MAIN IDEAS BEHIND COGNITIVE THEORY
What is important is the cognitive process, not the behavior.
Learners are not passive responders to the environmental stimuli.
Learners are actively making mental connections between new information and old.
Learners organize their knowledge
into categories and connected networks.
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"STRUCTURES OF MEMORY"
SENSORY MEMORY
Characteristics
Really short
Size uncertain
Any processing destroys remainder
Stored as received
WORKING MEMORY
Characteristics
Relatively short (seconds)
Limited in capacity (7 + - 2)
Probably electrical in nature
Primarily auditory format, but some visual
LONG TERM MEMORY
Characteristics
Permanent
Unlimited capacity
Probably chemical in nature
Organized network structure/schemata
Probably stored in two ways, visual and auditory
HOW MEMORY IS STRUCTURED
Ways to think about how memories are stored:
episodic vs semantic
imaginal vs verbal description (dual code)
Types of knowledge
declarative knowledge
procedural knowledge
compiled knowledge
automaticity
Things that affect memory storage:
Prior knowledge
Schemas and Scripts
Misconceptions
"PROCESSES OF LEARNING"
Between Sensory and Working memory
ATTENTION: Getting sensory input
into working memory by orienting to it
PERCEPTION: Recognizing an incoming stimulus (pattern recognition)
In Working Memory
ORGANIZATION (CHUNKING)
REHEARSAL
RETRIEVAL (see below): Getting things out of
LTM into STM
Between Working and Long term Memory
ENCODING (Storage): Changing the stimulus in order to store it in LTM
Meaningful learning
Elaboration
Imagery
Organization
Deep vs shallow processing (Summaries and
paraphrasing)
Mnemonics
How teachers assist encoding
Advance Organizers
Comparative organizers
Schema activation
Mnemonics
Visualizations
Analogies
Examples