COGNITIVE DIMENSION

How Do Children Learn?

Physically

Once born, children develop strength :

• from top to bottom

• from the inside to the outside

• from large muscle to small muscle

This is a sequence that all humans follow.

How Do Children Learn?

Mentally

When a child is born, he/she comes with a brain ready and eager to learn. It has great potential for development, depending on what we put into it.

Early experiences greatly influence the way a person develops and determine how their learning patterns develop.

As children interact with their environment, they learn problem solving skills, Critical thinking skills, and language skills.

How Could Teachers Foster Children Cognitive Development?

• Hands on learning is good for both children and adults. The learner is actively involved instead of just sitting and listening.

• working puzzles,

• making collages,

• painting, measuring ingredients for you as you cook,

• simple board games together…

• Lakeisha and George are painting at the easel. Each of them has a jar of blue paint and a jar of yellow paint. Suddenly George yells, "Look, 'Keisha, I made green!" "How did you do it?" asks Lakeisha. "I put yellow paint on top of my blue paint - yellow and blue put together make green!" yells George. Other children gather around to watch and ask for a turn. The teacher wonders aloud what would happen if they mixed other colors. She allows the children to explore colors and and help her chart their color discoveries with words and color samples.

To encourage mental development they...

• Ask open-ended questions .

• Give children choices.

• Allow and encourage creativity

• Build language skills.

• Learn about the neighborhood and the city through walks and field trips.

• Provide many manipulative materials which encourage the development of problem solving skills.

• Encourage counting objects through games and individual activities.

• Ask the children for their opinions.

• Make charts with their predictions and their opinions and reread them often.

• Read daily to the children.

• Remember, what children know depends on the experiences they have had.

Concept of Intelligence

• Intelligence comes from the Latin verb "intellegere", which means "to understand".

• By this rationale, intelligence (as understanding) is arguably different from being "smart" (able to adapt to one's environment), or being "clever" (able to creatively adapt).

Intelligence Concept

• Intelligence (also called intellect) is an umbrella term used to describe a property of the mind that encompasses many related abilities, such as the capacities to reason, to plan, to solve problems, to think abstractly, to comprehend ideas, to use language, and to learn.

• There are several ways to define intelligence. In some cases, intelligence may include traits such as creativity, personality, character, knowledge, or wisdom.

Which Are The Theories

Behind The Studyof The

CognitiveProcess?

• Stages of CognitiveDevelopment, Jean Piaget.

• Discovery Learning, JeromeBruner.

• Meaningful Learning, David Ausubel.

Stages of CognitiveDevelopment, Jean Piaget

The four stages are:

1. Sensorimotor (birth to 2 years)

2. Preoperational (2 years to 7 years)

3. Concrete operational (7 years to 11 years)

4. Formal operational (abstract thinking; 11 years and up)

• In the sensorimotor stage, the mental structures are mainly concerned with the mastery of concrete objects.

• The mastery of symbols takes place in the preoperational stage.

• In the concrete stage, children learn mastery of classes, relations, and numbers and how to reason.

• The last stage deals with the mastery of thought.

Assimilation involves the incorporation of new events into preexisting cognitive structures.

Accommodation means existing structures change to accommodate to the new information. This dual process, assimilation-accommodation, enables the child to form schema.

Equilibration involves the person striking a balance between himself and the environment, between assimilation and accomodation.

Fundamental processes:

Discovery LearningJerome Bruner

Learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge. The learner selects and transforms information, constructs hypotheses, and makes decisions, relying on a cognitive structure to do so.Cognitive structure (i.e., schema, mental models) provides meaning and organization to experiences and allows the individual to "go beyond the information given". As far as instruction is concerned, the instructor should try and encourage students to discover principles by themselves. The instructor and student should engage in an active dialog (i.e., socraticlearning).

Characteristics

• Learning is constructed by a student through two processes: the Resolution of conflict and Reflection about theory.

• Discovery learning is preferred over expository teaching. The learner determines his or her own best way of learning, and that learning should not be externally determined and controlled.

• Discovery learning increases motivation to learn, and also produces better long-term memory.

Characteristics

• The learner must be active, because only he/she can select and interpret information from the environment.

• Constructivism does not necessarily mean hands-on -learning. What the learner already knows determines what he/she will learn.

• Knowledge is a personally meaningful construction.

Characteristics

• It promotes a students' free exploration within a given framework or structure.

• Modern technological advances such as interactive laser disks, multimedia technologies, on-line facilities and the Worlds Wide Web provide students with access to databases and sear engines which support discovery learning.

Meaningful Learning,DavidAusubel

• Cognitive theorists are concerned with the changes in a student's understanding that result from learning.

• Learning must be meaningful. • Cognitive learning is based on

schemata or mental structures by which students organize their perceived environment.

• Schematic structures of cognitive development change by the process of assimilation and accommodation.

David Ausubel's "assimilation theory of learning"

• It promotes the idea that people learn better if they can find meaning in the learning.

• Rote learning or memorization is used for information that a learner is required to know but does not find meaningful.

• If a learner is presented with new information that processes some external or internal characteristics which enable the learner to associate it with previous learning, the learner may learn the new information because it is meaningful to him/her.

• The relationship between short- term and long-term memory.

• Organization of knowledge in long-term memory is called cognitive structure.

• Cognitive strategies useful in making learning meaningful and useful for transfer of learning have been identified: rehearsal strategies, elaboration strategies, organization strategies, comprehension monitoring strategies and effective strategies.

Principles

1. The most general ideas of a subject should be presented first and then progressively differentiated in terms of detail and specificity.

2. Instructional materials should attempt to integrate new material with previously presented information through comparisons and cross-referencing of new and old ideas.

How To Develop ThinkingProcesses

• Problems are related to dilemmas, doubts, and decisions.

• These tools are logical "thinking tools” They can be used in standalone situations, or together they form a coherent problem-solving and change management system.

• Their generic purpose is to translate intuition to a format that can be discussed rationally, questioned without offense, and modified to more fully reflect the understanding of the situation.

Attention

• “Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German”• William James, in his monumental Principles of

Psychology (1890),

Perception

• Before one can learn anything, perception must take place, i.e. one has to become aware of it through one of the senses.

• Subsequently one has to interpret whatever one has seen or heard. In essence then, perception means interpretation.

• Lack of experience may cause a person to misinterpret what he has seen or heard.

• In other words, perception represents our apprehension of a present situation in terms of our past experiences, or, as stated by the philosopher Kant “We see things not as they are but as we are.”

Memory

• Receptive memory: recognizing visual or auditory stimuli .

• Sequential memory: This refers to the ability to recall stimuli in their order of observation or presentation. Many dyslexics have poor visual sequential memory.

• Rote memory: This refers to the ability to learn certain information as a habit pattern.

• Short-term memory: Working Memory, Krudsen

• Long-term memory: This refers to the ability to retrieve information of things learned in the past.

No real progress can be attained by either the child or the teacher when the same ground has to be covered over and over because the child has forgotten.

Exercise 1

• You want to learn how to play softball so that you can join a team. How will you learn to play?

Will you: • 1. Buy a book and read about how to play

softball. • 2. Watch a video about softball. • 3. Ask a friend who plays to grab a ball,

bat, and glove and teach you.