Personal Reflection on Cognitivism

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To be fair, I'm still wrapping my head around cognitivism. There was a lot of information to work with when studying cognitivism, from the fundamental principles of the learning theory to how the brain works - or is theorized to work - and how that affects our understanding of cognitivism as a learning theory. Much of what we read on how the brain works was not included in my infographics on cognitivism, however, but I do find that information useful for my future practice as a collegiate science educator. I will admit, as well, that I am writing this reflection after being exposed to all learning theories (including social learning), but I will try to keep the two as separate as possible while writing this reflection. I do indeed like some of the aspects of cognitivism over behaviorism. One of my previous concerns with behaviorism was its necessity to see learning as a behavioral change. I like that cognitivism does not necessarily need observable behavior to indicate learning. While dealing with behaviorism, I was constantly reminded of a book called "Out of My Mind" by Sharon Draper. The book followed the story of a girl (Melody) who was very smart but unable to communicate her intelligence through "traditional" means, such as talking and writing. Eventually, she was able to communicate her knowledge with her peers through the use of assistive technology. What bothered me about behaviorism is that, without that technology, Melody would have been seen as someone who could not learn. On the contrary, Melody learned many things and I feel as though cognitivism provides a means of indicating that learning despite not being able to show it.

 

Latent learning was also something I found intriguing and it made me second-guess some applications of lecture-based content delivery. While students indeed need to be active in their learning, as is noted in cognitivism, mental activeness in acquiring and assimilating or accomodating information could potentially be possible in lecture-format, so long as the information is presented in an organized fashion and connected to prior knowledge that is activated and gauged in the students. Surface and Deep learning (through meaningful learning), as well as the concept of distributed learning (reviewing material gradually over time instead of cramming it all in the night before) actually inspired me to take more of a charge with my own learning in one of my tougher courses this semester. I'm still working on integrating these types of learning into my schedule and behaviors instead of my "fall back" into cramming, but I've found trying to do this and attempting to connect the information into my prior knowledge or accomodating a new schema for it is helping me understand what is happening in class a bit more than beforehand. I think the cognitivist perspective on learning and its associated instructional design theories could have great use in the classroom. 

 

I feel the way that cognitivism informs instruction makes sense. Mental models and schemas are organized in certain ways, so presenting information in a very structured, organized way that links new information to previous knowledge and lays out, step by step, what students can expect to be doing in their classroom activities helps students retain information and pay more attention to important points in the content that they need to know and understand (especially those that are signaled to the students during the work). Advanced organizers are a great way of helping organize information in a flowing pattern that students can use to relate one topic to another. I think to maximize the use of this concept, however, students should be instructed to construct their own mental models of the information on paper or some other form of visual media to better see what it is that they know, what the new information is, and how it fits into their current maps. Otherwise, students might just try to memorize the map or organizer you give them instead of incorporating it into their own mental schema. I think the nine steps of cognitive learning are also very useful, though they have some resemblences to behaviorism, such as in the use of practice, feedback, and assessments to narrow down behaviors and content that students have mastered and that which they need more improvement on. The use of learning objectives is also a facet that is shared between the two learning theories. Regardless, I feel these are items that many teachers do not emphasize in their coursework from my collegiate experience, and they can be tools that would be helpful to students who are learning several subjects at once and might not know how to place this information into their minds in a way that isn't just rote memorization of unconnected facts. 

 

Some of the classroom activities were reflective of cognitivism. One which stands out was having to design a "mini-lesson" of sorts for students to work with and better grasp some of the basic assumptions of cognitivism. My group came up with the idea of drawing (almost literally) a mental map of the assumptions that we chose were most important and how they could be represented visually; it was almost like a comedic combination of an infographic and cognitive map (since we were no artists). We then would have students draw their own map or representation of what these assumptions were and what they meant to them. This allowed us to do many things. We were able to evaluate our own prior knowlege and understanding of the material, and we elicited our own performance by drawing out a cognitive map of the assumptions to present. We gathered feedback from our peers as well, which allowed us to look at what we came up with and evaluate whether our interpretations of the information made sense or not. Using this with our theoretical students would garner much of the same advantages while also allowing us to assess their prior knowledge and understanding of the material through their generated maps. The information presented to us in the lectures was also formatted in an organized way that made it easy for us to link to what we already know and return to the information in the future should we need it for future applications (like for the knowledge base!). 

 

I have a complex relationship with my idea of learning and instruction after exploring cognitivism. I know we aren't supposed to say "we prescribe to more than one learning theory", but I can honestly see the usefulness of the different instructional methods in a variety of situations in and out of the classroom. I believe many of the applications of instructional design theory depend upon what is being taught and what the end-goal of the lesson is. I'm inclined to say that I would have more physical or behavioral-based outcomes, such as athletics, be taught in a manner that is informed by behaviorism as opposed to cognitivism. But that's the thing; cognitivism also uses behavior as a performance measure in some scenarios, and uses behavior to infer cognitive processes. Does that mean that, then, behaviorism implies that everything we do and all our reactions are mindless without thought or processing? It certainly seems that way with the manner that cognitivism combats behaviorism. I do indeed like that cognitivism supports the fact that people can learn without necessarily showing it right away or at all, and for that reason, I feel as though my ideas about learning are shifted more towards a cognitivist point of view. It certainly doesn't help behaviorism's fight to be the dominant learning theory when cognitivism shares many of its applications in instructional design, such as practice, repetition, feedback, assessment, and other related characteristics mentioned above. I cannot truly ask about different implications of cognitivism in a fashion that doesn't just move the conversation ahead towards social learning. I do wish I would have done this reflection prior to learning about social learning, but it took me quite some time and the creation of this knowledge base to start wrapping my head around cognitivism. I think, though, in comparison to behaviorism, cognitivism has more flexibility in its application to different groups and scenarios.

 

My only concern is that, how can we truly gauge whether someone learns something without some form of behavior-based assessment. Cognitivism makes the assumption that learning can occur without a behavioral change, but is there a way to truly ever know whether someone learned something or not if they don't show it? This brings me full circle, too, to Melody in "Out of My Mind" and I start to wonder why I ask these questions in the first place. As a future educator, it makes sense that we need students to prove that they have learned material through some sort of articulation and presentation of their knowledge. But as a fellow human, who am I to judge and demand whether you can show me if you know something or not? You could know a lot about many things but might not be able to articulate them on the spot or at all. Does that mean you're unintelligent? No. But in the system of education in which we need assessments to prove understanding, how would we be able to gauge or apply the other assumption of cognitivism that states behavior change is not necessary to learn? These are the things that continue to circulate in my mind about cognitivism. 

 

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