Cognitive Information Processing

This week's readings were definitely interesting. I had a real time wading through the article from Miller--in fact, when I first started reading I thought perhaps it had been posted by mistake! However, I believe that I do naturally incorporate more cognitive strategies into my teaching than I do behaviorist ones. Ultimately, with behaviorism, the main reinforcement that's out there is the grade itself. Beyond that, I don't think I'm much of a behaviorist.

However, I regularly make use of things like mnemonic devices, advance organizers, examples and non-examples, and practice with corrective feedback. Most reading instruction makes heavy use of building on background knowledge because activating background knowledge is one of the primary strategies that effective readers utilize. Therefore, I really can't imagine doing anything without first making sure that students are thinking about where they've already been, and how what they're looking at now fits in with what they already know. Other reading strategies do the same thing. Think about making connections: you're basically thinking about how what you're learning at present is connected to things you already know, either from your own experience, or from things you've read, or things you've heard about in the world. A basic premise of active reading is that you can't comprehend what you're decoding unless you can fit it into your prior experience in some way.

The idea that different people can listen to the same lesson but receive different amounts of information is kind of funny. My dad and I were talking about how much easier it would be if students could just raise their hand and say, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much variance they're experiencing. Then I thought about it, and I really think in many ways students DO tell us. I do have students who will say to me, "I don't get it." That always makes me feel as if I had just been squashed by a ton of bricks, since it sounds as if the student had received exactly no information from the lovely explanation I just spent ten minutes crafting for their benefit. However, usually when I talk more to the student, I realize that they got some of it, but then the rest of it they need help situating properly in their brain. Others will tell us they're experiencing virtually no variance and are simply waiting for us to move on! This is usually communicated through rolled eyes, pulling out a book, or exaggerated sighs. That's the joy of a classroom of 30 students of vastly differing ability levels. But that's a different blog...

So what is learning in the context of cognitivism? I think that students need the information broken down into logical steps and logical sequences in order to learn and retain it. They need periodic reviews of what they may have "learned" previously in order to be able to call that information back into use when they need it. Otherwise, I've found that it goes away never to be seen again. The human mind, at least the 7th grade mind, is full of black holes...