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Cognitivism
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Cognitivism is a learning theory that looks upon the mind and its inner processes as central to knowledge acquisition.
Unlike behaviorists, cognitive theorists believed that these processes could be understood scientifically. These processes included memory, thought, knowledge, and problem solving. Learners are active agents in creating meaning and growing their knowledge. Cognitivism started in the 1950s in reaction to Behaviorist's exclusion of the learner's inner processes.
Background photo by Adrien Olichon
Benjamin Bloom
(1913-1999)
Taxonomist of Learning
Educational psychologist who identified 3 domains of learning:
cognitive (thinking)
affective (feeling)
psycho-motor (doing)
Hierarchy of learning:
Learners progress through
different stages of thought (bottom to top):
remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, creating
Jerome Bruner
(1915-2016)
Pioneer of Spiral Curriculum
Bruner saw schooling as only one piece of a broader cultural education. Learning enables not only assimilation, but also creation, prediction, and invention. Learners should be "active problem-solvers" who construct meaning through interacting with the subject matter.
Spiral Curriculum
Learning should build on previous knowledge through revisits that evolve one's understanding of the subject in an interconnected, progressive manner that encourages in-depth knowledge.
Jean Piaget
(1874-1949)
Cognitive Development Revolutionary
Piaget pioneered the systematic study of cognitive development with detailed observational studies. He concluded that learning occurred when the learner actively engaged with their environment
Four stages of cognitive development:
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Sensorimotor (birth to 2 yrs old)
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Preoperational (2–7 yrs old)
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Concrete operations (7–10 yrs)
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Formal operations (11+ yrs old)
Albert Bandura
(1925-2021)
Social Cognitive Theorist
For Bandura interpersonal interactions create the environment for cognitive development. Social experiences, observation, imitation, and reinforcement provide the individual with agency in their learning journey.
Social Learning Theory
Observing, modeling, and imitating others's stance is integral to learning. To classical and operant conditioning learning theories, Bandura adds:
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observational learning
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mediating processes
Lev Vygotsky
(1896-1934)
Sociocultural Theorist of Constructivism
To Vygotsky, learning is embedded in cultural values and is a socially mediated process of collaborating with a more learned member of society. One creates meaning through meaningful (social) interactions with the world.
Zone of proximal development (ZPD):
The span between independent learning, guided learning, and learning just beyond the learner's grasp, ZPD emphasized the need for a guide in co-constructing knowledge.
The mind as a computer processor: a history
Background photo by Miguel á Padriñán
Benjamin Bloom
& Taxonomy of cognitive domain
Implications for teaching & learning
Approach has best applicability to higher education, since it emphasizes higher order abstraction, synthesis, analysis, and generalization. But in breaking down the process of learning into steps, teachers can scaffold learning how to learn at these higher orders at a developmentally appropriate level, as per Piaget's teachings.
Jean Piaget
& Cognitive Development
Four stages of cognitive development
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Sensorimotor (0–2 yrs old): Infants explore and learn about the world through their senses and develop their motor skills.
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Preoperational (2–7 yrs old): Children develop their language skills and represent the world symbolically. They also engage in imaginative play as a form of discovery and processing the world.
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Concrete operational (7–11 yrs old): Children develop logical reasoning around concrete objects and environmental events.
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Formal operational (11+ yrs old): As children enter adolescence, the develop abstract thinking skills and an ability for hypothetical reasoning.
The learner in all stages learns through active engagement with their environment. According to Piaget, cognitive development goes hand in hand with biological development, as the learner reorganizes their mental processes in response to environmental experience.
Schemas, the basic building block of Piaget's cognitive model, creates a mental representation of the world. As the child develops, they increase their capacity and complexity of schemata. Operations are organized, sophisticated groups of schemata, which the child increasingly adapts with growth.
Implications for teaching & learning
The child solves problems in their environment through developing schemata. Learning is the process of environmental adaptation, where the child alters these mental models of the world to reflect how the world actually is. Adaptation further happens through assimilation, incorporating new experiences into awareness via existing schemata, and through accommodation, altering the existing schemata to solve new experiences. The child is thus an active participant in their maturation.
When existing schemas adequately explain the world around us, we reach a state of equilibrium. But learning does present new situations, which creates disequilibrium and requires "rethinking" one's world view.
Thus teaching and learning requires the child or learner to discover, research, and experiment for themselves to understand and make sense of the learning material, which the teacher provides. The teacher, in turn, should evaluate the learner's level of development in order to provide suitable tasks for learning. One teaches to the child's developmental stage, creating disequilibrium by devising lessons with useful objectives.
Lev Vygotsky
& the Zone of Proximal Development
Vygotsky considered the role of culture and society as central in the formation and development of reason, speech, and mental abilities in children. Adults, as purveyors of knowledge, are key players in children's cognitive development by assigning culturally specific meaning to the world around them. Their mutual co-creation expands the child's capacity to learn toward formal reasoning.
Language is also central to learning. Inner speech enables mental reasoning and external speech enables one to communicate with others. Before the age of two, Vygotsky believed, the child has no internal language, only social language.
Implications for teaching & learning
Like Piaget, Vygotsky believed in the central role of the learner as active participant in the learning process through meaningful interactions with the world. Unlike Piaget, whose knowledge acquisition involved interactions with content, Vygotsky saw knowledge as co-constructed through meaningful social interactions. Learning is thus collaborative in nature.
Vygotsky's zone of proximal development places the teacher in the pivotal role of More Knowledgeable Other (MKO), who provides the tools of intellectual adaptation. With the guidance of the MKO, the student expands their access to knowledge towards areas just beyond their reach through scaffolding. Learning is more student-centered, customized to their individual zones of independence. Based on that, the teacher can create the framework for reaching learning goals.
Jerome Bruner
& Spiral Curriculum
Bruner posits that children go through three stages of cognitive development:
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Enactive representation (action-based, 0–1 yrs old): knowledge through motor responses; thinking through physical actions (by doing, vs. internal representation).
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Iconic representation (image-based, 1–6 yrs old): information stored as pictures or sensory, mental images (icons). Diagrams and illustration help when learning new subjects. Thinking based in hearing smell or touch, and sight.
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Symbolic representations (language-based, 7+ yrs old): knowledge in language, math or other symbolic forms as music. Symbols are more flexible and lead to more abstract representation.
Not age-dependent, Bruner recommends these three stages for all ages when encountering new material.
Implications for teaching & learning design
In this learner centered approach, the teacher may need to provide varying levels of assistance along the journey towards advanced knowledge. Bruner emphasizes the importance of organized instruction so as to assist the active learner in assimilating new information to existing schemata. Part of the learning is figuring out the structure of the subject content assisted by this organized instruction. This helps to create a level of autonomy enabling the learner to eventually organize their own instruction.
Education should thus facilitate the learner's problem-solving and thinking skills and develop symbolic thought in children.
Albert Bandura
& Social Cognitive Theory
Self-efficacy
Developing the belief in one's on capability to accomplish tasks is key in learning, which requires motivation, effort, and persistence.
Implications for teaching & learning
Observational learning occurs when individuals model themselves after peers who are knowledgeable, higher or similar status, or rewarded or nurturing figures. The learner seeks to adopt their behaviors through observation. These peers and (role) models are instrumental in modeling success and motivating learners to similarly achieve. Mentorship programs and group learning experiences can provide exposure to peer mastery and can simultaneously motivate.
Motivators could be self-identification with the model/peer, or aspirational to reach a certain status or level of knowledge. Rewarded behaviors could also spark imitation. Internal or external reinforcements further sparks motivation.
Mediational Processes
Observational learning employs cognitive processes to acquire knowledge. Social Learning Theory takes the behaviorist model of the black box, deemed unknowable, and closely scrutinizes these very same mediational processes. Environmental stimuli are the social inputs which output model following behavior, or learning.
These mediational processes are (see left-hand graphic):
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Attention: Imitated behavior must first be noticed
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Retention: The behavior to follow must be remembered
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Motor Reproduction: Our ability to perform the behavior is key.
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Motivation: Willingness to reproduce behavior
However, this does not fully explain the cognitive processes involved, just the pre-requisite steps.
Implications (of constructivism) for instructional (learning) design:
Constructivist learning theories place the inner process of learning front and center. Whether in the environment itself provides the input (stimulus) for learning or its social context furnishes the impetus for learning, the learner is active participant in knowledge acquisition.
Cognitive Load Theory provides a contemporary examination of the optimal conditions for learning, or processing information.
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For Piaget, the child's cognitive development determined the learner's information capacity. Instructional materials and activities need to meet the learner at their cognitive stage.
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For Vygotsky, more knowledgeable individuals manage the learner's cognitive load in the Zone of Proximal Development.
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Bruner applies scaffolding to accommodate the learner's cognitive load and motivation with materials presented in smaller steps.
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Bandura's social cognitive theory posits that cognitive load is determined by the learner's self-efficacy with their belief in their abilities playing a central role. Being presented with materials at the appropriate level could strengthen this.
Cognitive Load Theory
In sum, our minds can only take in so much information at once.
When designing learning experiences, human cognitive architecture and its capacity to process information should be considered:
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Working memory: first processor; if load is reduced, information can travel to long-term memory.
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short-term memory: can hold limited number of elements simultaneously
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long-term memory: structures that help us think, perceive, and solve problems (Sweller)
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Schemas: "cognitive structures that make up an individual's knowledge base" (Sweller); what experts acquire
Goal of design: reduce working memory load.
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Use goal-free problems to lighten the working memory load
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Physically integrate sources of information
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Reduce redundancy
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Use auditory and visual information where both are essential, as they use different channels and thus increase capacity.
Strength and limitations of cognitivism in Higher Education >