts or experiences in mind and
  be able to retrieve it when needed.
• Three types of memory storage systems
• sensory memory
• short term memory and
• long term memory.

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MEMORY SYSTEMS
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• Promoting sensory registration
• The teacher must
• avoid giving too much information
• pause at every stage or step
• make learners aware of the important information
• help learners use as many sense organs as
  possible.

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• Promoting sensory memory
• Teachers should
• present little information
• involve short time activities (opportunity to
  rehearse)
• organize and link well the information with other
  materials to be learnt and previous information.

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• Long Term Memory
• Information held in Short Term Memory is
  transferred in to Long Term Memory.
• LTM has very large capacity to store.
• Information in LTM is retained for a long time
  and will never be forgotten.
• Failure to retrieve it may be due to some factors.

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• Types of memory
• Episodic, Semantic and Procedural.
• Episodic memory/images pictorial representations
  of information like images of personal
  experiences or events what one did or saw.
• Semantic memory stores facts and general
  knowledge concepts, principles, learning
  strategies or problem solving skills.
• Procedural memory stores information of how to
  do things or how to perform intellectual tasks
  how to operate a computer or to build a house.

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• Forgetting
• Failure to retain information in the long term
  memory or unable to retrieve already available
  information.
• Why do we forget?
• Forgetting is caused by
• Information interference mixed up of
  information, information is pushed aside or
  inhibited.
• This happens when two pieces of information
  appear to be similar or too much a like and there
  were no cues to differentiate them.
• One is lost or confused with another because of
  lack of sufficient learning.

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• The interval is too short
• One information has not been well comprehended
• Two types of interference/inhibition
• Retroactive inhibition
• Proactive inhibition
• Proactive inhibition failure to learn new
  information because is interfered by previously
  learned information.
• Retroactive inhibition failure to recall
  previously learned information due to learning
  new information.

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• Emotional state on a material, process, teacher
  or when doing an action affect remembering,
  example fear, hate, sadness disappointment or
  lack of interest.
• Fatigue it is difficult to retrieve or retain
  information.
• It affects the work of sense organs, attention
  and concentration.
• Unorganized information Organization facilitates
  the work of the schema.
• Information which is not interrelated or is in
  illogical sequence is hard to organize in a
  mental schema.

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• No rehearsal large amount of information, noise
  some emotions or lack of chance to rehearse.
• Encoding failure the information has never been
  encoded so it has not been transferred neither to
  STM nor to LTM.
• Motivated forgetting bad, traumatic, shameful
  information are intentionally repressed as they
  bring out bad feelings.
• Memory Strategies
• Engagement in meaningful practices and using
  variety of visual aids assist in using many sense
  organs in learning.

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• Good organization and presentation of material.
• Interrelation of facts and ideas can be captured
  easily and so makes mental schema to work more
  effectively.
• Frequent revision and practice
• Mass learning Practice newly learned information
  intensely until it is thoroughly learned.
• Distributed practice Spread several shorter
  sessions over a few days and guide students to
  practice a little each day through home work or
  class work.
• This leads to better retention.

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• Part learning Breaking the long list of items
  into smaller list.
• Encourage learners to learn part of a thing
  separately.
• Over-learning Continuous practice of the learned
  material beyond the point of recall or initial
  learning. This help long term retention
• Teaching by association using examples, real
  objects, illustrations, pictures or models.
• Association provides memory cues. One thing
  stimulates remembering of another.
• Motivation promotes interest and feelings of
  need and meaningfulness of a material.

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• This will reinforce attention, concentration and
  rehearsal.
• Give an outline in the beginning of the lesson
  and summary at the end due to primary and recent
  effects of information.
• Primary information draws more attention to the
  learner while recent information is not affected
  by intervening information.
• Using elaborative rehearsal
• This helps in deeper information processing. Ask
  the students the meaning of a concepts at every
  step.

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• The use of mnemonics these are cues that aid
  memory. They are used to form mental images to
  help remember associations.
• Types of mnemonics
• Yodai mnemonic each word in a piece of
  information to be remembered is given another
  more familiar name.
• Peg word method List of facts is linked with
  images two- shoe, three- tree, four-door,
• Initial letter strategies make acronyms like
  BODMAS.

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References

• Elliot et al (2000) Educational Psychology
  Effective Teaching, Effective Learning Boston
  McGraw Hill.
  
  
  
• Hamilton, I (1995) Dictionary of Cognitive
  Psychology. Methuen
• Passer, M Smith, R (2001)Psychology Frontiers
  and Application. Boston McGraw Hill.
• Slavin, R (1988) Educational Psychology Theory
  into Practice. Englewood Cliffs Prentice Hall.
• Snowman, J. McCown R. Biehler, R (2009)
  Psychology Applied to Teaching (12th edition).
  Belmont Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.