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“By the mid-twentieth century, an alternative approach known as cognitivism began to address what many theorists viewed as the more problematic aspects of behaviorism:  that learning is passive rather than active, that knowledge is externally imposed, and that the evidence of learning is as simple as a correct answer. Cognitivists known as Gestalt theorists challenged the idea that learning is the result of behavioral conditioning, proposing instead that in the real world it is a series of internal processes that result in moments of insight that cannot be satisfactorily explained by trial and error or repetition.  Cognitivism in effect internalized the study of learning, shifting its focus from outward behavior to the psychology and science of information processing and to some degree to the motivational and emotional factors that contribute to knowledge formation.”  (Booth, p. 39)

As witnessed here, behaviorism was clearly not perfect. Learning is also an internal process, and the development of cognitivism proved that learning in an internalized experience as well. The further behavioral theorists delve into this field, the more we come to realize that learning is often a complex process involving many, many factors and that it is best to keep an open mind and be flexible in one's own pursuit of learning and teaching others. -Melissa Ida

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"Another study cautions against cognitive overload, including too much 'learning by doing,' warning that too much 'extraneous processing' not directly related to achieving intended learning outcomes may actually hinder learning ('cognitive load theory'). In this study, students did better on a test after reading material containing prepared graphic organizers than when they were asked to prepare their own graphic organizers (Stull and Mayer, 2007). All of this leads to the conclusion that a balanced and flexible approach is essential, particularly when encountering learners' incorrect mental models in a range of library, media, and information center environments." (Grassian & Kaplowitz, p. 75)

The biggest point to take away from this study is the fact that balance is key. As the authors state, too much "extraneous processing" simply puts on a strain on students' ability to learn when "learning by doing". ~Melissa Ida

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New literature from the cognitivist camp emphasizes metacognition, which emphasizes active learning. critical thinking, and metaliteracy in IL.

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I've included an example of recent anti-cognitivist literature that seeks to expose and deconstruct cognitivism's overintellectualization of emotions.

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Real World Experiences with Constructivism

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Real World Experiences with Constructivism

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"I believe we should implement constructivist principles in our instructional design but not as a completely constructivist teaching method. I see constructivism as problem based learning (PBL) where the students have to determine how to solve the problems with only minimal teaching help....The students had trouble applying prior knowledge because they did not have any or could not remember it....I believe the theory of PBL is a great way to increase student engagement and learning but the way it is implemented has to be improved. I think that it is something that the students and instructors have to be willing and shown how to use." (Khitt, retrieved from https://khitt.wordpress.com/2012/01/) (Abby Armour)

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"If experiences or situations are at odds with an individual's current ways of perceiving and/or thinking about the world...a tension or ambiguity results....Faced with a disconnect between new experiences and old mental models, learners feel the need to reexamine or reconstruct their worldview in order to incorporate the new information. If successful, a revised worldview is developed, and the information becomes part of the learners' new mental model." (Grassian & Kaplowitz, p. 31) (Abby Armour)

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Learn about the Cognitivism learning theory in a short, humorous video. (Abby Armour)

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Graphic Comparing Learning Theories - How Does Cognitivism Compare?

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Graphic Comparing Learning Theories - How Does Cognitivism Compare?

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(Abby Armour)

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"...emphasis on mind, or the mechanisms through which people perceive, process, and recall information" (Booth, p. 38) (Abby Armour)

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This infograph explores the concept of scaffolding in relation to developing cognitive skills in the classroom.

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This work by Mia MacMeekin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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Cognitive Theory & Practice (Brett Siegel)

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Cognitive Theory & Practice (Brett Siegel)

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This article provides a closer look at the driving theories of Piaget and Vygotsky, as well as practical applications for cognitive-based instruction.

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This would actually make all of the knowledge I have on Piaget worth while! haha

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Cognitivism & Maker Spaces (Melissa Ida)

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Cognitivism & Maker Spaces (Melissa Ida)

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This article offers a critique of the cognitive load theory and looks at maker spaces in school libraries.

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There's no doubt that students find making to be a creative and engaging activity. But as they tinker, design, and invent, are they actually learning anything?

Making is too young a phenomenon to have generated a broad research base to answer this question. The literature that does exist comes from enthusiastic champions of making, rather than disinterested investigators. But there are two well-established lines of research within psychology and cognitive science that can inform how we understand making and help us ensure that making leads to learning. Taken together, these two strands of empirical evidence provide the best guide we presently have for maximizing the learning potential of maker activities.

The first line of research is called cognitive load theory, developed by John Sweller, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, and others. You may recall from a college psychology class "the magical number seven"-the notion that people can only hold seven pieces of information in their heads at one time. In recent years, scientists have determined that our cognitive capacity is even smaller, able to accommodate more like two to four items. So students learn best when they aren't grappling with too many ideas.

This argument has relevance for student makers in two ways. First, cognitive load theorists warn that activities that are "self-guided" or "minimally guided" (as many maker projects are) may not lead to effective learning, as measured by assessments of students' knowledge at the activity's end. Novices are, by definition, not yet knowledgeable enough to make smart choices about which avenues to pursue and which to ignore. Beginners engaged in self-directed projects may also develop new misunderstandings along the way. In all, self-directed maker activities may have students expending a lot of time and effort-and scarce cognitive resources-on activities that don't help them learn.

Second, cognitive load researchers caution that learning and creating are distinct undertakings, each of which competes with the other for limited mental reserves. ( "Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning"). Absorbing and thinking about new knowledge imposes a significant cognitive burden, as does pursuing a specified goal (for example, building a model airplane). When students are asked to do both at once, they tend to focus on meeting the goal, leaving precious few cognitive resources for the reflection that leads to lasting learning. Student makers may produce a handsome model airplane having no idea what makes it fly. The best way to ensure learning, these researchers maintain, is to provide direct instruction: clear, straightforward explanation, offered before any making has begun.

Let them fail

A second line of evidence is called productive failure. This research has mostly been carried out by Manu Kapur, a professor at the National Institute of Education in Singapore, and has principally concerned mathematical problem-solving. Rather than explain a mathematical concept and then ask students to apply it, as in a traditional classroom, Kapur gives students a difficult problem without any explanation at all. Working in teams, the students are tasked with devising as many potential solutions as possible. Typically, such students do not arrive at the textbook or "canonical" solution-but instead generate more inventive approaches. Only then does Kapur step in and offer direct instruction on the best way to solve the problem.

Kapur has found that presenting problems in this seemingly backwards order helps those students learn more deeply and flexibly than subjects who receive direct instruction. Indeed, the teams that generated the greatest number of suboptimal solutions-or failed-learned the most from the exercise. ( "Failure can be productive for teaching children maths.")

This happens for three reasons, Kapur theorizes. One: Students who do not receive teacher instruction at the outset are forced to rely on their previous knowledge. Research shows that "activating" previous knowledge leads to better learning, because it allows us to integrate new knowledge with what is already stored in our brains. Two: Because the learners are not given the solution to the problem right away, they are forced to grapple with the deep structure of the problem-an experience that allows them to understand the solution at a more fundamental level when they do finally receive the answer. And three: Learners pay especially close attention when the instructor reveals the correct solution, because they have now thought deeply about the problem but have failed themselves to come up with the correct solution. They're eager to find out what it might be, and this eagerness makes it more likely that they'll remember it going forward. The best way to ensure learning, Kapur maintains, is to deliberately "design for failure."

Hold on there

Now, neither of these approaches may, at the outset, hold much appeal for maker enthusiasts. Making is concerned with learning through creating-not through lecture-style direct instruction. Also, maker culture is about promoting a sense of competence and mastery-not deliberately setting up learners for failure. Moreover, don't these two lines of research contradict each other? One advises instructors to tell learners what to do up front, and the other prescribes just the opposite.

On closer inspection, however, these two bodies of evidence actually complement each other. Some tasks, like those concerning basic knowledge or skills, are better suited to direct instruction. It may be better to provide explicit instruction on how to operate a 3-D printer, for example, than to have students figure out the directions on their own. We should tell student makers exactly how to perform straightforward tasks, so that they can devote cognitive resources to more complex operations. Meanwhile, tasks that themselves demand deeper conceptual understanding are likely to benefit from a productive-failure approach. In such cases, we should organize makers into groups and ask them to generate multiple solutions.

Incorporating insights from both methods can help ensure that maker activities produce real learning. By applying cognitive load theory to making, we can "unbundle" learning and creating-at least at first-so as to reduce cognitive overload. Instead of asking learners to learn and make at the same time, these two activities can be separated and then pursued sequentially. Makers working on that model airplane, for example, could carefully inspect a previously assembled plane, examine a diagram of it, and then watch as we put one together, explaining as we go, before attempting to make one themselves.

Once students begin making, we can carefully scaffold their mental activity, allowing them to explore and make choices but always within a framework that supports accurate and effective learning. ( "Taking the Load Off a Learner's Mind: Instructional Design for Complex Learning,") The scaffolding lightens learners' cognitive load until they can take over more mental tasks themselves. This approach actually dovetails with the apprenticeship model that inspired the maker movement: students learn to create under the guidance of a master, taking on more responsibility as their skills and confidence grow. And, rather than relying entirely on their own intuition, they have models to inspect and emulate-again, especially early on, when the mental demands of learning are high.

Applying the lessons of productive failure to making, we can immerse students in a maker task with minimal prior instruction. Students should be asked to generate as many potential solutions as they can, working in teams to maximize the number of solutions contributed and explored. This initial phase should be followed by direct instruction on the optimal solution-instruction that addresses the students' own array of solutions, explaining why each one misses the mark. The contrasts we draw between the ideal solution and the learners' suboptimal solutions do much to facilitate their learning. This approach, too, is fully in tune with the maker approach: it encourages students to play with ideas and materials, without the pressure to find the one right answer.

Learning by doing-in the library

School librarians who direct maker spaces have found ingenious solutions to accommodate the ways in which students learn. At New Milford High School in New Jersey, for example, library media specialist Laura Fleming has created two types of "stations" at which students can work: fixed stations and flexible stations. Fixed stations have "low barriers to entry," says Fleming; students can walk into the library and immediately engage in the activities set up there, without any instruction or guidance. Fleming's fixed stations include LEGOs and a take-apart technology area, where students can disassemble old computers and other machines to investigate how they work. These fixed stations are available at all times throughout the school year. Flexible stations, by contrast, are periodically changed, and they involve much more structured guidance from Fleming, who might lead students step-by-step through an activity, modeling what to do as she goes. Projects at flexible stations have included building a robot and creating cartoons with stop-motion animation.

Fleming has ensured that her library's maker space enhances classroom learning by doing her homework. "Before I ordered a single piece of equipment [for the maker space], I did a thorough survey of students' existing interests," says Fleming. "I also looked for ways that the maker space could supplement areas in the academic curriculum that were thin, or make available to all students activities that had previously been open to only a select group." The "themes" of Fleming's maker space include molecular gastronomy, wearable tech, electricity and papertronics, polymers, and engineering inventions.

At the library of Perry Meridian Middle School in Indiana, maker space themes include micro-manufacturing and fabrication, digital music composition, textiles and sewing, and architecture and urban planning. Leslie Preddy, the school's library media specialist, promotes learning there by encouraging kids to collaborate. "We had a student who became very knowledgeable about video production lead a workshop for his classmates in the subject," says Preddy. "When you're teaching other people, that's learning at the highest level." Preddy scaffolds student learning in her maker space by providing "pathfinder guides"-written instructions that structure students' thinking-and by asking "intentional questions," queries that help students find a solution without handing them the answer. She also encourages them to embrace failure as an efficient and effective way to learn.

"Thinking and sharing have always gone on in school libraries," Preddy notes. "Maker spaces connect thinking and sharing with creating, and that takes learning to a whole new level."

Annie Murphy Paul is learning columnist at Time.com and author of the upcoming book Brilliant: The New Science of Smart (Crown, 2015).

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How to Ensure that Making Leads to Learning

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There's no doubt that students find making to be a creative and engaging activity. But as they tinker, design, and invent, are they actually learning anything? Making is too young a phenomenon to have generated a broad research base to answer this question.

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This PowToon provides a quick glimpse into the basics of this theory.

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Social Cognitive Models of Health Behavior

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first video opening presentation-- Created using PowToon -- Free sign up at http://www.powtoon.com/ . Make your own animated videos and animated presentations for free. PowToon is a free tool that allows you to develop cool animated clips and animated presentations for your website, office meeting, sales pitch, nonprofit fundraiser, product launch, video resume, or anything else you could use an animated explainer video.

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Cognitivism in the Library  (Melissa Ida)

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Cognitivism in the Library  (Melissa Ida)

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This blog entry by a teacher-librarian looks at how cognitivsim can be applied in the classrom with library science students.

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After studying all the information on cognitivism, I now have a better understanding of how to help students encode information meaningfully to long-term memory so that it can be easily retrieved, namely by focusing on two main elements: providing organized instruction and activating prior knowledge. Memory plays a prominent role in the cognitive theory, and learning results when information is stored in long term memory in an organized and meaningful way. One way to help students to do this is through graphic techniques such as semantic maps, concept maps, networking, advanced organizers, etc, all of which can be done using technology or the old-fashioned way, on the board or individual worksheets. By emphasizing the structuring, organizing and sequencing of information, teachers are facilitating optimal processing. Students benefit from using such techniques as outlining, summarizing, mneumonics, chunking, analogies and links to prior knowledge. A favorite in library instruction is the K-W-L chart, where the students list what they know on a topic, then what they want to know, and finally, after the research is complete, what they have learned. In this way, students are assisted in organizing and structuring the information they already know with the new information they are learning.
Acrostics, mneumonics and visual clues also help students to connect new information to memories already in the long term memory. I remember to this day the colors of the rainbow through "Roy G. Biv" and the "preposition song" and the "helping verb song" I sang in 7th grade English class. By setting all the prepositions and helping verbs to popular song tunes, and repeatedly singing the songs, this knowledge was transferred to my long term memory, as evidenced by the fact that I still remember these songs (but don't ask me what I had for breakfast 3 days ago, you get the idea)! I'm looking forward to singing the bibliography song with my library students someday, another song which combines students knowledge with a popular tune. I also recently observed a library lesson which made clever use of mental imagery. The lesson was on the "Dewey Body" and helped students to remember the different Dewey Decimal classification categories by connecting them each to a different part of the body. I never saw students learn this information so fast and in such an enjoyable manner! Coincidentally, I was studying those same classification categories in my cataloging class, so I passed the "Dewey Body" lesson on to my classmates, since you're never to old to have fun with learning!
Two other ways teachers can help students to encode information meaningfully to long-term memory is by using cognitive apprenticeship or anchored instruction. During cognitive apprenticeship (an example of cooperative learning), students can collaborate in groups to construct meaning and call on their teachers as facilitators to the process. Anchored instruction engages students with authentic tasks designed to develop useful knowledge and problem solving skills, while at the same time motivating students by connecting to their prior knowledge, and thereby facilitating transfer into long term memory.
Finally, while attending my first TEAM workshop last week on Podcasting, I was reminded of the cognitivism module. One of the reasons I listed for using podcasts in education was that they allow for infinite review and reinforcement of skills. By recording podcasts we are using the technology that our students are most familiar with, such as IPODs, and we can help them break down important information into smaller digestible chunks, which they can review at their own convenience, as many times as they feel necessary. I feel that podcasts are a great technology tool which ties into the cognitive theory which emphasizes that the learner is responsible for learning to occur as they rehearse, code and structure their knowledge.

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After studying all the information on cognitivism, I now have a better understanding of how to help students encode information meaningfully to long-term memory so that it can be easily retrieved, namely by focusing on two main elements: providing organized instruction and activating prior knowledge.