Cognitivism

Cognitivism focuses on thinking and how humans process, organize, and make sense of new information. There are several people who have influenced cognitivsim and the science of learning.

Benjamin Bloom

Bloom created a taxononomy (1956) that illustrated the different ways in which a human's cognitive domain is organized with the most simplistic types at the bottom and the more sophisticated at the top. Bloom's taxonomy is still widely used in education today to help educators analyze and create types of tasks cater to different parts of the the cognitive domain. 

Jean Piaget

Piaget's work began in the 1930's but gained a lot of traction in the field of education in the 1960's-1980's. Piaget believed that cognitive development comes from the combined roles that nature and nurture play in a child's development. He outlined 4 stages of various cognitive abilities that children go through from birth through adolescence. He realized that children do not just acquire knowledge but rather they construct their understanding of the world which he called a schema. Piaget believed that active exploration with the environment shapes children's schemas. 

Piaget's work influences teaching and learning because it reinforces that children do not come to the classroom as blank slates or empty vessels to be filled with knoweldge. Rather, they already have certain schema and constructs about the world which we can then use to further knowledge. 

Lev Vygotsky

Vygotsky was influenced by the work of Piaget in that he acknowledged that young children are curious and explore and experiment with their environment to construct a concept of the world. But Vygotsky took Piaget's work further to describe how community, culture, and social interactions play a key role in children making meaning of their learning. He reasoned that learners need a More Knowledgeable Other (MKO) with a higher ability to foster the learning. He also developed a model that illustrates three important areas of the learning process: what a learner can do independently, what a learner can achieve with help and scaffolding, and what is frustrational or too difficult for a learner to do independently. He coined the term "Zone of Proximal Development" to describe the learning that occurs with help from a MKO and and proper scaffolding. 

Vygotsky's work has influenced teaching and learning because we know understand that we can largely influence learning when we can identify a student's Zone of Proximal Development and offer proper teaching and scaffolding to move that student towards autonomy. 

Jerome Bruner

Bruner (1966) developed 3 stages of cognitive development: enactive, iconic, and symbolic, in that order. Unlike Piaget’s stages, Bruner did not believe that these stages were tied to specific age groups. He reasoned that a child must be ready to learn the subject matter but that any subject could be taught to any child at any age as long as the instruction was appropriate for that child based on his/her current schema. Bruner influenced teaching and learning by introducing the concept of a spiraling curriculum where similar ideas or concepts are taught at every age but cater to children's stages of thinking and learning. For example, in Kindergarten and 1st grades, students learn basic, single digit addition and subtraction concepts by learning to join and separate quantities. By 2nd grade, they learn they can regroup larger units to make smaller units or regroup a lot of smaller units to make larger units then add and subtract those units. In 3rd-5th grades, students work with a variety of very large units (millions, billions) or very small units (fractions or decimals) to apply what they know of addition and subtraction. By middle school, students can add and subtract positive and negative numbers and variable expressions.

Albert Bandura

Bandura (1977) believed that humans are active processors of information that can reason about actions and consequences. Bandura reasoned that humans learn by observing, modeling, and imitating behaviors of others. But he concluded that humans did not merely observe a behavior and imitate it. Rather there was some deliberate thought and reasoning processes at work before a behavior was imitated. He also reasoned that the model or subject must capture the attention of the learner before a behavior could be observed, analyzed and imitated. Bandura's influence on teaching and learning cater to motivation and purposes or reasons for learning. If a reward outweighs any costs, the behavior is more likely to be learned and retained. 

Cognitive Load Theory

Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin (1968) created a model of memory that includes three parts: sensory memory, working memory, and long-term memory.  Using this idea, John Sweller coined the term Cognitive Load Theory in 1988. In essence, "Cognitive load" is the amount of information that one's working memory can hold at one time. Because working memory has a limit before it becomes overwhelmed, instructional methods should avoid overloading it with additional activities and information that don't directly contribute to the learning objective. In order to best influence learning, information should be broken down into smaller chunks that are easier to learn and retain. When too much information is presented at once, the brain has a harder time discerning what is important to retain. Chunking information can help information move from working memory to long-term memory.

Implications for Instructional Design

Based on the work of cognitive theorists, instructional design is best when it  follows certain intentional design features.

1. Reduce extraneous information that is not relevant to the learning objective. This comes from Cognitive Load Theory.

2. Vary the learning tasks in terms of their cognitive demands. Various types of cognitive demands are outlined in Bloom's taxonomy. 

3. Assume that your learners enter instruction with a pre-constructed schema that will be enhanced by their learning experiences. They are not empty vessels. Honor the knowledge that learners come with. This falls in line with Piaget's theories of learning

4. Identify learners' Zone of Proximal Development and instruct from this zone. When learning can be done independently, it is not meaningful. When learning is out of reach for the student at that time, the learning will be frustrational. This comes from Vygotsky's work in learning theory.

5. Spiral the content so that learners have multiple touch points with the content. This provides learners with opportunities to learn concepts are easy levels then apply it later to more challenging situations. This falls in line with Bruner's theories of learning.

6. Chunk learning into manageable, bite sized pieces so that the learner's working memory is not overloaded. This comes from Cognitive Load Theory.

Opinions on Cognitivism

Cognitivism (and later Constructivism) has been profoundly influential on my teaching practices over the past 20 years. As a teacher, I have leaned heavily on understanding that each student has a different Zone of Proximal Development for different concepts. I had to determine through observation and assessment where each child's ZPD lay and instruct from that place. In most cases, students ZPDs are similar but there may simultaneously be students who can understand concepts independently and students who are at a frustrational level. This is where instruction must be differentiated to meet the needs of different learners. Differentiation has its challenges when teaching live to students but it is particularly difficult to do when designing an asynchronous learning experience where I don't know who is on the other side of the computer screen. I have to design material that will be in the ZPD for the majority of my learners, then scaffold it appropriately into manageable chunks of information so as not to overload a learner. Spiraling is another technique I use a lot both for live teaching and asynchronous instructional design so that learners have opportunities to grow their knowledge. I personally find cognitivism to be far more useful and impactful on instructional design than behaviorism. 

Instructional Material Example:

EngageNY Math Curriculum, Grade 3 Module 4 Lesson 6

This instructional material is part of a teacher's edition for Grade 3 in a module about the concept of area. The entire module is an application of what students already learned in modules 1 and 3 about multiplication and division.  In this particular part of the teacher's edition, it instructs teachers on how to teach 3rd graders to draw rows and columns to make an array that will help them determine the area of a rectangle. Often times, math teachers take for granted that young children need to learn to draw rows and columns to make fairly equal sized squares. Most children are in their ZPD for this concept because they worked with square tiles to form arrays in earlier lessons. By now, they have realized that drawing all the little squares inside a rectangle is not efficient and not accurate and a new process (schema) is needed. This lesson does a nice job of chunking information into mangeable part for students while providing time for them to practice drawing rows and columns. Providing repetitive practice and a reason for the necessity of this still helps the student move this from working memory to long term memory. There is a motivation for students to do this because they realize the inefficiency of drawing the little squares inside versus connecting the sides of the rectangle with equally spaced rows and columns. The problem set caters to a variety of area on Bloom's taxonomy because students are required to analyze and match models as well as fill in information about the model. Later problems require students to reason about real world problems using their current schema.