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Chapter 9: Complex Cognitive Processes - Coggle Diagram
Chapter 9: Complex Cognitive Processes
Metacognition:
Knowledge about out own thinking processes.
Individual differences in metacognitio
People differ in how well and how easily they use matacognition strategies.
Differences are cause by age, maturation, biology, and learning experiences.
Working to improve metacognitive skills can be especially important for students who often have trouble in school.
. Lessons for teachers
For younger student
KWL: A strategy to guide racing and inquiry---What do I know about this subject?, What do I want to know?, At the end of the reading or inquiry, what did I learn?.
The KWL frame encourages students to "look within" and identify what they bring to each learning situation, where they want to go, and what they actually achieved.
For secondary and college student
For older students, teachers can incorporate metacognitive questions into their lessons, lectures, and assignments.
Metacognitive knowledge and regulation
Cognition about cognition/thinking about thinking.
Consisting of knowledge and skill.
Metacognition invokes all three kinds of knowledge: declarative, procedural, and self-regulatory.
Three essential metacognitive skills: planning, monitoring, and evaluating.
Most useful when tasks are challenging.
Learning strategies
Being strategic about learning
Learning Strategies: A special kind of procedural knowledge---knowing how to approach learning tasks.
Examples of Learning Strategies: Planning and Focusing Attention, Organizing and Remembering, Comprehension, Cognitive Monitoring, and Practice.
Deciding What is Important: Distinguish the main idea from less important information.
Summaries: Summaries are very helpful and important to the learning proccess but students must be taught how to summarize.
Underlinning and Highlighting: Don't highlight too much, think carefully about why you are highlighting a certain thing, and actively transform the information into your own words.
Taking notes has many advantages but it is also important to note that there are also caveats like those with better working memory abilities will benefit more from note taking.
Visual tools for organizing
Concept Map: A drawing that charts the relationship among ideas.
Cmaps: Tools for concept mapping developed by the Insitiute for Human and Machine Cognition that are connected to many knowledge maps and other resources on the Internet.
Retrieval practice
Retrieval Practice/Testing effect: Practicing by retrieving information from memory instead of restudying or rereading---more effective because retrieval seems to help memories consolidate in the brain and strengthens the neural pathways so the knowledge is easier to find.
Reading strategies
A number of strategies support the processes of focusing, investing, processing, monitoring, and cementing information and learning through retrieval practice in reading.
Many strategies use mnemonics to help students remember the steps involved such as READS and CAPS.
Applying learning strategies
Production Deficiency: Students learn problem-solving strategies, but do not apply them when they could or should.
Appropriate Task: The learning task must be appropriate.
Valuing Learning: Students must care about learning and understanding and believe learning strategies will help them reach their goals.
Effort and Efficacy: Students must believe the effort and investment required are reasonable, given the likely return.
Critical thinking and argumentation
Paul and Elder model
At the center of critical thinking are the elements of reasoning, which entail drawing conclusions based on reason. We must apply the standards to the elements. With practice in clear, accurate, logical reasoning from the elements, we develop intellectual traits.
Three elements emerge: dialogue, authentic instruction, and mentorship.
Applying critical thinking in specific subject
Many critical thinking skills are specific to a particular subject and serve to guide actions in that subject.
The historical critical thinking skills were: sourcing, corroboration, and contextualization.
Argumentation: The process of debating a claim with someone else.
Two styles of argumentation: disputative and deliberative
The heart of disputative argumentation is supporting your position with evidence and understanding and then refuting your opponent's claims and evidence.
Deliberative argumentation has the goal to collaborate in comparing, contrasting, and evaluating alternatives, then arrive at a constructive conclusion.
Lessons for teachers
It seems that to improve students' debating and persuasion skills, to help them learn to argue, disputative argumentation is a good approach.
Teaching for complex learning and robust knowledge
Robust Knowledge: It is deep, connected, and coherent.
Connected Knowledge means many separate bits of information are linked.
Coherent knowledge is consistent and has ne contradictions.
Deep Knowledge is knowledge about underlying principles that allow experts to recognize the same principle-based features in seemingly different problems.
Recognizing and Assessing Robust Knowledge
Experts can recall from their long-term memory many important details about the problem domain, but novices rely mostly on what the can hold in their working memory, and they often get overwhelmed.
Experts quickly and accurately apply the appropriate domain-specific strategy for the particular problem type.
Because novices' knowledge is based on surface details of problems, they have no principles or conceptual knowledge to transfer to new situations.
Teaching for Robust Knowledge
Worked Examples can support the development of robust knowledge by managing cognitive load so that students' working memory is not overwhelmed. Worked examples help students develop connections between steps, basic principles, and procedures.
Analogies allow students to build robust knowledge by linking key features in the problem to underlying principles. Using analogies can support transfer as students apply what they know to recognize similar processes at work in seemingly different situations.
Practice: Practice can be very effective in developing procedural knowledge of how to do things. Overlearning/Practicing even after you can do a skill or procedure makes performance smooth, fast, and automatic. Developing robust knowledge takes more than practice.
Self-explanations: To build robust knowledge, the bigger winner is self-explanation. Self-explainations are Bette than detailed explanations by the teacher in building robust knowledge.
Teaching for transfer
: Influence of previous learned materials on new materials; the productive uses of cognitive tools and motivations
Views of transfer
The productive use of knowledge, skills, and motivations across a lifetime is a fundamental goal of education.
Thoughtful transfer requires two processes---initial learning and reusing or applying what was learned.
Teaching for Positive Transfer
What is worth learning?
All later learning depends on positive transfer of basic skills (reading, writing, computing, cooperating, and speaking) to new situations.
Lessons for teachers
Overlearning: Practicing a skill past the point of mastery.
Students who have been actively involved in the learning process will have higher-level transfer.
Positive transfer is encouraged when skills are practiced under authentic conditions.
It is important to have the transfer of learning strategies that have been encountered earlier in the learning process.
Stages of transfer for strategies
Three stages in developing strategic transfer: acquisition phase, retention phase, and the transfer phase.
All students can benefit from direct teaching, modeling, and practice of learning strategies and study skills
Problem solving
: Creating New solutions for problems.
Identifying problem finding
Even though problem identification s a critical first step, research indicates that people often "leap" to naming the first problem that comes to mind.
Finding a solvable problem is key because from there you can turn it into an opportunity.
Defining goals and representing the problem
To represent the problem and set a goal, you have to focus attention on relevant information, understand the words of the problem, and activate the right schema to understand the whole problem.
Focusing Attention on What is Relevant: Representing the problem often requires finding the relevant information and ignoring the irrelevant details.
Understanding the Words: Problem solving requires comprehension of the language and relations in the problem.
Understanding the Whole Problem: Assemble all the relevant information and sentences into an accurate understanding or translation of the total problem.
Direct Instruction in Schemas: Teachers can begin by directly teaching the necessary schema using demonstration, modeling, and "think-alouds".
Worked Examples: Worked examples chunk some of the steps, provide cues and feedback, focus attention on relevant information, and make fewer demands on memory to help students understand instead of searching randomly for solutions.
Problem Representation: Schema-driven problem solving---recognizing a problem as a "disguised" version of an old problem for which one already has a solution.
Possible solution strategies
Algorithms: Step-by-step procedure for solving a problem; prescription for solutions.
Heuristic: General strategy used in attempting to solve problems.
Means-ends analysis: Heuristic in which a goal is divided into subgoals.
Working-backward strategy: Heuristic in which you start with the goal and move backward to solve the problem.
Analogical thinking: Heuristic in which one limits the search for solutions to situations that are similar to the one at hand.
Verbalization: Putting your problem-solving plan and its logic into words.
Anticipating, acting and looking back
Select a solution and anticipate the consequences.
After you choose a solution strategy and implement it, evaluate the results by checking for evidence that confirms or contradicts your solution.
Factors that hinder problem solving
Functional Fixedness: Inability to use objects or tools in a new way.
Response Set: Rigidity;the tendency to respond in the most familiar way.
Representativeness Heuristic: Judging the likelihood of an event based on how well the events match you prototypes.
Availability heuristic: Judging the likelihood of an event based on what is available in your memory, assuming those easily remembered events are common.
Belief perseverance: The tendency to hold on to beliefs, even in the face of contradictory evidence.
Conformation bias: Seeking information that confirms our choices and beliefs, while ignoring disconfirming evidence.
Expert knowledge and problem solving
Knowing what is important: Experts know where to focus their attention.
Memory for patterns and organization: Intuition about how to solve a problem based on the recognition of patterns and organization.
Procedural Knowledge: Steps of understanding the problem and choosing a solution simultaneously.
Planning and monitoring: Experts spend more time analyzing problems, drawing diagrams, breaking large problems down into subproblems, and making plans.