Group+Four+-+Cognitive+Psychology

__**Cognitive Psychology ** __




 * **Cognitive theory is a learning theory of psychology that attempts to explain human behavior by understanding thought processes. **

> > 1. What are the big ideas held by this grouping? > 2. Do they have a particular way of framing behavior? > 3. Contributions to our understandings of teaching and learning. > 4. Quotes? > 5. Interesting and or distinguishing things that you found that are worthy of mentioning. > 6. Any of the individuals more representative than others? From your point of view? From the field's point of view?
 * Assignment: Synthesize the point of view of the school of thought. Use the following questions to frame the discussion.

__//**Jean Piaget** **(Collective sharing)**//__ 1896 - 1980 "//only education is capable of saving our societies ..." (1934)//


 * gretchen here :o) : Piaget was a Swiss philosopher who developed his famous and well-known //**theory of cognitive development**//, which categorizes a child's cognitive development into 4 cognitive stages. These 4 stages include: //**sensorimotor (**//birth - age 2), //**pre-operational**// (ages 2 - 7, egocentrism and magical thinking), //**concrete operational**// (ages 7 - 12, logic), and //**formal operational**// (ages 12 and up, the development of abstract thought). Piaget's work started to applied to American education and curriculum development in the 1960s; his work also influenced other important psychologists including Lev Vygotsky and Lawrence Kohlberg.


 * karen here: after researching Resnick I find that Piaget is saying there is a hierarchy in terms of cognitive development that leads one to understanding stages of development throughout a child's life, where as Resnick says there is not a heirarchy, //Piaget observed that each stage gave way to the next at roughly predetermined and general ages. Moving from sensori-motor to concrete learning to preoperational learning to abstract learning.// He did contribute much to the knowledge of "readiness" factors and also constructivist movement in education..(giving projects that challenged some of the children' s observations such as a wide containor and a tall skinny containor...which holds more?)

__//**Eleanor Duckworth**//__ (Gretchen) "//The having of wonderful ideas is what I consider the essence of intellectual development."//


 * Eleanor Duckworth was born in Montreal in 1935 to peace activists. She taught elementary school during the 1960s and is noted for her development of a constructivist and exploratory elementary science curriculum. Duckworth was a student, colleague, and translator for //Jean Piaget//. She is now one of the leading progressive educators of our time, and a renowned professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she is a passionate teacher of teachers. Her research focuses on how students develop ideas, how teachers can come to observe and understand this process, and through this understanding of their students' understanding, become better teachers. In her own words, she is //teaching teachers to understand understanding.//


 * Another of Duckworth's significant contributions is the development of "//critical exploration"//, a clinical interview method tailored for the teacher as researcher in her own classroom, which guides meaningful interviews with students about their own thoughts and understandings. Duckworth emphasizes the importance of the classroom teacher being an observant researcher in her own classroom, constantly observing how her students come to learn and understand, and constantly tailoring her teaching practice to her students needs, thus guiding students explorations towards deeper understanding. Finally, Duckworth emphasizes valuing the learner's experience and insight.


 * Duckworth's Essential Question: //"How do people learn and what can anyone do to help?"//

__//**Jerome Bruner**//__ (Devon)

1. Cognitive theory is a learning theory of psychology that attempts to explain human behavior by understanding thought processes. Simply put, the branch seeks to understand internal mental processes like how people acquire information, think (process), perceive, remember, store, problem solve, and learn. Its foundations are generally attributed to the works of the following people: Wundt, Piaget, Wertheimer, to name a few. The phrase was first coined in 1967 by Ulric Neisser in his book //Cognitive Psychology//.


 * 2.** Like Piaget, Bruner demonstrated that thought processes could be subdivided into three distinct modes of reasoning. PIaget associated each mode with a specific period in childhood development, whereas Bruner believed that each mode was dominant throughout a developmental phase but could still be accessed and present throughout the developmental phase. Bruners model of human development includes enactive skills, iconic skills and symbolic skills. Enactive skills include things like manipulation of objects, and spatial awareness. Iconic skills involve visual recognition, and the ability to compare and contrast. Symbolic skills involve reasoning abstractly. Bruner believed deveopmental growth included mastery of each of the increasingly complex modes: enactive --> iconic --> symbolic.

Also like Piaget Bruner's work evolved during the time when behaviorism was all the rage because a stimulus produced a measurable response. Bruner was a key figure in moving the psychological field away from behaviorism and towards cognitism. Bruner's work is closely associated with constructivism as well. He advises that we remember things "with a view towards meaning and signification, not towards the end of somehow preserving the facts themselves."


 * 3.** Bruner's work has implications for teaching as he argues that children construct knowledge via the three modes of reasoning so a teacher should utilize all three modes when engaging students in learning. Asking a child to build or construct a model utilizes their enactive skills, watching a film would utilize their iconic skills and asking students to read a variety of text and converse about their findings would utilize their symbolic skill sets. To me this aligns perfectly with what many of us already know and believe about learning and readily try to employ in the classroom. He maintains that scaffolding is how students build understanding and is the process that eventually leads them to become independent learners.


 * 4.** "To perceive is to categorize, to conceptualize is to categorize, to learn is to form categories, to make decisions is to categorize."

He defined cognitive processes in his 1956 book //A Study in Thinking// as "the means whereby organisms achieve, retain and transform information."

“The interconnection of the new experience with the prior knowledge results in the reorganization of the cognitive structure, which creates meaning and allows the individual to "go beyond the information given".


 * 5.** He attended Duke and obtained a BA in 1937 and then obtained a PhD from Harvard in 1941. He was a psychology professor at Harvard from 1952-1972 and a Watts professor at Oxford from 1972-1980. He is currently a research professor and senior research fellow at New York University. He has published many books but his most recent is //The Culture of Education (1996).// He was born blind but learned to see after two cataract operations!! He was raised in NY City. He co-founded and directed the center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard. His studies and work with young children were influenced by Piaget, Vygotsky and Laria.

__//**Lauren Resnick**//__ __//(Karen)//__ > *Received the "Thorndike Award" in 1998 > *Currently President of American Educational Research Foundation > *Suggests that principals should be instructional leaders > *Moves forward the notion of outside of school learning for children and young adults because it reflects engagement, being motivated and having intrinsic ties to the information > *Was past director of Institute for Learning which created and fostered six tenants related to "Theory of Action" which is driven to "improve teaching and learning of standards based learning" in a manner that school districts are compelled to: > 1. be committed to working on an effort based concept of intelligence and education > 2 have a coherent instructional curriculum > 3. have a data driven culture of direct observation, critical analysis and a two way system of accountability > 4. engage all staff in on-going practice based staff development > 5.develops routine and continues engagement with parents and community > 6. focuses all members of the organization on productive and high functioning instructional core > > This organization develops "strategic relationships" with school districts to help the districts foster a community that encompases and practices the above goals.** > Here is a Quote of hers > "The most important single message of modern research on the nature of thinking is that the kinds of activities traditionally associated with thinking are not limited to advanced levels of development. Instead, these activities are an intimate part of even elementary levls of reading, mathematics, and other branches of learning -- when learning is proceeding well. In fact, the term "higher order" skills is probably itself fundamentally misleading, for it suggests that another set of skills, presumably called "lower order," needs to come first. This assumption -- that there is a sequence from lower level activities that do not require much independent thinking or judgment to higher level ones that do -- colors much educational theory and practice. Implicitly at least, it justifies long years of drill on the "basics" before thinking and problem solving are demanded. Cognitive research on the nature of basic skills such as reading and mathematics provides a fundamental challenge to this assumption.Indeed, research suggests that failure to cultivate aspects of thinking such as those listed in our working definition of high order skills [nonalgorithmic, complex, yielding multiple solutions, involving nuanced judgment, uncertainty, imposing meaning, etc.] may be a source of major learning difficulties even in elementary school. > > Cognitive theory... suggests that processes traditionally reserved for advanced students -- that is, for a minority who have developed skill and taste for interpretive mental work -- might be taught to all readers, including young children and, perhaps especially, those who learn with difficulty. Cognitive research suggests that these processes are what we mean by reading comprehension. Not to teach them is to ignore the most important aspects of reading." 
 * ***Studied at Radcliff and Harvard, currently Professor at University of Pittsburgh

Susan __//**J. McVicker Hunt**//__ was a prominent educational psychologist. He promoted and searched pioneering concepts related to the malleable nature of child intelligence (also with Bloom) that led to the theory of learning centered on the concept of an //information-processing system//. Thus he offered an alternative conception of intelligence as an information-processing system. Some of his research was useful in the creation of the Head Start Program. He became impressed with the evidence for plasticity in intellectual development. He also examinded the idea that children reared in early-impovished environments would result in later intellectual deficits.

The information processing theory centered around the idea that like the computer, the human mind is a system that processes info through the application of logical rules and strategies. But, like the computer, the mind has a limited capacity for the amount and nature of information it can process. But as a computer can be made into a better processor so can children through changes in their brains and sensory system and in the rules and strategies that they learn.

There are 4 main beliefs of the information-processing approach: 1. When the indificual perceives encodes, represents, and stores information from the environment in his mind or retrieves that information, he is thinking. Thinking also includes responnding to any constraints or limitations on memorty processes. (ie lack of prefrontal maturation) 2. The proper focus of study is the role of change mechanism in development. To solve problems effectively, children must encode critical information about a problem and then use this encoded info and relevant prior inowledge to construct a strategy to deal with the problem. 3/ Development is dreien by self-modification. Like Piagett's theory of cognitive development, the information-processing approach holds that children play an active role in their own development. Throught self-modification the child uses knowledge and strategies she has acquired from eariler problem solution to modify her responses to new situations or problems. In this way, she build newer and more sophisticated responses from prior knowledge. (Like the model in the book but the spiral we discussed) 4. Investigators must perform careful task analysis of the problem situations they present to children Thus a child may possess the basic ability necessary to perform a particular task when it is presented in a simple form, without unnecessary complexities. Howeverr if extra or misleading inf is added to the same task, the child may become confused and be unable to perform it.

The structure of the information-processing system is the store model - info from the environment that we acquire through our senses enters the system through the sensory registers - again like the model in the book. This does not account for the motor skills though as I understand it. (This led him urge research for optimal educational programs that would foster this idea.)
 * Ideas & Interests**
 * (Researched with rats on the effects of early rearing environment to examine psychoanalytic insights into the development of personality characteristics.)
 * (Examined the effects of child-rearing practices from a broad historical perspective, and became impressed with the evidence for plasticity in intellectual development.)
 * Children are reared in early-impoverished environment, which results in intellectual deficit.
 * His thought that environments are much more self-selected or self-created, and therefore, posited the importance of intrinsic motivation for intellectual development.