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Cognitive Psychology Comprehensive Course Paper

Daniel Coffin

Concordia University, Nebraska

Submitted in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for EDUC 511

October 18th, 2015

As I have developed my craft as a teacher, one of my greatest challenges has

been to help students learn better. As a novice teacher, I focused my efforts on aspects

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of teaching like classroom management, organization and content presentation, thinking

that if I merely presented information clearly and concisely, kept my grading timely, and

eliminated distractions as much as I could in the classroom, student learning would just

happen on its own. These aren’t necessarily bad things to work on, but they are at best

tangential to the task of learning. It wasn’t until I began my study of cognition that I be-

gan to see that just because the work of learning was intangible and took place in the

privacy of my students’ minds didn’t mean that I couldn’t take concrete steps in the

classroom to improve my students’ ability to apprehend new content and incorporate it

into their pre-existing body of knowledge.

Humans are learning creatures. We are designed to take in information through our

senses, organize it with our brains, and create from that sensory information a mental

model of the world. Some students perform these functions more quickly or efficiently,

but they all perform these functions, and they all can benefit from some relatively simple

changes in the classroom which will maximize the efficiency by which they take in and

make meaning of new information.

Research on sensory perception by Sperling, Darwin, Ashcraft, and Handel indicate

some interesting findings regarding the limits of what students are able to register and

remember about what they see and hear in the classroom. Information perceived

through sight was remembered for about half a second after the image was removed,

while information perceived through hearing was remembered for a little more than 3

second after the end of the sound (as cited in Bruning, Schraw, & Norby, 2011, p. 20).

As such, teachers need to be aware of these limitations and need not to expect stu-

dents to perceive too much information at one time. Furthermore, the fact that students

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can perceive and recall information presented visually and auditorially suggests that

presenting information simultaneously in both sensory channels would increase the

probability that such information would be perceived and remembered by students

(Bruning, Schraw, & Norby, 2011, p. 20).

Of course, it would be farcical to simply expect students to commit to memory every-

thing they see or hear in the classroom. Not only would this be impossible, it wouldn’t

even be desirable as not everything said or displayed in a classroom is of equal impor-

tance. When teachers say, “I want my students to be able to remember what I’ve said,”

what they really mean is, “I want my students to be able to remember what I’ve said that

is important or relevant to the learning task at hand.” The problem is that students don’t

necessarily know ahead of time what information is important and should be remem-

bered at all costs and what can be safely dismissed. They need to be able to separate

the signal from the noise.

They do so by means of schemata, mental models which not only organize existing

information but influence when and how new information is perceived in the environ-

ment (Bruning, Schraw, & Norby, 2011, p. 48). As such, teachers can prepare students

for new learning by helping them to recall what they already know so that they can more

readily incorporate new learning into their pre-existing frameworks of knowledge. Acti-

vating schemata can easily be done as part of a “Do Now” or other anticipatory learning

activity. For example, as I help my students build background knowledge prior to read-

ing The Watsons go to Birmingham - 1963, we will discuss the concept of de jure segre-

gation as practiced in America in the 1950s and 1960s. My students are unlikely to be

able to provide me with an accurate definition of segregation or even a concrete exam-

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ple, and so I begin our lesson with something with which they are already: a discussion

of school rules and fairness. By beginning with these concepts with which they are inti-

mately familiar, I get them thinking about fairness as it applies to rules and as we look at

depictions of segregation through historical accounts, they know what to look and listen

for: How are the rules being applied? Are they fair? If not, in what way are they unfair?

Are they being applied arbitrarily? Is there an overarching principle which determines

how rules are being applied unfairly? Thanks to the anticipatory discussion, my stu-

dents’ relevant schemata have been activated and they are prepared now to attend to

the most important information I have to present to them: that segregation was a prac-

tice by which rules were unfairly applied on the basis of race or skin color.

Assuming my students know what to perceive in my classroom and I have pre-

sented the information in media which permits it to be readily perceived, there is still one

more important consideration: that my students have situated themselves to attend to

that presentation of information. Research indicates that humans are limited in the num-

ber of things they can think about or do at any one time (as cited in Bruning, Schraw, &

Norby, 2011, p. 22), which means that attention must be selectively employed to what

happens to be most important at any given time. One important implication for class-

room practice is that teachers should not be presenting unrelated information to stu-

dents at the same time (e.g., having students write down homework due for tomorrow

from the whiteboard while also giving important instructions about what texts to bring for

tomorrow’s class). Another is that when students are demonstrably confused in class,

teachers should not automatically assume that their confusion is the result of inatten-

tion. If the task is resource-limited, then yes, eliminating distractions which divide atten-

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tion should help the student, but is the task is data-limited, then the problem isn’t atten-

tion-based, but the student lacks some information vital to the task, and the teacher

needs to help the student address this deficiency (Bruning, Schraw, & Norby, 2011, p.

22). This simple differential assessment can help save both teacher and student unnec-

essary frustration in the classroom.

My focus to this point on what teachers can and should do to address cognition in

the classroom isn’t to suggest that the burden of thinking in the classroom falls solely on

the shoulders of teachers. On the contrary, the student is the only one in the classroom

who can perceive information and organize it in such a way that it can be recalled and

put to use. Consider the following analogy. A student is provided with a bookshelf and

stacks of printed materials stored in a locked room. It is up to the student to arrange the

various books, maps, pamphlets and papers in such a way that he or she can find them

efficiently when needed. No one but the student can do this, as that bookshelf and

those materials are locked up where only the student can handle them. As teachers,

however, we have the responsibility to be guides and mentors to students in this task. I

cannot place books on the shelf, so to speak, but I can advise as to what organization of

books makes most sense and will enable students to retrieve information in the quickest

and easiest fashion. All to often I hear from teachers, “I can’t make them learn,” which is

true, but they too easily forget the corollary, “but I can show them how to more easily.”

This comprehensive review obviously barely scratches the surface of what I have

learned over the course of this unit, let alone what there is to learn about cognition and

how to teach in a way that best enables student cognition in the classroom. Still, this

triad of perception, schemata and attention, I think, nicely illustrate the guiding principle

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of cognitive psychology: while there is much that is unknown about how learning occurs,

what is known shows that teachers have not just the ability but the responsibility to

teach in a way that works with and not against how students are designed to learn. If we

as teachers learn to teach in a fashion compatible with how students are ready to learn,

how much more can we and our students accomplish together than we are already?

The possibilities are dizzying.

References

Bruning, R.H., Schraw, G.J., & Norby, M.M. (2011). Cognitive psychology and instruc-

tion

(5th ed.). Boston: Pearson