These are
useful as guides for the students to differentiate the important and
unimportant facts. In other words, accurate perception is important in good
learning. It is part of the Gestalt principles. Clearly, these principles are
useful as guide for teachers as they organize their materials and learning
activities. So in this chapter, we will discuss the origin and features of
cognitive theory and relate them to cognitive constructivism and meaningful learning.
The
“Cognitive revolution” is the name for an intellectual movement in the 1950s
that began with what are known collectively as the cognitive sciences. It began
in the modern context of greater interdisciplinary communication and research. The
relevant areas of interchange were the combination
of psychology, anthropology and linguistics with approaches developed within
the then-nascent fields of artificial intelligence, computer science and
neuroscience. Two of the prominent figures in cognitive psychology are Jean
Piaget (1896 – 1980) and Lev Vygotsky (1896 – 1934).
The cognitive revolution in
psychology was a response to behaviourism, which was the predominant school in
experimental psychology at the time. This school was heavily influenced by Ivan
Pavlov,B.F. Skinner, and other physiologists. They proposed that psychology could
only become an objective cience if it is based on observable behaviour in test subjects.
Since mental events are not publicly observable, behaviourist psychologists avoided
description of mental processes or the mind in their literature. Psychoanalytic
theories on the other hand stress the importance of the unconscious while cognitive theories emphasize
on conscious thoughts. 3 important cognitive theories are Piaget’s cognitive
developmental theory, Vygotsky’s sociocultural cognitive theory and information
processing theories, which we have discussed in previous chapter. Cognitive
Psychology focuses on the study of how people think, understand, and know. They
emphasizes on learning how people comprehend and represent the outside world within
themselves and how our ways of thinking about the world influence our
behaviour.
From a cognitive learning
perspective, learning involves the transformation of information in the
environment into knowledge that is stored in the mind. Learning occurs when new
knowledge is acquired or existing knowledge is modified by experience. Among
the main issues studied and discussed by cognitive psychologists are:
1. The
cognitive theories present a positive view of development, emphasizing
conscious thinking.
2. The
cognitive theories (especially Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s) emphasize on the
individual’s active construction of understanding.
3. Piaget’s
and Vygotsky’s theories underscore the importance of examining developmental
changes in children’s thinking.
4. The
information processing theory offers detail descriptions of cognitive
processes.
