Cognitivism andConstructivism

Last Week: Behaviourism

Cognitivism

The cognitivist revolution replaced behaviourism in 1960s as the dominant paradigm.

We recall Chomsky's argument that language could not be acquired purely through conditioning (even though radical behaviourists never argued that), and must be at least partly explained by the existence of internal mental states.

Cognitivism

Cognitivism argues that the “black box” of the mind should be opened and understood.

The learner is viewed as an information processor.

…or a computer

Cognitivism

Mental processes such as thinking, memory, knowing, and problem-solving need to be explored.

Knowledge can be seen as schema or symbolic mental constructions.

Learning is defined as change in a learner’s schemata.

SHOCK – HORROR - DISMAY

There is a great deal of ambiguity in the education literature as to what constitutes Cognitivism, and how it different from Constructivism

What follows is my take on things…

SHOCK – HORROR - DISMAY

There is a great deal of ambiguity in the education literature as to what constitutes Cognitivism, and how it different from Constructivism

What follows is my take on things…

ConstructivismCognitive

ConstructivismCognitivismProto-Cognitivism

Proto-Cognitivism:Gestalt Psychology

Gestalt Psychology

Gestalt - "essence or shape of an entity's complete form"

"The whole is greater than the sum of the parts" is often used when explaining Gestalt theory.

They see objects as perceived within an environment according to all of their elements taken together as a global construct.

Max Wertheimer

Born April 15, 1880 Died Oct 12, 1943 Born in Prague, Czech

Republic Psychologist Father of Gestalt

psychology

Inspiration

In 1910 he bought a toy stroboscope

He saw two separate and alternating light patterns

He discovered that if the spacing, on-time, and off-time were just right for these lights, his mind would perceive the dual lights as one single flashing light moving back and forth

Phi phenomenon

a perceptual illusion in which a perception of motion is produced by a succession of still images.

Lead to important questions about how perception and the brain works.

Kurt Koffka

Born March 18, 1886 Died Nov 22, 1941 Born in Berlin,

Germany Psychologist Another of the founders

of Gestalt psychology Learning theorist

Theories on learning

Koffka believed that most of early learning is what he referred to as, "sensorimotor learning," which is a type of learning which occurs after a consequence. For example, a child who touches a hot stove will learn not to touch it again.

Koffka also believed that a lot of learning occurs by imitation, though he argued that it is not important to understand how imitation works, but rather to acknowledge that it is a natural occurrence.

According to Koffka, the highest type of learning is “ideational learning”, which makes use of language.

Wolfgang Köhler

Born in Jan 21, 1887 Died in June 11, 1967 Born in Reval (now

Tallinn), Estonia Psychologist and

phenomenologist Another of the founders

of Gestalt psychology

Problem solving In 1913, Köhler went to the

island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands for six years

Köhler observed the manner in which chimpanzees solve problems, such as that of retrieving bananas when positioned out of reach. He found that they stacked wooden crates to use as makeshift ladders, in order to retrieve the food.

If the bananas were placed on the ground outside of the cage, they used sticks to lengthen the reach of their arms.

Problem solving Köhler concluded that the

chimps had not arrived at these methods through trial-and-error (which American psychologist Edward Thorndike had claimed to be the basis of all animal learning, through his law of effect), but rather that they had experienced an insight (also sometimes known as an “aha experience”), in which, having realized the answer, they then proceeded to carry it out in a way that was, in Köhler’s words, “unwaveringly purposeful.”

Main principles of Gestalt Psychology

Gestalt Principles

Emergence Reification Multistability Invariance Prägnanz

Principle of Emergence

Principle of Emergence

The dog is not recognized by first identifying its parts (feet, ears, nose, tail, etc.), and then inferring the dog from those component parts.

Instead, the dog is perceived as a whole, all at once.

Principle of Reification

Principle of Reification

the experienced percept contains more explicit spatial information than the sensory stimulus on which it is based.

Principle of Multistability

Principle of Multistability

the tendency of ambiguous perceptual experiences to pop back and forth unstably between two or more alternative interpretations.

Principle of Invariance

Principle of Invariance

the property of perception whereby simple geometrical objects are recognized independent of rotation, translation, and scale; as well as several other variations such as elastic deformations, different lighting, and different component features.

Principle of Prägnanz

we tend to order our experience in a manner that is regular, orderly, symmetric, and simple.

This results in other more basic laws Law of Closure Law of Similarity Law of Proximity Law of Continuity Law of Common Fate

Law of Closure

The mind may experience elements it does not perceive through sensation, in order to complete a regular figure (that is, to increase regularity).

Law of Similarity

The mind groups similar elements into collective entities or totalities. This similarity might depend on relationships of form, colour, size, or brightness.

Law of Proximity

Spatial or temporal proximity of elements may induce the mind to perceive a collective or totality.

Law of Symmetry

Symmetrical images are perceived collectively, even in spite of distance.

Law of Continuity

The mind continues visual, auditory, and kinetic patterns.

Law of Common Fate

Elements with the same moving direction are perceived as a collective or unit.

An Investigation of the spatial perception of time multiplexing during the simulation of motion of objects The project investigated the

physiology and psychology of visual perception, and attempted to explain the illusion in those terms.

The psychology investigation centred on Gestalt Psychology and how the principles in Gestalt psychology co-operate to cause the formation of illusory contours.

I designed an LED Array system whose display characteristics could be varied in software to assist in supporting the proposed theory.

In addition the research appears to have found a way of measuring the persistence of vision of illusory contours for very short periods of time.

Cognitivism

Kurt Lewin

Born Sept 9, 1890 Died Feb 12, 1947 Born in Mogilno, Poland Psychologist "founder of social

psychology“ Worked closely with the

Gestalt psychologists

Force field Analysis provides a framework for

looking at the factors (forces) that influence a situation, originally social situations.

Lewin believed the "field" to be a Gestalt psychological environment existing in an individual's (or in the collective group) mind at a certain point in time that can be mathematically described in a topological constellation of constructs.

Action Research first coined the term “action

research” in about 1944. In his 1946 paper “Action Research and Minority Problems” he described action research as “a comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms of social action and research leading to social action” that uses “a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action, and fact-finding about the result of the action”.

Instructional Design Active Learning

Instruction must be planned with a clear vision of what the students will do with the content presented. It is critical that students interact with the instructional content and that activities be developed to promote and support open-ended, self-directed learning. Content should never be delivered for memorization, but instead for use as a tool in planned and sequenced activities.

A Cohesive Approach Lewin wrote that a piecemeal approach to guiding learners to accept new

ideas, attitudes, and behaviors is ineffective. Instead, a cohesive approach must be utilized to support changes in cognition, affect, and behavior.

Impact of the Social Environment Lewin theorized that before changes in ideas, attitudes, and behavior will

occur, modifications in a learner's perception of self and his/her social environment are essential. He also argued that it is easier to create change in a social context than individually. 

More work on Instructional Design

Instructional Design

Maximise the effectiveness, efficiency and appeal of instruction and other learning experiences.

The process consists of determining the current state and needs of the learner, defining the end goal of instruction, and creating some "intervention" to assist in the transition.

The outcome of this instruction may be directly observable and scientifically measured or completely hidden and assumed.

Robert Mills Gagné

Born in Aug 21, 1916 Died in April 28, 2002 Born in in North Andover,

Massachusetts educational psychologist best known for his

“Conditions of Learning” involved in applying

instructional theory to the design of computer based learning.

The Gagné Assumption

different types of learning exist, and that different instructional conditions are most likely to bring about these different types of learning.

Five Categories of Learning

verbal information intellectual skills cognitive strategies motor skills attitudes

Eight Types of Learning1. Signal Learning - The individual learns to make a general, diffuse

response to a signal. Such was the classical conditioned response of Pavlov.

2. Stimulus-Response Learning - The learner acquires a precise response to a discriminated stimulus.

3. Chaining - A chain of two or more stimulus-response connections is acquired.

4. Verbal Association - The learning of chains that are verbal.5. Discrimination Learning - The individual learns to make different

identifying responses to many different stimuli that may resemble each other in physical appearance.

6. Concept Learning - The learner acquires a capability of making a common response to a class of stimuli.

7. Rule Learning - A rule is a chain of two or more concepts.8. Problem Solving - A kind of learning that requires the internal events

usually called thinking.

Nine Events of Instruction1. Gain attention - Curiosity motivates students to learn. 2. Inform learners of objectives - These objectives should form the basis for

assessment. 3. Stimulate recall of prior learning - Associating new information with prior

knowledge can facilitate the learning process. 4. Present the content - This event of instruction is where the new content is

actually presented to the learner. 5. Provide “learning guidance” - use of examples, non-examples, case studies,

graphical representations, mnemonics, and analogies. 6. Elicit performance (practice) - Eliciting performance provides an opportunity

for learners to confirm their correct understanding, and the repetition further increases the likelihood of retention.

7. Provide feedback - guidance and answers provided at this stage are called formative feedback.

8. Assess performance - take a final assessment. 9. Enhance retention and transfer to the job - Effective education will have a

"performance" focus.

George Armitage Miller

Born Feb 3, 1920 Age 90 Born in Charleston,

West Virginia Psychologist and

Cognitive Scientist founder of WordNet “Miller’s Magic Number”

Information Processing Theory TOTE: “Test-Operate-Test-

Exit” an iterative problem solving

strategy based on feedback loops test where the system is

currently, then perform some

operation that makes a change,

then retest again, and to repeat this until the

answer is satisfactory, at which point the process is complete and ends (or exits).

Test

Operate

Exit

Information Processing Theory

The following is an example of a simple TOTE: When driving a car and looking for the appropriate turn off.

Test - is this the turnoff? - No Operate - keep driving Test - is this the turnoff? - No Operate - keep driving Test - is this the turnoff? - Yes Exit

Test

Operate

ExitProblem

Miller’s Magic Number

7 ± 2

Miller’s Magic Number "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two:

Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information" (Miller 1956) is one of the most highly cited papers in psychology

He looked at Memory span - which is a long list of items (e.g., digits, letters, words) that a person can repeat back immediately after presentation in correct order.

Miller observed that memory span of young adults is approximately 7 chunks. He noticed that memory span is approximately the same for stimuli with vastly different amount of information .

Charles M. Reigeluth Elaboration Theory

instruction is made out of layers and that each layer of instruction elaborates on the previously presented ideas. By elaborating on the previous ideal, it reiterates, thereby improving retention Present overview of simplest

and most fundamental ideas Add complexity to one aspect Review the overview and

show relationships to the details

Provide additional elaboration of details

Provide additional summary and synthesis

Charles M. Reigeluth The Eight Steps in Elaboration Theory

1. Organizing Course Structure: Single organisation for complete course2. Simple to complex: start with simplest ideas, in the first lesson, and then

add elaborations in subsequent lessons.3. Within-lesson sequence: general to detailed, simple to complex, abstract

to concrete.4. Summarizers: content reviews presented in rule-example-practice format 5. Synthesizers: Presentation devices that help the learner integrate content

elements into a meaningful whole and assimilate them into prior knowledge, e.g. a concept hierarchy, a procedural flowchart or decision table, or a cause-effect model .

6. Analogies: relate the content to learners' prior knowledge, use multiple analogies, especially with a highly divergent group of learners.

7. Cognitive strategies: variety of cues - pictures, diagrams, mnemonics, etc. - can trigger cognitive strategies needed for processing of material.

8. Learner control: Learners are encouraged to exercise control over both content and instructional strategy. Clear labelling and separation of strategy components facilitates effective learner control of those components.

Cognitive Constructivism

Cognitive Constructivism Learning is an active process: Direct experience, making

errors, and looking for solutions are vital for the assimilation and accommodation of information. How information is presented is important. When information is introduced as an aid to problem solving, it functions as a tool rather than an isolated arbitrary fact.

Learning should be whole, authentic, and "real": Piaget helps us to understand that meaning is constructed as children interact in meaningful ways with the world around them. Thus, That means less emphasis on isolated "skill" exercises that try to teach something like long division or end of sentence punctuation. Students still learn these things in cognitive constructivist classrooms, but they are more likely to learn them if they are engaged in meaningful activities (such as operating a class "store" or "bank" or writing and editing a class newspaper).

Jerome Seymour Bruner

Born October 1, 1915 Age 94 Born in New York, New

York cognitive psychologist

and educational psychologist

Scaffolding Theory Spiral Curriculum

Theory of Instruction

Learning is an active process in which learners constructs new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge.

The learner selects and transforms information, constructs hypotheses, and makes decisions, relying on a cognitive structure to do so.

Cognitive structure (i.e., schema, mental models) provides meaning and organization to experiences and allows the individual to "go beyond the information given".

Theory of Instruction

As far as instruction is concerned, the instructor should try and encourage students to discover principles by themselves.

The instructor and student should engage in an active dialog (i.e., Socratic learning).

The task of the instructor is to translate information to be learned into a format appropriate to the learner's current state of understanding.

Curriculum should be organized in a spiral manner so that the student continually builds upon what they have already learned.

Scaffolding Theory

He used the term to describe young children's oral language acquisition. Helped by their parents when they first start learning to speak, young children are provided with instinctive structures to learn a language. Bed-time stories and read alouds are classic examples

Spiral Curriculum

Instead of focusing for relatively long periods of time on specific narrow topics, a spiral curriculum tries to expose students to a wide varies of ideas over and over ago.

Jean Piaget

Born 9 August 1896 Died 16 Sept 1980 Born in Neuchâtel,

Switzerland Swiss psychologist and

philosopher He laid great

importance to the education of children

Key Ideas Schemas – categories of knowledge A schema describes both the mental and physical actions

involved in understanding and knowing. Schemas are categories of knowledge that help us to interpret and understand the world. In Piaget's view, a schema includes both a category of knowledge and the process of obtaining that knowledge. As experiences happen, this new information is used to modify, add to, or change previously existing schemas. For example, a child may have a schema about a type of animal, such as a dog. If the child's sole experience has been with small dogs, a child might believe that all dogs are small, furry, and have four legs. Suppose then that the child encounters a very large dog. The child will take in this new information, modifying the previously existing schema to include this new information.

Key Ideas

Assimilation - adding to an existing schema The process of taking in new information into our

previously existing schema’s is known as assimilation. The process is somewhat subjective, because we tend to modify experience or information somewhat to fit in with our pre-existing beliefs. In the example above, seeing a dog and labeling it "dog" is an example of assimilating the animal into the child's dog schema.

Key Ideas

Accommodation - changing an existing schema

Another part of adaptation involves changing or altering our existing schemas in light of new information, a process known as accommodation. Accommodation involves altering existing schemas, or ideas, as a result of new information or new experiences. New schemas may also be developed during this process.

Key Ideas Equilibration - balancing between assimilation

and accommodation Piaget believed that all children try to strike a

balance between assimilation and accommodation, which is achieved through a mechanism Piaget called equilibration. As children progress through the stages of cognitive development, it is important to maintain a balance between applying previous knowledge (assimilation) and changing behaviour to account for new knowledge (accommodation). Equilibration helps explain how children are able to move from one stage of thought into the next.

The four development stages Sensorimotor stage: from birth to age 2. Children experience

the world through movement and senses (use five senses to explore the world). During the sensorimotor stage children are extremely egocentric, meaning they cannot perceive the world from others' viewpoints.

Preoperational Stage: from ages 2 to 7 (magical thinking predominates. Acquisition of motor skills). Egocentrism begins strongly and then weakens. Children cannot conserve or use logical thinking.

Concrete operational Stage: from ages 7 to 12 (children begin to think logically but are very concrete in their thinking). Children can now conceive and think logically but only with practical aids. They are no longer egocentric.

Formal operational Stage: from age 12 onwards (development of abstract reasoning). Children develop abstract thought and can easily conserve and think logically in their mind.

Other forms of Constructivism

Constructivism

Constructivism humans generate knowledge and meaning from their

experiences. Social Constructivism encourages the learner to arrive at his or

her version of the truth, influenced by his or her background, culture or embedded worldview.

Historical developments and symbol systems, such as language, logic, and mathematical systems, are inherited by the learner as a member of a particular culture and these are learned throughout the learner's life.

This also stresses the importance of the nature of the learner's social interaction with knowledgeable members of the society.

Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky

Born Nov 17 1896 Died June 11, 1934 Bron in Orsha, in the

Russian Empire (today in Belarus).

a Soviet psychologist and the founder of cultural-historical psychology.

Cultural Mediation and Internalization

Vygotsky investigated child development and how this was guided by the role of culture and interpersonal communication.

He observed how higher mental functions developed historically within particular cultural groups, as well as individually through social interactions with significant people in a child's life, particularly parents, but also other adults.

Through these interactions, a child came to learn the habits of mind of her/his culture, including speech patterns, written language, and other symbolic knowledge through which the child derives meaning and which affected a child's construction of her/his knowledge.

This key premise of Vygotskian psychology is often referred to as cultural mediation.

Psychology of Play

Vygotsky's also undertook a great deal of research on play, or children's games, as a psychological phenomenon and its role in the child's development. Through play the child develops abstract meaning separate from the objects in the world, which is a critical feature in the development of higher mental functions.

Zone of Proximal Development Vygotsky’s term for the range of

tasks that are too difficult for the child to master alone but that can be learned with guidance and assistance of adults or more-skilled children.

The lower limit of ZPD is the level of skill reached by the child working independently.

The upper limit is the level of additional responsibility the child can accept with the assistance of an able instructor.

Scaffolding is changing the level of support. Over the course of a teaching session, a more-skilled person adjusts the amount of guidance to fit the child’s current performance

John Dewey

Born Oct 20, 1859 Died June 1, 1952 Born in Burlington,

Vermont Philosopher,

psychologist, and educational reformer

Very influential to education and social reform

The Reflex Arc Concept In Dewey's article "The Reflex Arc

Concept in Psychology" which appeared in Psychological Review in 1896, he reasons against the traditional stimulus-response understanding of the reflex arc in favor of a "circular" account in which what serves as "stimulus" and what as "response" depends on how one considers the situation.

While he does not deny the existence of stimulus, sensation, and response, he disagreed that they were separate, juxtaposed events happening like links in a chain.

He developed the idea that there is a coordination by which the stimulation is enriched by the results of previous experiences.

Reflective Thinking

Reflection as a meaning-making process;1. Moves the learner from one experience to the

next with deeper understanding of its relationships with and connections to other experiences and ideas.

2. The thread that makes continuity of learning possible.

3. It insures the progress of the individual, and, ultimately, society.

4. It is a means to essentially moral ends.

Experiential Learning Model

On Education Dewey was an educational reformer, who emphasized that the traditional

teaching's concern with delivering knowledge needed to be balanced with a much greater concern with the students' actual experiences and active learning.

At the same time, Dewey was alarmed by many of the "child-centered" excesses of educational-school pedagogues who claimed to be his followers. In How We Think, Dewey wrote;

“The older type of instruction tended to treat the teacher as a dictatorial ruler. The newer type sometimes treats the teacher as a negligible factor, almost as an evil, though a necessary one. In reality, the teacher is the intellectual leader of a social group, He is a leader, not in virtue of official position, but because of wider and deeper knowledge and matured experience. The supposition that the teacher must abdicate its leadership is merely silly.”

Maria Montessori

Born August 31, 1870 Died May 6, 1952 Born in Chiaravalle

(Ancona), Italy Physician, educator,

philosopher, humanitarian and devout Catholic

best known for her philosophy and the Montessori method of education of children from birth to adolescence

Montessori Method

an educational approach where children are given freedom in an environment prepared with materials designed for their self-directed learning activity.

The purpose of which is to bring about, sustain and support children’s true natural way of being ("the child's true normal nature").

The Three-Period Lesson Period 1 consists of providing the child with the name of the

material. In the case of letter sounds, the teacher will have the child trace the letter and say, "This is u. This is p." This provides the children with the name of what they are learning.

Period 2 is to help the child recognize the different objects. Most of the time with the three-period lesson is in period 2. Some things the teacher might say are, "Show me the u. Show me the p” or "Point to the u. Point to the p.” After spending some time in the second period, the child may move on to period 3.

Period 3 involves checking to see if the child not only recognizes the name of the material, but is able to tell you what it is. The teacher will point to the "u" and ask the student, "What is this?" If the child replies with, "uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu", the child fully understands it. With letters, the lesson finally ends with the child blending the letters to make a simple word, such as “up.”

Planes of Development The natural development of children proceeds through several distinct

planes of development, each one having its own unique conditions and sensitive periods for acquiring basic faculties in the developmental process.

The first plane (ages 0-6) involves basic personality formation and learning through physical senses. During this plane, children experience sensitive periods for acquiring language and developing basic mental order.

The second plane of development (6-12) involves learning through abstract reasoning, developing through a sensitivity for imagination and social interaction with others.

The third plane (12-18) is the period of adolescent growth, involving the significant biological changes of puberty, moving towards learning a valuation of the human personality, especially as related to experiences in the surrounding community.

The fourth plane (18+), involves a completion of all remaining development in the process of maturing in adult society.

In America After the 1907 establishment of Montessori's first school in

Rome, by 1917 there was an intense interest in her method in America in large part due to the publication of a small booklet entitled "The Montessori System Examined" by William Heard Kilpatrick - a follower of John Dewey.

Confusion and conflict about the method's philosophy emerged with particular intensity in the modern development of Montessori in the United States where, in 1967, the name "Montessori" was held to be a "generic term" that no organization could claim for its own exclusive use. Since then, the number and diversity of Montessori organizations and philosophies have expanded considerably.

The End?

We’ll touch on some of these topics again when we look at formal models of instructional design, and other topics.