Cognitivism in Practice

Dr. Orey states that, "Cognitive learning theories revolve around information processing" (Laureate Education, 2009). In Chapter 4, Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers, the idea that advanced organizers "are structures that teachers provide to students before a learning activity to help them classify and make sense of the content they'll encounter, particularly new content that is not well organized in its original format"(Hubbell, Kuhn & Malenoski, 2007). When using an advanced organizer the "higher-level" or "essential" questions should be in the center node and then from that you should branch off with facts or ideas you learned from the lesson. Creating this type of organizer is a great visual representation used to summarize what the students have learned from the lesson. In addition, it is important to have the students summarize not only at the end of the lesson, but also throughout the lesson. Having the students work on the organizer throughout the lesson will help to ensure that they are understanding the concept as you are going along rather than getting to the end and finding out they don't understand it.

In Chapter 6, Summarizing and Note Taking, "The instructional strategy summarizing and note taking focuses on enhancing students' ability to synthesize information and distill it into a concise new form" (Hubbell, Kuhn & Malenoski, 2007). When taking notes it is important to organize the information in a way that is easy to refer back to and understand. In this chapter, they mention many different techniques to use when taking notes, such as: Microsoft Word and the AutoSummarize feature, Inspiration, Wikis and Blogs. Taking notes is difficult for students as it seems they like to write down everything exactly as they see or hear it. Using these techniques and with a lot of practice, eventually the students should be able to learn how to summarize and pull just the most important information to include in their notes. It is important that they have the most important ideas since the short term or working memory can "only process 7 plus or minus 2 pieces of information at one time" (Laureate Education, 2009).

The idea of Cues, Questions, Advanced Organizers and Summarizing and Note Taking correlate with the principles of the cognitive learning theory. All of these help to organize and internalize the information that is being taught for an easier retrieval at a later time.