Skip to main content

Cognitive Design: Essential Questions for Educators (Part 9 of 14)


On its own, cognitive science is helpful for understanding how the mind works; it's only useful, though, if we can apply this understanding to facilitate better learning.

So how is the cognitive model for learning useful for educators? 
Teaching and the Cognitive Model
Let’s review: learning happens in four cognitive stages: Attention, Encoding, Storage (I and II), and Retrieval.  And from the perspective of students, we can think of these stages working like this:
  • Attention is the filtering out of the many stimuli of the world and the focusing on the information at hand.
  • Encoding is the brain registering this information, processing sensory experience and attaching new information to old information.
  • Storage is the consolidation of information and its movement from working memory to long term memory.
  • Retrieval is the act of bringing long-term memory back into mind, back in to working memory and out into our experiences, silently to ourselves or publicly to others.
As educators, we can deliberately consider these processes in our work; these processes can directly inform how we plan individual classes, how we plan a unit, or even a year.  And even if we are not teachers, but people engaged more broadly in the education space (ed tech ed tech-designers, administrators, and more), we can ask:


  • Am I aware of what my students, clients, or users attend to?
  • How am I capturing, directing, engaging, or simply inviting their attention?
  • Have I created a safe environment in which students’ attention is on the learning?
  • How can I richly encode new learning by making it as multi-sensory as possible?
  • How can I attach what I am teaching to what they know?  (What prior knowledge do my students or users have?  Does their prior knowledge need correcting?)
  • How can I connect new knowledge to old knowledge in the most organized way in order to enable easy retrieval later on?
  • Have I given the brain ample time to consolidate and integrate memories?  (Have I spread learning experiences over multiple nights/weeks/more to allow consolidation and integration during sleep?)
  • How can I provide regular retrieval opportunities?  (How can I provide the most opportunities for students to recycle information, to retrieve what they know from long-term memory, bring it into working memory to strengthen it and attach it to new information?)
Essential Questions for Teachers, considering the Cognitive Model
These are the essential questions I try to ask myself as I’m planning, for they get to the heart of what’s happening in my students’ minds.  But in order to answer these questions, I have to know my students: who they are, how they get along with their classmates, what inspires them, and more.  The interaction between what I know about my students and what I know about how their minds work is the sweet spot for learning.  When I sail in between both, that’s when good planning happens.


This is the ninth of fourteen posts in a series about the role of cognitive science in education.
To have future posts delivered to your inbox, choose "subscribe" from the bar on the right side of the screen.

Introduction:

Apple image from Wikimedia commons.

blogger analytics

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Four Ways to Measure Creativity

Assessing creative work has been a bugaboo for a good long time.  In schools it's the constant refrain: “How can you grade creative writing?”  or “It’s a poem: however it comes out is right.”  In businesses and elsewhere, people demand innovation--and are stymied with understanding how to measure it. But this is not the bugaboo we think it is--in the classroom, or in the broader world of creative work.  Here are four different ways to assess creativity, each designed for different settings: 1. Measuring How Creative a Person Is - The Guilford Model 2. Measuring How Creative a Work Is - The Taxonomy of Creative Design 3. Measuring Creative Work Against a Program - The Requirements Model 4. Measuring the Social Value of Creative Work - Csikszentmihalyi’s Model Notably, in each of these cases, what we mean by "creative" changes a little.  Sometimes "creativity" refers to divergent production (how much one produces, or how varied it is).  Sometimes "c...

Taxonomy of Creative Design

Strategies to improve creativity are many, but they are also diffuse.  Little ties them together in a way that offers a coherent vision for how creativity can be understood or developed incrementally.  The Taxonomy of Creative Design, a work in progress, offers a new theory for doing so. Since creative work can be measured along spectrums of both and form and content, the Taxonomy of Creative Design offers a progression from imitation to original creation measured in terms of form and content.  In doing so, it organizes creative works into an inclusive, unifying landscape that serves not only as an analytical lens through which one might evaluate creative work, but also as a methodical approach to developing creative skills. Here is a closer look: Imitation Imitation is the replication of a previous work.  It is the painter with an easel at the museum, painting her own Mona Lisa; it is the jazz musician performing the solo of the great...

A Cognitive Model for Educators: Attention, Encoding, Storage, Retrieval (Part 2 of 14)

So how do  people learn?  What are the mechanics of memory?  Can we distill thousands of articles and books to something that is manageable, digestible, and applicable to our classrooms?   Yes.   In brief, the cognitive process of learning has four basic stages: Attention : the filter through which we experience the world Encoding : how we process what our attention admits into the mind Storage : what happens once information enters the brain Retrieval : the recall of that information or behavior Almost everything we do or know, we learn through these stages, for our learning is memory, and the bulk of our memory is influenced by these four processes: what we pay attention to, how we encode it, what happens to it in storage, and when and how we retrieve it. Here’s a closer look at each: Attention: We are bombarded by sensory information, but we attend to only a small amount of it.  We constantly process sights, sounds, smells, a...