Cognitivism

This week I was presented with the idea of cognitivism, which at its heart, is about students experience and engagement when approaching new information.  Students need to make the connections within the information on their own to truly add it to their general fund of knowledge.  Another aspect of cognitivism is the use of shapes and images being used to form these connections.

Also, in this week’s resources, I was exposed to a few instructional strategies that make use of the idea of cognitivism.  The first of which was the use of cues, questions, and advance organizers.  This approach to introducing information forces the students to experience the information.  The teacher is leading them in the right direction in the learning with the right choice of questions and cues.  The students take those cues, and search for the right information.  If the student is actively searching for correct information, they are more apt to commit it to memory, since it is a more engaging experience.  A good example of this in action is a K-W-L chart.  Students and teachers approach a new topic by discussing the things that they already know, which helps the teacher formulate better questions that lead students in the correct directions.  It also lays a ground work for the lesson by having the students decide on what they want to know, which puts them in charge of their learning.  And it recaps things at the end with a discussion on what was learned.  Another good aspect of a table like this is that it takes advantage of the positives of using shapes and images to organize information.

Another strategy was the idea of summarization and note taking.  This, like the prior approach, forces the students to experience the information as opposed to just reading it.  If a student is asked to summarize a piece of reading in their own words, they will have to read it, decide on what was important, what to include, and how to phrase it in their own way.  That small amount of time spent on the information asks them to look at it nearly four times already.  Adding the experiential portion of writing things in their own words, the students increase their retention of it greatly.

Cognitivism appears to be the basis for much of what I was taught all throughout my college career.  Making the students work with the information as opposed to simply just reading it is solid practice.  With as many students as we have, and each with their own learning style, these approaches offer plenty of opportunity for many of them to put information into their long term memories.