3. Cognitivism

Cognitivism largely replaced behaviourism and came to prominence in the late 20th century. This theory concentrated on the organisation of knowledge, information processing and decision-making. David Ausubel (1960) and Jerome Bruner (1966) were the main proponents of cognitivism. Bruner pursued the notion that learners should be given opportunities to discover for themselves relationships that are inherent in the learning material, a teaching technique he named ‘scaffolding’. 

According to cognitivism, knowledge is the mental schema that students use to map the outside world. Knowledge is kept in long-term memory and can be retrieved to process external information in working memory. Declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge are some of the fundamental building blocks of knowledge that can be broken down and simplified. Learning is the process of applying different cognitive and metacognitive strategies to encode, organise, analyse, and structure external information in order to create a new schema or modify an existing schema that is retained in memory. The boundaries for recognising the similarities and differences of different information during learning processes and the transfer of learning processes were created by the past knowledge of the learners. 

   

Video 3: Cognitivism [3:44]

 Compared to behaviourism, the mental processes and structures - perception, thinking, language, and reasoning - are more suited to describe complex kinds of learning since they are fundamental to people's attention, memory, and idea development. Learning organised complex knowledge that can be broken down, standardised, and analysed into an algorithmic or rule-based system is best explained by cognitivism. For instance, to learn programming, a learner could gradually become proficient in each of the sub-tasks (such as understanding syntax, mastering loops and conditionals, implementing functions, and so forth) and then put all of the sub-tasks together to complete a complex program or application.

The goal of cognivist instruction is to transfer knowledge as effectively and efficiently as feasible through processing processes. The main elements that account for learning include structured instructional components, learners' prior knowledge and learning techniques to approach learning and prevent forgetting, and learning motivation. Among the cognitivist approaches to instructional design are:

  • Task/knowledge analysis to identify and illustrate the prerequisite relationships which results in hierarchical structures of knowledge which results in hierarchical structures of learning content and decomposition of instruction;
  • Learner analysis to determine learners’ predisposition to learning (i.e., how do learners activate, maintain, and direct their learning) and to bridge between learners’ prior knowledge and the target learning;
  • Design of information bridge to facilitate recall of prerequisite skill and draw analogies between prior knowledge and target knowledge;
  • Information elaboration and chunking that structure, organize, and sequence information to facilitate optimal processing;
  • Design of practice and assessment to provide informative feedback that directs student’s information processing, self-regulated learning, and knowledge transfer;
  • Design of learning environment that actively involves learners in the learning process and supports learners’ self-regulated learning and motivation maintenance.

Educational designers should be mindful of the limitations of cognitivism when examining the learner-centered approach to complex learning (i.e., learning and the meaning of knowledge vary across contexts and cases). They should also stress that each learner is a unique constructive learning agent rather than a computer-like information processor.

In an online teaching environment, this could manifest itself in the teacher providing regular and focused support to each learner in the early stages of the course, but making less frequent supporting interventions as the learner begins to act successfully by themselves. Ausubel’s work in this area would suggest that it is better for the teacher to provide some materials in advance, that allow the learner to ‘organise’ their learning approach prior to them  accessing the actual course materials, so that they have already developed much of the skillset they will need to successfully undertake the course (OU, 2017).