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Key Questions

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Learning Objectives

• Information processing – Teachers will understand how information is received, organized, and remembered.
• Associations and connections – Teachers will become familiar with strategies for helping students to make associations and draw connections among concepts and for enhancing memory and information use.
• Novices and experts – Teachers will understand how experts and novices differ in how they solve problems and use knowledge. Teachers will consider how to organize instruction to encourage the development of expert strategies.

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Session Outline

How do we perceive and understand the world around us? How do we make sense of events and new information? What helps us to remember or forget? How do people think when they are solving problems? And why – and how – does an expert solve a problem more efficiently than a novice? In this session, we explore cognitive processing – the work we do to take in, organize, and make sense of new information. Teachers can assist students as they grapple with new ideas, organize, and communicate what they have learned.

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How Does Experience Affect the Brain?

In How People Learn, Bransford and colleagues (2000) identify three major points about brain development that are important for education:

• Learning changes the physical structure of the brain,
• These structural changes alter the functional organization of the brain; in other words, learning organizes and reorganizes the brain, and
• Different parts of the brain may be ready to learn at different times.

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Learning and the Physical Structure of the Brain

As we interact with the world around us, nerve cells, or neurons, send and receive information to and from other nerve cells. Communication between neurons takes place across microscopic gaps, or synapses, and nerve impulses are transmitted neurochemically across these synapses. The neuron integrates the information received from the synapses, which in turn project information to other parts of the body, such as the muscles. This process is the basis of how we think, move, talk, and make sense of the world around us.

New connections are added to the brain in two ways:

More complex cognitive processing occurs in the cerebral cortex – the blanket of cells that covers the brain and is divided into lobes, each of which performs many different functions.

It is a common misperception that individuals' intelligence and brain development are entirely determined by biology. Education and experience do develop the brain.

Cognitive psychologists—those who study how we learn by conducting human experiments and observations—can help us to bridge understandings in neuroscience with implications for the classroom.

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How Do We Perceive and Make Sense of the World Around Us?

We are constantly bombarded with stimuli and information, not all of which can be attended to at once. What is perceived and processed in the brain depends on several features of the stimulus as well as of the perceiver. Critical are –

• what captures our attention – the visual, auditory, or other attributes of the stimulus that cause us to pay attention
• how we selectively filter out aspects of the information that are unfamiliar or uncategorizable to us or that do not mesh with our expectations
• how we organize the information in our brain, connecting it through associations with other things we know.

Individuals process information differently in the brain. For example, people learn through different pathways and modalities – visual, aural, kinesthetic – and with different kinds of representations. These differences pose a challenge for teachers, requiring that they represent ideas and information in ways that allow for different kinds of processing and figure out what will allow certain students to process information most effectively.

Many researchers attribute specific learning difficulties to problems that occur when the brain processes language and other visual, auditory, and kinesthetic information.

Learning disabilities take different forms – they are related to language comprehension and production, motor skills, social skills, and attention, for instance.

It is important for teachers to have skills and tools for observing and cataloging the kinds of tasks with which students seem to have difficulty, as well as those with which they have greater success, as a guide to curriculum planning and instructional adaptations.

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How Do We Remember?

• For learning to occur, facts, concepts, and ideas must be stored; connected to other facts, concepts, and ideas; and built upon. Cognitive theorists have studied the nature of memory to determine how and under what conditions people retain or forget information.
• How can memory be enhanced? Researchers have found that information is stored in several forms – visual, verbal, and by its meaning. When physical, auditory, and visual stimuli are combined with symbolic materials like language or numbers, the ability to retrieve information is likely improved.
• Research also demonstrates that when people are asked to remember a series of events or list of words, they will do better at recalling them if they create categories or meaningful connections among them, and if they "chunk" this information into smaller groupings.
• Other strategies for enhancing the retrieval of learned material include overlearning, learning with understanding, and relating material to an organized knowledge base.
• When the curriculum is organized in a manner that allows new material to build on earlier learning, and when new material is tied to what students already know, teaching effectiveness is increased.

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How Do We Organize and Build Knowledge?

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Making Connections

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Developing Conceptual Knowledge

• Throughout their lives, individuals develop more complex associations among words, concepts, and ideas. Cognitive psychologists call these "schemas" or general knowledge structures used for understanding and memory storage. Schemas consist of information, in an abstract form, of the associations we have with a word, concept, or idea, and they in turn connect with other schemas.
• The schemas one brings to a learning experience – a person's background knowledge – influence what is learned and what is retrieved. Part of the teacher's role is to develop and enrich students' existing schemas and the ways their minds organize information.
• As we develop understandings of concepts, we create new associations among ideas. One way to make these new associations visible to teachers and students is by creating a visual representation or diagram of the underlying features and structures of a concept.

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Developing Explanations

• Another way we build knowledge is through the construction of explanations about different phenomena. Individuals carry around "mental models," or explanations, in their heads for why things happen.
• Mental models may come from students' intuitive theories – like theories of motion or theories of evolution – or they can be provided as a form of instruction by teachers or textbooks.
• There are several ways teachers can support all children in organizing their learning, including those who experience challenges in cognitive processing.

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Knowledge in Practice: How Do Experts Solve Problems?

Glaser (1992) suggests that teachers consider four strategies in designing experiences for students that will enable them to develop competence in solving problems:

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Conclusion

Attending to cognitive processing means taking into account and tapping into the often-invisible ways we develop knowledge, solve problems, and make sense of our worlds.