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Cognitive psychology - Coggle Diagram
Cognitive psychology
Information processing
Information theorists see the brain as a highly complex computer and explain its workings in terms of rules and models how different aspects of learning take place.
It is concerned with how humans take in information, process it, and act upon thaat information.
Focus of the work
Attention
Klatzky suggests that attention should be seen as a process of filtering out an overwhilming range of incoming stimuli and selecting out only those stimuli which are important for further processing.
Best conceptualizes attention as a cognitive resource which can be drawn upon as a means of concentrating our mental efforts. As one becomes more skillful, there is less need to call upon one's full attention.
Developmental psychologists have shown that attention, the ability to select what is important and adapt their attention to the demands of the situation, improves with age.
Implication for teachers
Teacher must help learners to focus their attention on certain key aspects of what they are hearing or communicating rather than attempting to cope with everything at once.
Help learners to distinguish relevant from irrelevant information and focus on how to use and remember relevant information.
Memory
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Sensory register
In the memory process, stimuli are initially recorded for a brief amount of ime before being passed into short term or working memory, that is, whatever one has in mind at any particular time, lasting no longer than thrity seconds.
Because of the limited capacity of most people's working memory, it is necessary to break down complexx material into related chunks before consigning these to the long-term memory store.The most common ways of doing this is rehearsal, which can be repetition or association of meaning to what is to be remembered.
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Through the use of models or scripts, theorists claim to be able to predict the kind of mental processes that will be necessary for effective learning.
Constructivism
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Jerome Bruner
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-The development of conceptual understanding and of cognitive skills and strategies is a central aim of education, rather than the acquisition of factual information.
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-It is important to learn how to learn, which he considered to be the key to transferring what as learned from one situation to another.
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-He offered advice on the structure of the curriculum and the ways in which learners could be motivated and helped to remember what they have learned.
-One of his most famous contributions is that the foundations of any subject may be taught to anyone at any age in some form. This led to the notion of spiral curriculum. Teacher should first introduce the basic ideas that give life and form to any topic and subject area, and then revisit and build upon this repeatedly. This has influenced language syllabuses.
-The most general objective of education is the cultivation of excellence, which can be only achieved by challenging learners to exercise their full powers to become completely absorbed in problems and thus, discover the pleasure of full and effective functioning.
-He emphasized the importance of the right balance between the degree of structure imposed on a lesson and the amount of flexibility that is built in to allow learners to discover principles, concepts, and facts for themselves.
We need to seek balance between teaching aspects of the target language and skills in the language, and developing the learner's ability to analyze the language, to make guesses on how rules operate, to take risks in trying out the language, and to learn from their errors.
-He stressed the imporance of guesswork and intuitive thinking in learners. In order to encourge this, teachers need to ask questions that can be answered and that take you somewhere.
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Bruner cannot be considered a purely cognitiive psychologist as he places a great deal of emphasis on the interaction of the learner with the curriculum, the teacher and significant others. This would classify Bruner as a social constructivist. Bruner has a foot in both camps.
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It is concermed with the way in which the human mind thinks and learns. Therefore, cognitive psychologists are intrested in the mental processes that are involved in learning.
It deals with how people build up and draw upon their memories and the ways in which they become involved in the process of learning.
The learner is seen as an active participant in the learning process, using various mental strategies in order to sort out the system of the language to be learned. Learneres are required to use their minds to oberve, think, categorize, and hypothesize togradually work out how the language operates.