Cognitivism in Practice

Cognitive learning theory has been the focus of this weeks studies and with it two instructional strategies called ‘Cues, Questions and Advance Organizers’ and ‘Summarizing and Note Taking’. This weeks blog focuses on correlating these strategies with the cognitive learning theory.

Cognitive learning theory is about learning being a mental operation whereby information enters the brain through a sensory input, this information is then mentally processed in the short term memory and if rehearsed or reviewed it should enter the long term memory for it is be used and referred to at a later date. This theory is totally different from behaviorism as internal, mental activity is the focus rather than external changes in the environment as discussed in last weeks blog posting.

            The cues, questions and advance organizers strategy is all about helping students to develop their ability to recall, use and organize information that they process (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, & Malenoski, 2007). Cues and questions are used to jog the students memories in order to recall the information the have learned, and advance organizers are tools that teachers give students to help them better organize and understand the information they encounter. I have just started experimenting with an advance organizer to better help my students learn my curriculum content and hopefully more easily recall this information in the future. The advance organizer that I am using is a concept map supplied by webspiration.com, it has been really easy to set up and it has allowed me to set up a resource to organize and represent connections between concepts whilst also including visual representations so that the information is more likely to enter the long-term memory.

            The other strategy of summarizing and note taking focuses on developing students’ abilities to condense and filter information that they have learned into notes that can be used to study from. The resource explains the importance of teaching students how to take quality notes and summarize if we want them to have something to study from so that they can succeed in what they are studying. There is an abundance of educational technologies available for teachers to help guide their students into taking quality notes and summaries such as wikis, blogs, concept maps, google docs etc. These documents can be completed individually or in collaborative groups but it is important to teach students that notes should be considered ‘works in progress’ and can always be edited and added to.

References:

Pitler, H., Hubbell, E., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). Using technology with classroom instruction that works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.