Cognitive theories of learning:

Piaget, Bruner, Gagne, Ausubel•By the end of this lesson you must be able to explain the concept of learning from the Cognitive theories perspectives•Identify the factors that play a role in the learning process according to cognitive theories•Be able to explain the Cognitive basic concepts and principles of learning .•Explain how you would use them to facilitate teaching-learning among your primary school learners

Cognitive definition of learning•Learning is a change in cognitive structure•The change that is visible in our behaviour is influenced not by stimuli or reinforcement as claimed by behaviourism

Our thoughts, reasoning, imaginations, perception, interest and value are also important internal factors that play a role in the process of learning. We act out of reasoning.

Cognitive theories emphasize the role of the mind in the organization, analysis, mental restructuring, interpretation, transformation of information into a meaningful experience. We can measure learning by measuring the thinking of our learners. Our behaviours are a result of how we think

Perceiving, thinking, imagining and remembering are cognitive mode of learning. Learning through insight

• While Behaviourism emphasise the role of the teacher as a director of instruction, the one who selects appropriate stimuli and reinforcement, Cognitive theories see learners as active participants who should manage their own learning through attending, processing, rehearsing, storing, retrieving what they have acquired.

• Cognitive theories also emphasise the role of past experience in the interpretation of new experience

Jean PiagetChildren understand and interpret their world differently

from that of adult.Their capacity to organise, analyse and interpret information

differ from age and stages of their development. The thinking and reasoning of children at sensory motor stage and preoperational stage lack logic as compared to those at concrete operational and formal operational stage.

Piaget advocate action based learning where children manipulate objects. Pupils must be encouraged to manipulate and explore a large number of materials and objects

Learning as a continuous process of assimilation, accommodation and equilibration

The role of perception in learning/ IPM modelPrinciples of organizing our experiencesThis is the tendency of human mind to impose

structure to the information that comes through our senses. We might be looking at the same information but seeing interpreting it differently. Cognitive theories stress the role of thinking process in learning process. We filter selectively what we want to learn. The mind identify feature, select, reject, analyse and store

Factors that interfere with our perception

• Selective attentionTeachers need to use different strategies to arouse and

direct the attention of their learners. Using a variety of teaching methods, teaching and learning aids, posing question, emphasis, underline, bold, silence, voice change

The age of the learner and the amount of material to be learned

• Sensory defect• Overhaste• Premature closure• motivation

Multi-store model/ Three port processing modelSensory Register

Receptors receive information from the environmentAttention and recognition is needed to process received information. Process such as encoding, decodingAttending to the feature of the learning materials.What happen to the information we have not attended to?Different people have different level of attention. During introduction the purpose is to make learners interested and pay

full attention to what is going to happen.• short term memoryHas a limited capacity to keep information for 30 minutes minimum.Can be strengthened through rehearsals , elaboration and practice.

Unless this information is chunked and send to the long term memory if it has to last longer

• Long term memoryHas a large unlimited capacity to keep huge

amount of information for a longer period.It keeps three categories of memoriesa) Episodic memories- our memories of times or

placesb) Semantic memories- meanings of ideas, facts and

conceptc) Procedural memories: steps used in a task or

learning of a particular skill

Jerome Bruner

Three modes of learning

Enactive mode: Touching, tasting, moving and grasping objects. Learning result from this physical interactions with objects. Early learning is motoric and action based.• Iconic Mode: Concepts and principles can be

demonstrated physically or through pictures and diagrams, slides, etc.

• Symbolic mode: language become the main vehicle to acquire a wide variety of experiences

• Bruner stresses on Discovery learning. Children to be allowed to discover things independently. Teachers should allow children opportunity to manipulate objects. Educational tours, the use of visuals help children to form images. At the later stage children will benefit from verbal learning.

• Episodes of learning involves acquisition, transformation and Evaluation.

Teachers should motivate learners to learn by using different modes of learning in the lessons

David Ausubel

Receptive learning/ Verbal learning/Sub-sumptionThe presence of cognitive structures facilitates

learning. Rote learning should be discouraged through relating the new information to the existing knowledge of the learners. The language and communication should be very well organized to facilitate meaningful learning.

Receptive learning involves presentation of factual information. Receptive learning do not necessarily need to be passive reception. When new learning is connected to what learners already know it is likely to be retained and applied.

• Existing mental structure is used to learn new ideas• Teachers should use advanced organiser when presenting

a new topic to their learners. The basic concepts that would enable learners to understand the rest of the topic should be covered first to enable the learners to understand the rest of the lesson. Expose your learners first to the central ideas before you do them in much more details- general overview of the topic. Use mediators that enable learners to make connections. Use chunking and BODMAS to assist learners to remember. Teach learners to identify main ideas from the topics and write under them the supporting. These strategies are called Expository teaching that aids the Mnemonic devices to search and locate information later.

• Concepts mapping, listing the key concepts in the topic. All these strategies can be used to help learners organise the information.

What is rote learningFixing information in your memory without

understanding its meaning. Information that was not properly organised to allow the learners to make connections with their existing knowledge

Rote learning is influenced by the following factors;

• Practice effectRevising, repeating, rehearsing what you learned

by rote can later improve your understandingTransfer effect. Connecting previous knowledge

to new lesson help learners to learn with understanding.

Proactive interference effect.A learner who have learned using the old

version of Microsoft word may find learning of the new version difficult when trying to apply the knowledge of other icons.

Serial position effectHow the alignment of the main ideas and basic

concepts are organised throughout the presentation will reduce rote learning

Context effectPutting one’s lesson in a context will improve

rote learningLevel effectPresentation of information should be done at

different levels/ iconic, enactive, symbolic.

Retro active interferenceLearning of the new material disrupt what one

has learned previouslyOrganisational effectRote learning improve when the material is

organised from simple to complexSerial position effectThis is when the main points and concepts arePositioned very well in the presentation to have

a good flow of ideas.

What is meaningful verbal learningSuccessful abstraction and comprehension of

main ideas of the lesson learnedFactors influencing meaningful verbal learningProviding learners with learning objectives

indicate the levels at which you want them to do their abstraction.

Selectively note taking, ability to spot and jot down key issues from the lesson

Teachers organisation of the material to be learned

Instruction presented verbally, teacher emphasize the main points combining with demonstration, visuals, mediators can positively affect meaningful learning.

Learners who take notes while they learn better as compared to learners who read silently while trying to use photographic memory on what they read.

Cognitive theories advices teachers to use the following teaching strategies in their presentation

• Advanced organisers

• Structured overviews

• Mediators

• Mnemonic devices• Chunking. Elaborations• Hierarchical retrieval systems

• Concept Mapping

GagneLearning is influenced by factors inside the learner as

well as outside the learners. Anger, pleasure, anxiety and curiosity are perceived as natural motives that need to be present in a learner to urge him to learn.

Basic skills should be learned first before the high level skills

There are eight types of learning from the simple to the complex

a) Signal learningHearing your father’s car approaching you have learned

to run to open the gate.

b) Stimulus-Response learningAnything that the teacher do to facilitate

learners to select the correct response will make learning easier. Presenting learners with objects that have common features is an example of stimulus-response learning. This would also facilitate the stimulus discrimination of objects

c) ChainingStructuring of related skills to be acquired

together is called chaining

d) Verbal associationPresenting objects and their names helps learners to

form the association between the word and the object. Teaching vocabularies to young learners can be done this way.

e) Discrimination LearningPresenting object to help learners to compare and

contrast assist the learners to discriminate between their attributes. The learning of shapes, sizes, colours, textures, letters can be an example.

Learning become more complex as we proceed from the former types of learning to other forms of learning.

f) Concept learning• A number of experiences is needed to form up

concepts. Children who had limited exposure to objects and situation will experience difficulties understanding certain abstract words. It is the understanding of concepts that would facilitate the learning of facts, ideas, principles and formulas.

• Children who brought a rich of sensory experience, having seen many examples, exposed to grouping and classification skills will be able to abstract and conceptualise correctly using the language. “ A picture is worth ten thousand words.” ( Behr:1975)

g) Rule LearningTo understand this rule, Heavy objects float over the

water while light objects sink.The learner should first understand the meaning of

basic concepts bolded if he is to transform this into practice.

Factors inside the learner such as: prior learning, language development, cognitive style of organising and transforming, attitude and motivation of the learner will influence learning. Situational factors as to how teaching/ learning activities are structured, selected teaching approaches, materials will also do its parts

h) Problem solving learning• When the teacher create a situation for

learners to apply learned concepts, ideas, rules to related situations.

Gestalt view of learning

Wolfgang Kohler, Kurt Kafka, Max Wetheimer, Karl Dunker• They emphasize the role of perception, the perceiver in the

learning process• learning is a process of restructuring and reorganizing learning

experiences.• It involves the arrangement of learning experiences in a

meaningful whole. The whole is greater then the parts and the parts derive meaning from the whole.

• Learners should be assisted to perceive, process, store and retrieve all the information

• Discovery of meaning creates learning and transfer to other related situation.

• The whole emerge first before the parts• Learning is a result of problem solving

• What is taught should be organized in a certain pattern or sequence

• Learning is a process of seeing meaningful relationships in a situation

• Reorganisation and restructuring of essential elements of problems to be solved help learners to form new cognitive structures

• Cognitive tension occurs when we are faced by something disorganised and we are unable to solve it. Anger and frustration follows when we do not understand.

• Insight / A-ha experience breaks through when we pieces of information's presented to us are structured and related to each other.

Gestalt scholars established the following laws of organising information

Figure –ground perception• This organising tendency to spot and pick up main

features from the situation. Our ability to short out relevant from irrelevant details. When you spot a picture from the wall, a badge on a blazer, an aeroplane against the sky or a song against the beats. Items underlined are the figures and the remaining are the background.

Law of Pragnanza/ similaritiesThe tendency to perceive objects that are similar as

belong together (similarities)

Law of Proximity: The tendency to group objects that are closer to one another than those that are far apart from one another.

Law of Continuity: Things that form a straight line tend to be perceived together compared to things which form curves

Form consistency: The form and size of a moving object remain the same no matter .

Law of closure: Our brains are able to fill in the gaps and complete the missing part of the information.

Too many items in the picture, too much details, failure to scan for details, careless arrangement leads to illusions and cognitive conflicts

• Our perception is influenced by our past experiences, attention, attitudes, interest

One who does not a have a past experience of a donkey and a mule will perceive them as the same. Our previous knowledge helps us to make sense of new information ( Schema theory)

Learners who are not interested in what they perceive are not ready to look for details.

They tend to close themselves off from the incoming information

Kurt Levin's view: Field theory• Learning is a dynamic activity influenced by the

learners’ intrinsic motivation. (Van Parreren’s theory)• A learner set some cognitive goals that he anticipate

to achieve.• Learning is also influenced by the valence quality of

the learning material. Its attractiveness, orderliness, vividness and so forth.

• Every learner operates in his own life space when he learn. Every learner perceive, organize and interpret information differently and form his points of view. Exposure to same information would not lead to the same response.