‘Teaching means creating situations where structures can be discovered’ (Jean Piaget)

This approach is often compared to doing a jigsaw in which a piece only makes sense when placed in the correct place, linking pieces around it to produce a larger and clearer picture. Learners actively process information, and their behaviour is modified or altered when they recognise a relationship between the elements of information.

In many ways, cognitivism is an umbrella term which has links with constructivism and connectivism. Emerging in the 1950s, partly as a response to Behaviourism. Practitioners such as Bruner, Vygotsky and Bloom believed that learning was not simply prompted by external stimuli, such as a teacher, but instead involved cognitive activity, or thinking. It all takes place in the mind.

As neuroscientists made more discoveries about the brain, cognitivists were able to develop their pedagogical approaches using this knowledge.  A lot of dyslexia tutoring and educational psychology assessments centre around this cognitive approach of learning.

How would this approach work as a pure tutoring model?

The Tutor would be focusing on getting to know the student’s individual processing style. They would be examining how the student can (or cannot) control their attention and focus on what is being taught. The tutor would also be noting how much cognitive fluency the student has with the learning material, this means how much the student can process information and link the tutoring material to other things they may have learned.

The tutor will next look at how the brain is organising the learning material and see how the student is making sense of and storing the information. For example, the student learns about decimals and percentages in maths, can they link this to fractions and other topics that are ‘part of a whole’? Or the student could be learning about tragedies in literature, can they link this to their knowledge of hamlet or Macbeth?  The tutor will be focusing on the students mistakes and using them as evidence of incorrect organisation and storage, looking to help the student correct these errors.

Lastly the tutor will be looking at retrieval and examining how the student can access any stored information. Can the student remember the right information at the right time prompted by an exam or test question? Does the student of have that ‘tip of the tongue feeling’ where they can’t quite remember what the answer is, even know they know the material? The tutor will be looking to strengthen the neurological connections between what is known and what is remembered to aid information retrieval for exam speed and accuracy.

The tutor will be highly attended to individual differences and recognise that each student has their own cognitive rules and capabilities and seek to improve their cognition at all times.

Criticisms

A criticism of cognitivism is that it focuses on what happens in the mind. This is what we think about; it is like a black box for information going in and out of it. We can’t actually see into the mind and work out what is happening when a student learns. Therefore, we are reliant on experiments conducted by educational researchers who take a stimulus in and stimulus out approach. This stimulus in and stimulus out approach means students are often given something to learn (normally lists of words) in different experimental conditions and then the researcher tests how many things (words) the student can remember and how right they were.  A lot of cognitivism research is criticised for not being true to life.

Additionally, cognitivism only focuses on what is happening inside a student’s mind, it pays no attention to the environmental factors unless they are seen as distracting attention. It also gives no consideration of  the student’s social economic status, their emotional response to learning, their motivation or their ability to articulate how and what they are learning.

Nonetheless, cognition and what is happening in the mind has become a rising science within education and with the advent of brain imaging techniques it is consistently being researched upon with new discoveries being made.

Thematic application

Intelligence/mindset?

One of the core tenets of Cognitivism is that intelligence is not fixed and that learners can be taught anything.

Discovery/instruction

In many ways, Cognitivism embraces both of these themes. The learner is certainly instructed, but the instructor encourages the cognitive approach of linking ideas and making sense of concepts.

Active/Passive Learning:

Cognitivism requires an active learning, The whole premise of the research is that learners use their minds, engage, and think in order to organise process and store information.

Atomisation/application

Cognitivism contains both atomisation and application. A student learns the atomised skills, and is then able to apply those skills to new situations and tasks.