EDU510: Blog 3
- Rosa Conti
- Jun 18, 2022
- 8 min read
An Overview of Cognitive Applications & Teaching Principles
As my graduate class on the cognitive science of teaching and learning nears the end, it’s challenging to summarize the many principles and teaching methods I have learned over the past seven weeks. Studying cognitive science related to learning has many facets to explore and consider, and it’s easy to be remiss when trying to capture its holistic essence.
This article will cover several essential high points of cognitive science relevant to educator and learning perspectives. Each area will also offer a brief personal perspective as it experientially relates to my learning and corporate training work.
COGNITIVE SCIENCE
Let’s begin with a reminder: Cognitive science is the scientific and emotional study of how the mind processes and transforms information (Penn State, n.d.). It threads together theoretical and philosophical ideas that help with mental faculties such as “perception, language, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion” (Penn State, n.d., para. 1) as it relates to thinking and learning.
In other words, we have processes and procedures in our minds that we can tap into to help us remember, make sense of complex ideas, create relationships between old and new information, and much more. Educators can use these processes and procedures to help students develop an enthusiasm for learning, creating intrinsic motivation in students to become active learners.
While I am not a teacher nor have a classroom of students, I resonate with the philosophies and findings of cognitive learning – from my own experience and witnessing it in my corporate training work.
For example, to ensure content is mastered, learners must be allowed to “struggle through and resolve” cognitive conflict because research indicates that students need the motivation to want to undergo the struggle (Forney ISD, n.d.). Of the three key ingredients that must be present to evoke intrinsic motivation – autonomy, connection, and mastery (Forney ISD, n.d.), mastery interests me the most. Mastery requires a balance of challenge and ability. In other words, according to Forney ISD (n.d.), if the content is too challenging and the learners’ ability low, stress occurs. Inversely, boredom ensues if the challenge is too low and the learners’ ability is high. I have experienced both.
For instance, the instructional design for a course I took a few months ago was unnecessarily complicated with run-on sentences, misleading grammar, and a bucket of fifty-cent words. It's not that my ability is low, but the instructional designer made the instructions more complicated than they needed to be. The project direction could have been made much more straightforward, and as a learner, this made me resentful, and I struggled to keep refocusing myself to try and make sense of the poor instructions. On the contrary, I’ve taken mandatory work compliance courses that were so simplistic that it was difficult to retain interest. Hence, there needs to be a balance between (necessary) learning challenges and abilities.
MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS
A mental representation is how we perceive things or decide on ideas, thoughts, or experiences. One could argue that mental representations are personal biases because we each have different mental representations based on our life experiences, memories, thoughts, and more.
This bias is essential to a teaching or training environment because it’s critical to understand that learners have different mental representations. After all, their mental symbols and categorizations (concepts) and memories (images) vary from one another.
For example, if students are told to write a short essay, the concept of what “short” means will differ amongst the students. Herein lies the bias.
These mental symbols are “theoretical constructs” that exist in our minds and create schemas. According to developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, these are pieces of knowledge culled together from different experiences that provoke our reactions to incoming stimuli or information (McLeod, 2022).
Concepts, Images, Analogies, Rules, and Logic are the five mental representations that work together to support critical thinking and bolster and reinforce learning. Understanding these cognitive principles can help educators shape students' learning journeys by recognizing their importance and designing dynamic learning systems (DLS) that best suit their needs and learning styles.
Mental representation in the form of concepts and images is used in my work role. To explain the navigation of a new SharePoint document and media repository, employees are given a conceptual analogy of “walking into a house.” For example, the SharePoint site was likened to the layout of a house, with each library on the site representing a different room in the house. Employees were given a cognitive (conceptual) “walk-through” of the SharePoint house using mental images, such as locked doors (to explain site user permissions) and locked closets (to explain folder user permissions). By applying this mental imagery to teach about libraries, folders, and files to what they already know (the layout of a house), employees could grasp the mental perception of navigating our team’s new SharePoint site more easily.
EMOTIONS + LEARNING
Our rational minds are naturally wired to try to understand, distinguish, and categorize all we perceive and experience. At a young age, we begin to create stories about ourselves that empower or disempower us. These stories are fueled by emotions that can motivate or demotivate our learning. Therefore, educators need to try to understand what drives students to feel and do the things they do so that they can create a dynamic learning system (DLS) that will influence positive emotions in students.
There are many thoughts on what evokes intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation in learners. One approach is to create a "junior version" of learning where an educator will estimate a student's development level and begin from there. Using the scaffolding method, entry-level questions will scale to larger, more abstract ideas. For example, "Why do you think that?" and "How do you feel?" will evolve into more critical thinking inquiries. Junior versions are effective because students don't feel left behind when struggling and can move forward at their own pace. When students are set up for success by making incremental milestone progress, their emotions become positive, and they feel motivated to learn more.
Henry Ford said, “Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.” Believing in our ability to learn has everything to do with the emotional experience we bring to the lesson.
In the spirit of evoking positive emotions in learners, even the subtlest action can trigger a positive feeling that ripples forward. Take me, for example. A few months ago, I had an instructor who allowed me the opportunity to fix an error in exchange for earning two points back. She created a truly experiential learning moment for me by teaching me the correct way to do something and then allowing me the opportunity to do it – versus reducing my grade. I aspire to teach a postsecondary communication curriculum when I finish my M.Ed. degree and Dr. Jennifer Wojcik created a new schema in my mind of what a great college instructor can be. Instead of deflating my emotions with a lowered grade, what may have felt like a tiny gesture to her was a watershed moment for me that I plan to pay forward someday.
DAVID PERKINS' 7 PRINCIPLES FOR MAKING LEARNING WHOLE
In his book, Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education, author David Perkins teaches that students learn better if they are introduced to the "whole game" versus only isolated pieces of a concept or discipline.
The crux of his educator framework is categorized into seven principles:
Play the Whole Game
Make the Game Worth Playing
Work on the Hard Parts
Play Out of Town
Uncover the Hidden Game
Learn from the Team
Learn the Game of Learning
By playing the whole game, Perkins teaches that we must become active participants (versus only observers) when learning something new. Otherwise, we won’t experience what he calls “threshold experiences,” which are learning moments that give the encounter more meaning as we progress and “know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it” (Perkins, 2009, p. 9).
Instead of ritual learning, whose goal is to memorize facts to produce satisfactory test scores, Perkins argues that when a student is shown the whole picture (albeit in scaffolding increments or junior versions), it makes the games worth playing. Students stay interested when they are allowed to see the whole picture as compared to “do this … because.”
According to Perkins (2009), to get good at something, you must work on the hard parts. Doing this takes deliberate practice. Therefore, educators must embrace, look for, and challenge the hard parts in lessons that they anticipate learners will find struggling. Perhaps more importantly, it’s not just about students “fixing” their mistakes but strengthening their understanding in an area that gives them trouble. Feedback from teachers, classmates, and peers, as well as self-reflective assessment by students, can help identify problem areas and offer strategies for possible solutions. Understanding how cognition and metacognition work with the learning process is critical because attention and memory also influence the hard parts of learning.
The idea behind playing out of town has to do with learners being able to transfer learning to another situation, unlike the original one from which they learned it. In other words, “the whole point of formal education is to prepare for other times and other places, not just to get better in the classroom” (Perkins, 2009, p. 12). For example, learning that four quarters (25 cents) equals one dollar (100 cents) can help young learners when asked to divide something into four equal parts.
To uncover the hidden game in learning, Perkins tells us that learners should not just be shown or told the end goal, or as Perkins calls it: the “final score.” This makes them spectators. They should enter the experience as participants. This helps them understand the steps and nuances involved and provides better context. It also makes the “game worth playing” and keeps them interested, curious and feeling empowered by seeing the big picture. For example, if each student in a classroom were asked to illustrate one page of a book without knowing what was on the other pages, their perception would be isolated to the content of their one page without understanding the whole story.
Perkins’ principle on learning from the team is akin to Vygotsky’s theory that learners gain information from “more knowledgeable others” (MKO). In other words, settings such as team support, social interactions, paired problem solving, mentoring, debates, and many more situations where learners can glean awareness, expertise, or know-how from each other should be sought after.
Learners need to learn the game of learning by getting in the "driver's seat" (versus taking a spectator "passenger" role) of their education. Perkins believes the strategic game is often overlooked and suggests that learners should assess their progress and redirect their thinking (Perkins, 2009). This could appear in the form of self-inquiring questions, such as, "What/Whom do I need to become better at____?" or "What weakness areas should I focus on?" or "Whom do I admire who is already good at what I want to do/be?" When students take personal ownership and get into the spirit of self-managed learning, they begin to practice self-awareness and take inventory of themselves (self-reflection and metacognition).
By applying the many known tenets of cognitive science and the framework of Perkins' seven teaching principles, educators are better positioning students for a successful learning experience, which promises to lead to a more rewarding life.
David Perkins explains his #1 Principle of 'playing the whole game.'
References
Forney ISD. (2016, October 24). How We Learn [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlaG99awCD8
McLeod, S. (2022, April 6). Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html
Penn State. (n.d.). Cognitive Science & Artificial Intelligence – Information, People, and Technology. The Pennsylvania State University – Open Resource Publishing. https://psu.pb.unizin.org/ist110/chapter/5-3-emotional-design
Perkins, D. (2009). Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education. Jossey-Bass.
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