Cognitive view of learning

• Maria Mubashar
• Fajar Rashid
• Sumaiya Maqsood
• Mehwish Mubashar
• Aniqa Amir
Group Members

• Cognitive View of learning
• What is learning?
• The information processing model
• How mind works?
1. Sensory memory
2. Short term memory
3. Long term memory
• Metacognition
• Diversity in Information Processing
• Cognitive principles for the classroom
TABLE OF CONTENT

What is the Cognitive view of how we
learn?
● Cognitive psychology and cognitive views of learning was the combined work of
several influential psychologists since the late 1950s.
● As behavioral learning theories define learning as a relatively enduring change
in observable behavior that occurs as a result of the interaction of an individual
with the environment.
● Educational psychologists became frustrated with the limitations of behaviorist
theories and methods, which could not explain the complexities of human
cognition, such as how language develops and how meaningful learning
occurs.
● So, cognitive psychology explains how internal and external factors influence
an individual’s mental processes to supplement learning.

What is learning?
● Learning involves far more than thinking: it involves the whole
personality - senses, feelings, intuition, beliefs, values and will.
● Gardner Murphy (1968) define learning as;
“The term learning covers every modification in behavior to meet
environmental requirements.”
● According to Kingsley and R. Garry;
“Learning is the process by which behavior (in the broader sense) is
originated or changes through practice or training.”

Cognitive Learning
● Cognitive learning is an active style of learning that focuses on
helping you learn how to maximize your brain’s potential.
● The ability of the brain’s mental processes to absorb and retain
information through experience, senses, and thought is known as
cognition.
● Cognitive views of learning are characterized by their focus on the
changes in thought that are involved in learning.
● They emphasize the mental processes underlying the processing of
new information, such as paying attention to an explanation,
interpreting a graph, or relating new concepts to prior knowledge.
● Due to this emphasis, cognitive theory defines learning as a relatively
enduring change in mental structures that occurs as a result of the
interaction of an individual with the environment.

Behaviuoral views
• A relatively enduring change in
observable behavior that occurs as a
result of an individual’s interaction
with the environment
• Producing desirable behavior or
reducing undesirable behavior
• Reflects differences in students past
Conditioning reinforcement and
punishment
• Controlled laboratory experiments
conducted with animals other than
human and examining only observable
behaviors
Cognitive views
• A relatively enduring change in mental
structures that occurs a result of an
individual’s interaction with the
environment
• Promoting growth in student’s mental
structure
• Play a fundamental role in
understanding how students construct
new knowledge or acquire new skills
• Varied research methods conducted
with a diversity of human's examining
observable behaviors and mental state
Difference between cognitive views and
behaviuoral views of learning

The Information Processing Model
● The information processing model simplified is comparing the human
brain to a computer or basic processor.
● Information Processing model tell that how individuals perceive,
analyze, manipulate, use, and remember information.
● A model is a human-made, concrete representation of a complex
system that can be used to guide the understanding of the real
system.

How mind works?
● It is theorized that the brain works in a set sequence, as does a computer.
● The sequence goes as follows, receives input, processes the information, and
delivers an output.
● The information-processing model is the classic model used by cognitive
psychologists to explain cognition and learning.
● The Atkinson and Shiffrin Model was proposed in 1968 by Richard Atkinson and
Richard Shiffrin.
● The model illustrates their theory of the human memory. The model is an
explanation of how memory processes work.
● You hear and see and feel many things, but only a small number are
remembered.

These two theorists used their model to show that the human memory can be broken
in to three sub-sections that are:
• Sensory Memory
• Short-Term Memory
• Long-Term Memory

Sensory Memory
● Sensory memory is the information store that briefly holds stimuli from the
environment until they can be processed (Neisser, 1967).
● The sensory memory is responsible for holding onto information that the mind
receives through the senses such as auditory and visual information.
● For example, if someone were to hear a bird chirp, they know that it is a bird
because that information is held in the brief sensory memory.
● This memory usually unconscious and last for a very short amount of time.
● The Sensory Memory has a very limited capacity and duration; it can only handle
between 3-7 units, or stimuli, at a time and only for about 1- 3 seconds at a time
before information is forgotten.
● A convenient way to think of the Sensory Memory is as a filter.

Attention can be defined as the
process of allocating cognitive
resources to a stimulus or task
at hand.
Perception
Perception is defined as the
cognitive process that gives
meaning to sensory input.
Attention

Sensory Memory
Attention
Attention is a selective process by nature
because the amount of cognitive resources
in the brain are limited (Mangels, Piction, &
Craik, 2001).
In other words, we can focus our attention
on only so many things at one time
(Anderson, 2005).
Attention typically requires conscious
effort, such as when learners focus on
certain information because it is important
for achieving their goals.
Perception
Once attention is devoted to certain stimuli,
perception is the process that interprets the stimuli
based on our prior knowledge or long-term memory.
The fact that different people may perceive different
things from the same picture demonstrates that the
process of making sense is subjective.
In fact, research in perception shows that what we
see, hear, smell, taste, and feel depends on our
personal memories and experiences (Mandler,
1984).
Checking on students’ perception of new
information is essential to learning.
You can ask open-ended questions during
instruction to see if students were able to identify
essential information.

Short Term Memory
● Short-term memory is also called working memory and relates to what we
are thinking about at any given moment in time.
● In working Memory, the capacity and duration are slightly longer
than Sensory Memory, but not by much.
● The duration of STM seems to be between 15 and 30 seconds, and the
capacity about 7 items.
● Short term memory retains information that is needed for only a short period
of time such as remembering a phone number that needs to be dialed.

Maintenance Rehearsal is useful at keeping, or maintaining,
information in the Working Memory.
Central Executive:
This is used to hold visual and spatial information.
Maintenance Rehearsal:
Phonological Loop:
Visuospatial Sketch Pad:
The Central Executive is the control center, regulating how
information is being processed between each of the memory
stores.
The phonological loop is a component of working memory
model that deals with spoken and written material.

Maintenance Rehearsal
● Maintenance Rehearsal is useful at keeping, or maintaining,
information in the Working Memory, but typically, information does
not get much further, and is soon forgotten once attention is
directed elsewhere.
● An example of maintenance rehearsal would be remembering a
phone number only long enough to make the phone call.
● The goal of Rehearsal is Encoding, or the storage of information
into Long-Term Memory.
● Baddeley and Hitch introduced the model of working memory in
1974.
● Through their research, they contributed more to help understand
how the mind may process information.

● Storage is simply means holding onto the information.
● It is the cognitive process by which a copy of new information is
saved into long-term memory.
● Storing concerns the nature of memory stores, where the
information is stored, how long the memory lasts for (duration),
how much can be stored at any time (capacity) and what kind of
information is held.
● The way we store information affects the way we retrieve it.
● However, most of the new information that is held in working
memory is subject to some type of modification before being
stored in long-term memory.
● Even when you read the same story to all the students in your
classroom, each student is likely to give different interpretations
to the story and relate the characters and events to their unique
experiences.
Storage

● Encoding is the cognitive process by which new information is
elaborated or organized and saved into long-term memory.
● When information comes into our memory system (from sensory input),
it needs to be changed into a form that the system can cope with, so that
it can be stored.
● Think of this as similar to changing your money into a different currency
when you travel from one country to another.
● There are three main ways in which information can be encoded
(changed): Visual (picture), Acoustic (sound) and Semantic (meaning).
● To better understand the differences between storing and encoding new
information, let’s distinguish between rote learning and meaningful
learning methods.
Encoding

Meaningful Learning Methods
Students experience meaningful learning
when they make connections
between new information and their
prior knowledge.
Therefore, meaningful learning requires
students to encode rather than
merely store new information into
long term memory.
Meaningful learning is more efficient
than rote learning, especially when
students can relate ideas to
themselves.
There are two methods for encoding
information in meaningful ways:
elaboration and organization.
Rote Learning Methods
Students experience rote
learning when they are
able to remember
something, yet what they
remember has no meaning
attached to it.
Rote learning is the result of
merely storing new
information and can be
achieved with rehearsal,
repeating information over
and over for a long period
of time, either mentally or
aloud.

With elaboration methods, students use their
prior knowledge to expand on a new idea,
thereby storing more information than
what was originally presented to them.
The second method for encoding information
meaningfully is organization, which is
most useful when the information to be
encoded is complex and interrelated.
Organization consists of providing an orderly
structure to multiple pieces of
information; it can range from “chunking”
information with similar characteristics
(i.e., categorizing items) to creating a
visual representation of all the most
relevant concepts to be learned with
corresponding links to other concepts
(e.g., concept maps).
Usually, rehearsal leads to a
long-term memory effect.
You may be able to sing the
words of a song that you
rote-memorized at a very
early age. But it’s not until
years later that you are able
to think about the words and
understand their meaning.

● Retrieval is the opposite process to storing and encoding and consists of
pulling information from our long-term memory into our working memory.
● Retrieval can be conscious or automatic.
● Other times, retrieving information from long-term memory is automatic,
such as when students remember regular classroom procedures, such as
writing their name on an assignment, without the need to be reminded.
● If we can’t remember something, it may be because we are unable to
retrieve it.
● When we are asked to retrieve something from memory, the differences
between STM and LTM become very clear.
● STM is stored and retrieved sequentially.
● For example, if a group of participants are given a list of words to remember,
and then asked to recall the fourth word on the list, participants go through
the list in the order they heard it in order to retrieve the information.
● Organizing information can help aid retrieval.
Memory Retrieval

● You can organize information in sequences (such as alphabetically, by size or by
time).
● Pulling information from long-term memory into working memory through these
steps;
1. Retrieval and Knowledge Activation
2. Retrieval and Knowledge Reconstruction
3. Retrieval and Forgetting
Retrieval and Knowledge Activation:
● Although the amount of information in our long-term memory is huge, we never
retrieve more than a few pieces of information at any one time.
● The mechanism at work when we retrieve information from long-term memory has
been called knowledge activation.
● Therefore, knowledge activation is the process of becoming aware of information
in long-term memory and usually spreads from one idea to other ideas that are
related to the original one.
Memory Retrieval

Retrieval and Knowledge Reconstruction:
● If knowledge activation does not find the information we are trying to retrieve, we
are either unable to come up with an answer (i.e., the feeling of “I don’t know”) or
we might come up with an answer through knowledge reconstruction, a mental
process that uses the information we have stored in long-term memory to construct
a reasonable answer.
● An advantage of memory reconstruction is that students develop new
understandings and skills by changing their mental structures over time.
● Also, reconstructive memory is very efficient.
● Rather than remembering the entirety of a memory event, we only need to
remember key elements of the event.
● Later, at retrieval, when key elements are being activated, we can put them
together to reconstruct the event.

Retrieval and Forgetting:
● The information-processing model assumes that part of the information held in
sensory memory, working memory, or long-term memory can be lost.
● There are at least three theories to explain retrieval failure.
○ Trace decay theory
○ Interference theory
○ Cue-dependent theory
● One theory argues that information might decay over time. It is called the trace
decay theory.
● We forget information when activation of the links connecting to the information
does not happen for a long period of time.
● In other words, the “use it or lose it” effect.
● Forgetting happens when information is not used.
● The second theory, interference theory argues that failure to retrieve information
from long-term memory is the result of the interference of other information with
the search for the target information, such as when you want to remember the
name of an actress and other names pop into in your head instead.

● Interference can be explained by cognitive views of learning.
● Because information is encoded in an organized and connected manner.
● The larger the amount of information encoded, the more connections there are in
your mental structures.
● Finally, according to the cue-dependent theory, forgetting is caused by a lack of
effective retrieval cues.
● For example, a student might fail to retrieve a fact for an exam even when he is
certain that he knows the fact.
● Have you ever experienced this feeling? This phenomenon is called the tip-of-the-
tongue.
● The TOT effect is the feeling of knowing something that cannot be retrieved
immediately.
● Despite the retrieval failure, students have the feeling that the word that they are
searching for is at the “tip of their tongue,” therefore its name.
● Once he finds the correct address for the information, retrieval will occur.

Long Term Memory
● Long-term memory refers to the storage of information over an extended
period.
● Unlike STM, long-term memory has a seemingly limitless capacity to store
information with little or no decay and requires little if any, rehearsal.
● In addition to these characteristics, long-term memory codes information
according to meaning, pattern and other characteristics.
● It is this memory that helps us to remember.
● Remembering identifying data like one’s name, father’s name, date of birth,
date of marriage, etc., is the simplest example of long-term memory.
● If you can remember something that happened more than just a few moments
ago, whether it occurred just hours ago or decades earlier, then it is a long-
term memory a number of things on a relatively permanent basis.

Long Term Memory
● Long-term memory is like a library, with millions of organized entries that can
be retrieved into working memory for reference and use.
● Keep in mind, however, that the computer metaphor is over simplistic because
it fails to capture the information processing complexity of the human brain.
● Similar to sensory memory, which includes specialized sensory registers (i.e.,
visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, olfactory), and working memory, which
includes specialized subsystems (i.e., VVSP, PL, and CE).
● Long-term memory can be broken down into different types.
● Declarative (divided into semantic and episodic knowledge), procedural, and
conditional knowledge.

Long-term Memory
Declarative Knowledge
Knowing “What”
Semantic Memory
General knowledge
about the world
Episodic Memory
Knowledge about
ourselves
Procedural Knowledge
Knowing “How”
Conditional Knowledge
Knowing “When” and
“Why”

● Declarative knowledge can be defined as knowing “what”.
● A characteristic of declarative knowledge is its availability to our
consciousness.
● This type of knowledge can be subdivided into two specialized memories:
● Semantic memory, or general knowledge about the world (e.g., specific facts,
definitions, principles).
● It includes knowledge learned at school (i.e., formal education) and knowledge
learned outside of school (i.e., informal knowledge).
● Semantic memory helps in storing as well as retrieving a collection of
relationships between events or association of ideas.
● Semantic memory impressions are more or less permanent.

● A student consciously retrieves information from semantic memory when he
needs to provide an answer to the following questions:
○ What is a lemon?
○ Why are plants green?
○ Who is the president of the United States?
○ What is the difference between a square and a rectangle?
● Episodic memory, or knowledge about our own life experiences (e.g., events,
places, times, and circumstances), also known as autobiographical knowledge.
● What even has happened during one’s life is stored in the shape of episodic
memory traces organized according to the time, space and other characteristics of
the events.
● At the time if recall, these memory traces are reproduced in the manner and
sequence in which they have been organized and stored in one’s mental
apparatus.

● Episodic memory is the memory which depends on retrieving the particular event
or episodes experienced by a person through his direct or indirect experiences.
● Retrieval from episodic memory happens when you need to provide an answer to
the following questions:
○ What did the professor say about working memory capacity yesterday?
○ What school did you attend when you were a fourth-grader?
○ Who did you have dinner with yesterday?
○ How old were you when your little sister was born?

● Procedural knowledge has been defined as “knowing how,” our knowledge of
how to perform tasks.
● A characteristic of procedural knowledge is that, unlike declarative
knowledge, we are not able to consciously retrieve this information from
long-term memory.
● This characteristic makes procedural knowledge difficult or impossible to
verbalize; therefore, it has also been called implicit memory.
● A student uses his procedural knowledge when engaging in an automatic
task.
● An example would be typing an essay on a computer, provided that typing
has been practiced for so long that it has become an automatic procedure
and the student does not need to consciously control it any longer.
Procedural Knowledge

● Conditional knowledge is “knowing when and why” to apply declarative
and procedural knowledge.
● It takes students’ conditional knowledge to determine when to apply an
appropriate math procedure (e.g., addition, subtraction, division,
multiplication) to solve story problems.
● Conditional knowledge will allow a student to answer the following
questions:
○ Should I use multiplication or division to solve this problem?
○ Should I take this street or that street to go to school?
○ What strategies should I use to study for this exam?
Conditional Knowledge

How Is Knowledge Represented in Long-Term
Memory?
● Knowledge representations are also known as mental representations.
● Mental representations preserve the information that we encode in
long-term memory and can be operated on by a variety of mental
processes.
● For example, you can activate a mental representation of your bedroom
(which you have stored in your long-term memory) and apply a mental
process to the generated picture in your head by imagining how your
bedroom would look if you moved the furniture around.
● Experts believe that declarative and procedural knowledge are
represented differently in our minds.

● One way in which cognitive psychologists explain how we represent declarative
knowledge in long-term memory is derived from schema theory.
● According to schema theory, people represent knowledge as networks of
connected facts and concepts that provide a structure for making sense of new
information.
● These structures are called schemas or schemata.
● A second way to represent declarative knowledge is through propositional
networks.
● A proposition is the smallest unit of meaning and can be thought of as an
assertion that is subject to being true or false.
● For example, the sentences “The cat was chased by the dog” and “The dog
chased the cat” represent the same proposition, although the sentences are
slightly different; and the sentence “Mary sat on the new sofa” represent two
propositions: “Mary sat on the sofa” and “The sofa is new.”
Schemas, Propositions, and Images

● Finally, some experts believe that declarative knowledge may be represented
by images, mental representations that keep the same structure or
appearance as the original information.
● Imagery theory is supported by research showing that manipulating an image
in one’s head (e.g., rotating, scanning) takes approximately the same amount
of time as manipulating the actual object.
● However, imagery theory is still controversial because many psychologists
believe that declarative knowledge could be stored as propositional networks
and later translated into images within working memory when the
information needs to be manipulated (e.g. scanned, rotated).
Schemas, Propositions, and Images

● Schemata and propositions are ways of representing declarative knowledge.
● Procedural knowledge can be represented through scripts and production rules.
● A script is a schema representation for a procedure. When tasks are repeated
over and over, the procedure involved in accomplishing the task is represented
as a complex structure with interconnected elements that are expected to be
present every time the procedure is initiatedProductions are if/then rules stating
an action to be performed and the condition under which such action should be
undertaken.
● A production rule or production system is thought to be initiated just like a
computer program.
● Once a certain condition exists, it automatically triggers the rules that follow
that condition and that are necessary to perform the task.
Scripts and Productions

Metacognition
● When we introduced cognitive views of learning, we defined cognition as the mental
processes and structures involved in thinking and learning. Metacognition adds a
prefix to cognition.
● Meta cognition is often referred to as “thinking about thinking”.
● Metacognition is a regulatory system that helps a person understand and control his
or her own cognitive performance.
● Metacognition allows people to take charge of their own learning.
● Sometimes people use the phrase ‘going meta’ when talking about metacognition,
referring to the process of stepping back to see what you are doing, as if you were
someone else observing it.
● “Metacognition was originally referred to as the knowledge about and regulation of
one’s own cognitive activities in learning processes”.
● Metacognition involves awareness of how they learn, an evaluation of their learning
needs, generating strategies to meet these needs and then implementing the
strategies.

Components of Metacognition
● Metacognition includes the ability to know when and why to apply different
strategies to study or solve different problem types. Metacognition includes two
components:
○ Knowledge of cognition
○ Control of cognition
● The first component, knowledge of cognition is stored in our long-term memory.
● Specifically, metacognition involves the three knowledge types in our memory:
declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge.
● A student might know what concepts he learned in pre-algebra and when and
where he learned the concepts, which are stored in the semantic and episodic
memories within declarative knowledge, respectively.
● He may also have learned some strategies to solve algebraic expressions, which
are part of his procedural knowledge.

Components of Metacognition
● Although knowledge about our knowledge is important to learning, this
knowledge may not promote further cognitive growth unless the student
engages in the second component of metacognition is control of cognition.
● This is why the most current theoretical developments define metacognition
as the strategic application of declarative, procedural, and conditional
knowledge to accomplish goals and solve problems.

Metacognition and Learning
● Students’ control of cognition can significantly improve their cognitive
processing and learning.
● Adults often fail to monitor their thinking so the adults can benefit from
metacognitive training.
● Students who have been taught metacognitive (self-regulated learning) skills
learn better than students who have not been taught these skills.
● It is possible to produce better learners by teaching metacognitive skills.
● Students with good metacognitive skills are better critical thinkers, problem-
solvers, or decision makers than students who are not.
● Metacognitive training can increase students’ self-confidence and sense of
personal responsibility for their own development.

● Metacognition is a difficult cognitive skill and requires time to develop.
● Yet children can be taught strategies for regulating their learning, such as
figuring out how much time they will need to study or finding an effective
strategy to study or solve a problem.
● Here are some metacognitive skills that each student may follow.
○ Knowing your limits - knowing the limits of one’s own memory for a particular
task and creating a means of external support.
○ Self-monitoring – self-monitoring one’s learning strategy, such as concept
mapping, and then adapting the strategy if it is not effective.
○ Modify – noticing whether one comprehend something one just read and then
modifying approach if one did not comprehend it.
Metacognition and learning

○ Skimming – choosing to skim subheadings of unimportant information to get to
the information one need.
○ Rehearsing – repeatedly rehearsing a skill in order to gain proficiency.
○ Self-test – periodically doing self-tests to see how well you learned something.

Diversity in Information Processing
● Diversity means understanding that each individual is unique, and
recognizing our individual differences.
● These can be along the dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual
orientation, socio-economic status, age, physical abilities, religious beliefs,
political beliefs, or other ideologies.
● The information-processing model was offered as a description of the
universal characteristics of humans’ cognitive architecture.
● However, as a future teacher you will need to be aware of some ways in
which students differ in the many memory systems and cognitive processes
described by the model.
● The goal of this section is to help you gain awareness about diversity in
information processing by summarizing some of these differences.

● Sensory memory is a very brief memory that allows people to retain impressions of
sensory information after the original stimulus has ceased.
● It is often thought of as the first stage of memory that involves registering a
tremendous amount of information about the environment, but only for a very brief
period.
● The purpose of sensory memory is to retain information long enough for it to be
recognized. Sensory memory allows an individual to remember an input in great
detail but for only a few milliseconds.
● The average student will have normal functioning of the sensory registers.
● Indication of tactile sensitivity may include avoiding touch or games that involve
contact with others; indication of visual sensitivity may include squinting, looking off
to one side instead of straight ahead, or becoming agitated in environments where
there are too many visual stimuli; and indication of auditory sensitivity may include
grimaces upon hearing certain sounds, withdrawal from people who talk loudly, or
echolalia (repeating back what is being said)
Differences in Sensory Memory

● Attention, in psychology, the concentration of awareness on some phenomenon
to the exclusion of other stimuli.
● Attention, then, may be understood as a condition of selective awareness which
governs the extent and quality of one’s interactions with one’s environment.
● Recent neuropsychology research suggests that students with ADHD have
excessively slow brain-wave activity, which results in a deficit in the brain’s
inhibitory mechanism.
● The inhibitory mechanism is fundamental in keeping us focused because it
represses distracting stimuli from the environment.
● Students with mental retardation are also characterized by a reduced ability to
ignore irrelevant information and focus their attention on relevant information.
● In all these cases, teachers should be especially careful to keep distracting stimuli
to a minimum, capture students’ attention before giving instructions or presenting
new information.
Differences in Attention

● Working memory is a cognitive system with a limited capacity that can hold
information temporarily.
● Working memory is important for reasoning and the guidance of decision-making
and behavior.
● High and low working memory (WM) capacity individuals performed the serial
reaction time task under both incidental and intentional learning conditions to
determine the role of WM capacity in the learning of sequential information.
● WM capacity differences emerged in conditions of intentional but not incidental
learning, indicating that individual differences in WM capacity occur in tasks
requiring some form of control, with little difference appearing on tasks that
required relatively automatic processing.
● The degree of learning was significantly related to higher order cognition, but only
when intentional processing was emphasized.
Differences in Working Memory

● However, teachers will find differences in working memory capacity among older
students, with larger working memory associated with higher scores on
intelligence tests.
● Students with smaller working memory are associated with a variety of learning
and language disorders.
● Students with learning disabilities remember fewer words than their normal
counterparts and frequently have deficits in working memory, which is
demonstrated in their difficulty in reading and writing tasks.
Differences in Working Memory

● Long-term memory is the storage of information for a long time. Long-term
memory is the final stage in the processing of memory.
● The Information stored in long-term memory lasts longer than those is short-term
memory.
● Long-term memory decays very little with time and it is easier to recall.
● The first factor that influences the duration of long-term memory is the way
memory was encoded.
● Optimally encoded memories last much longer than shallow processed memories.
● Another factor is the retrieval of memory.
● The number of times a specific memory is accessed plays an important role in the
strengthening of memory.
● This is probably the reason for better retrieval of information that is repeated and
practiced again and again.
Differences in Long-term Memory

● Giving attention and focus to the information makes it stick to the brain for a
relatively long time.
● The capacity of long-term memory is thought to have no limits.
● Differences in learners’ prior knowledge are an extremely important source of
individual differences in the classroom.
● When learners have stronger declarative and procedural knowledge in a domain,
they are better able to learn new information in that domain.
● Students’ cultural and socioeconomic background will also result in prior
knowledge differences due to differences in their prior academic and
nonacademic experiences.
● Because prior knowledge acts as a lens through which students view the world
and a foundation on which they construct new knowledge, teachers should learn
about their students’ diverse backgrounds and create meaningful activities that
incorporate their prior experiences.
Differences in Long-term Memory

● Metacognition is, put simply, thinking about one's thinking.
● More precisely, it refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one's
understanding and performance.
● Metacognition includes a critical awareness of (a) one's thinking and learning
and (b) oneself as a thinker and learner.
● Individual differences in metacognitive accuracy are generally thought to
reflect differences in metacognitive ability.
● If so, memory monitoring performance should be consistent across different
metacognitive tasks and show high test-retest reliability.
● Two experiments examined these possibilities, using four common
metacognitive tasks: ease of learning judgments, feeling of knowing judgments,
judgments of learning, and text comprehension monitoring.
Differences in Metacognition

● Most of the research in metacognition shows significant developmental
differences, with metacognitive skills developing slowly during the school years.
● Typically, by age 5 or 6, children know that familiar items are easier to
understand than unfamiliar ones, that short lists are easier to remember than
long ones, that recognition is easier than recall, and that forgetting is more
likely to occur as time goes by.
● On the other hand, young children fail to understand that related items are
easier to remember than unrelated ones and that remembering the gist of a story
is easier than remembering verbatim information; they also have overly
optimistic evaluations of their memory skills.
Differences in Metacognition

Cognitive Principles for the Classroom
● Cognitive psychologists have identified some common principles
underlying all cognitive views of learning.
○ Attract Students’ Attention
○ Emphasize What Students Already Know
○ Help Students Become Active Meaning-Makers
○ Prevent Cognitive Overload
○ Promote Students’ Elaboration of New Information
○ Help Students Organize Complex Information
○ Encourage Metacognition

Attract Students’ Attention
● Attention is the starting point of learning.
● Effective teachers are aware of the relationship between attention and
learning and regularly monitor and direct students’ attention to what is
important in the classroom.
● This can be done directly, by requesting that students tune out or disregard
irrelevant stimuli in the classroom environment, or indirectly, by using
methods to attract and maintain students’ attention throughout the lesson.
● Some methods are aimed at directly guiding students’ attention to an
important topic (verbal and visual signaling), whereas other methods are
aimed at increasing attention indirectly by promoting students’ curiosity,
interest, or personal engagement in a task.

Attract Students’ Attention
● Direct attention-getters are useful:
○ Cueing students with visual signals
○ Highlighting the main steps that students needed to attend to while
watching an instructional animation, which helps students’ understanding
and problem-solving skills
○ Calling students by name, thus increasing attention and achievement

Emphasize What Students Already Know
● What students already know (i.e., prior knowledge) is the basis on which
new learning is built.
● Typically, people who already know something about a topic are able to
learn new information about the topic more effectively than those who do
not.
● For example, a student with prior knowledge about addition of natural
numbers will learn more effectively about multiplication of natural
numbers than one who does not have that knowledge base.

Emphasize What Students Already Know
● Occasionally, students’ prior knowledge may also impede or interfere with
new learning.
● This happens when learners make inappropriate connections between new
information and prior knowledge, or when learners’ prior knowledge is at
odds with new information, such as in the case of having a misconception
or bias.
● The instructional implication of this cognitive principle is that teachers
should activate students’ prior knowledge, to help them make connections
with the new information, and assess the quality of this prior knowledge
before teaching new concepts.

Help Students Become Active Meaning-Makers
● In the view of most cognitive theories, meaningful learning is the product of the
interaction among what students know, the new information, and what students
do as they learn.
● An active learner is one who engages in mental processes that result in
meaningful understanding of the material.
● In other words, active learners make rather than take information, and
meaningful learning is construction of meaning rather than accumulation of
knowledge.
● Therefore, teachers can improve learning by placing students in the most active
role possible during learning.
● Note that the cognitive view of active learning focuses on minds-on activities
rather than hands-on activities.
● Teachers need to make sure that students are attending to relevant information
and that students’ engagement is not only behavioral but also mental

Prevent Cognitive Overload
● The information-processing model emphasizes the idea that successful
encoding and retrieval depend to a great extent on the amount of cognitive
resources spent in the meaningful processing of new information.
● Therefore, teachers need to be sensitive to the limitations in students’ working
memory capacity when planning instruction and assessment.
● When instruction is at a rapid pace or too much information is conveyed to
students at any time, working memory capacity can become exhausted and
learning may not occur, a case of cognitive overload.
● Let’s take a look at some useful strategies that teachers can use to prevent
students’ cognitive overload and promote learning.

Chunking:
● Chunking is the process of combining separate items into larger interconnected
units.
● Take five seconds to look at the list of letters below and then try to remember as
many letters as you can:
ACDEEEFGHIIILMMNNNOOOOPRRSSTT
● Clearly, you won’t be able to remember the 29 letters because they exceed
working memory capacity.
● Consistent with past research, you will be likely to remember approximately 7
letters instead. Now, take five seconds to read the phrase below and then try to
remember it:
THE INFORMATION PROCESSING MODEL
● You probably had no problem reading it once and remembering it later, even after
the phrase is gone from your sight.
● Notice that the first 29 letters you tried to remember can be used to make the
four-word phrase.

Dual Processing:
● Recall that a characteristic of working memory is that it has two independent
storage components, one for visual/spatial information and one for words/sounds.
● Dual processing happens when students are asked to combine visual and auditory
information.
● Suppose you are reading a textbook to learn about how engines work.
● The text includes a written explanation and a graphic illustrating the engine
components and relationships between them.
● You study by reading the text, trying to find the corresponding words in the
graphic, and connecting the text with the pictures.
Pacing:
● A challenge to students’ limited working memory capacity and duration is the
processing of complex new information at a fast pace.
● In this scenario, learners may not have enough time to organize the instructional
materials and integrate them with their prior knowledge.

● Pacing is a method that allows students with less knowledge to reduce cognitive
load by breaking down a larger instructional unit into smaller segments or by
allowing students to learn at their own pace.
● Although pacing in a diverse classroom can be challenging, research in computer-
based learning has shown that allowing students to control the pace of instruction
significantly improves learning.
Practicing:
● A fourth way to prevent cognitive overload is to practice newly acquired
knowledge or skills until they become automatic.
● Recall from our distinction between automatic and conscious processing that
automatic processing requires minimal attentional resources.
● In other words, once a procedure has become automatic, the central executive
does not need to make use of the limited resources in working memory to control
its functioning.

Promote Students’ Elaboration of New Information
● Recall that elaboration is one of the two methods for encoding information in
meaningful ways.
● Examples of strategies that teachers can use to promote students’ elaboration of
new information are higher-order questioning as well as presenting and
generating examples, analogies, and mnemonics.
High-Order Questioning:
● Asking high-order questions promotes the elaboration of new information in
working memory because, in order to answer the question, students need to do the
following:
○ Hold the new information in working memory
○ Retrieve relevant prior knowledge from long-term memory
○ Make meaningful connections between the new information and their prior knowledge
○ Produce a coherent response

Presenting and Generating Examples:
● Mrs. Hickson has just finished demonstrating how water expands when it freezes.
● Next, she asks her sixth-graders to take a minute to think about examples of this
water property in their life experiences.
● After a minute, Suzy responds, “Well, last winter our dog’s water dish cracked
after it snowed and all the water froze.”
● Timmy asks, “Is that why my mom tells me not to fill the ice cube tray completely
with water because it makes the ice hard to get out?”
● Mrs. Hickson demonstrated a great approach to helping her students elaborate on
new information.
● She asked them to provide their own examples of a new concept.
● She could also have given students another example of water expanding and
asked whether the example corresponded to the concept they had just learned.
● This method is not only an effective way to promote elaboration; it is also a very
effective way to assess your students’ understanding because it can reveal their
misconceptions.

Analogies:
● After learning about the parts of the cell, Mr. Jackson asks his students to make
an analogy between the parts of the cell and things they have in their house.
● Elizabeth answers, “Well, the trash cans in the house are like the vacuoles,
because they hold all the waste.”
● Fred replies, “Yeah, and the cell membrane is like the walls and the roof because it
holds everything in while protecting it from the outside.”
● Another effective way to promote meaningful learning is to have students make
analogies between a new concept and another known concept.
● Teachers can find something in students’ prior knowledge that is well understood
and that works analogously to something that is unknown.
● Then students can establish parallel relationships between the known and
unknown system .

Mnemonics (nuh-maa-nik):
● Mnemonics are strategies to improve memory, such as having students make
verbal or visual associations to new concepts.
● Mnemonics are used to encode simple information (e.g., lists of words,
procedures, formulas) in meaningful ways.
● Once the associations between new information and prior knowledge are
made, very little effort is needed to rehearse the mnemonic.
● Therefore, mnemonics are more efficient methods to encode simple
information than rote memory methods.
● All mnemonics help students’ encoding via elaboration.
● New information is associated with familiar words or phrases or through
evocative images.

Help Students Organize Complex Information
● The second method to encode information meaningfully is organization.
● Some examples of strategies that teachers can use to help students organize
complex new information are advance organizers and graphic organizers.
Advance Organizers:
● Teachers can help students encode new information by providing advance
organizers, an organizational structure that is provided before students are asked to
learn new complex information.
● Advance organizers can be as simple as an outline for a book chapter or a heading
for text.
Graphic Organizers:
● Graphic organizers convert verbal information into a structured visual display that
shows at a glance the key parts of the whole and their relations.
● Concept maps are graphic organizers that represent relevant concepts as nodes or
circles and relationships between concepts as links or lines between nodes

● Concept maps are useful assessment tools when created by students, provided
that concept maps have also been used during instruction.
● Because students need to focus their attention on the structure of knowledge
to produce a concept map, they can be used to promote and assess their
organization of ideas.
● Other examples of graphic organizers are mind webs, knowledge maps,
diagrams, charts, matrices, flowcharts, and tables

Encourage Metacognition
● Developing students’ metacognitive abilities is an important educational goal.
● Although some students acquire self-regulation skills largely on their own, teachers
can model metacognition and self-regulation by helping learners set specific goals
for themselves and asking learners to keep records of their performance and reflect
on their learning in journals or portfolios.
● In addition, teachers should provide specific criteria to help students self-assess
their performance and teach a repertoire of strategies that can be used to improve
learning.
● These methods have been shown to help students gain metacognitive skills.
● Although metacognition is a high order cognitive skill, even kindergartners and first-
graders can be slowly made aware of their performance and progress with simple
questions such as “What did you learn today?”
● “What are some things that you could not do yesterday and that you can do today?”

Cognitive view of learning

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Cognitive view of learning