A
Cognitive Approach to Learning A Three-Stage Information
Processing Model As has already been proposed
by Gagne in the preceding chapter, the processing of or acting on incoming
information by the brain is not a single-step process. The information must
first “get into” the brain and then must be kept or stored in the brain through
a process called memory. Furthermore, it must be stored in such a way that it
can be recalled or retrieved. Storing information in a retrievable form has been
called semantic encoding by Gagne
(1985) and others. Sensory
Register. The existence of three
stages of information processing —(1) entry via a sensory register (which
is also referred to as perception), (2) storage in short-term memory, and (3)
storage in long-term memory — has been widely proposed
(see, for example, Loftus & Loftus, 1976). The information we attend to and
perceive with our eyes and ears is registered or received in our thinking
process. It is then stored, temporarily, in short-term memory before being
transferred to long-term memory. If you carried out the experiment in Box
6.1, then during the 10 seconds that you were studying each list, you were
committing it to your sensory register (along with any markings in the book that
you or others have made and any background sounds, such as conversation or TV,
that might be going on while you study). Short-Term
Memory.
Information that a person focuses on and chooses to retain enters into
short-term memory, at least for a brief period of time. Unfortunately,
short-term memory has a limited capacity. If someone is introduced to six people
at a party, he or she may remember the names of only a few of them. Of course,
part of the problem here may be attention. George Miller (1956) has shown that
the capacity of short-term memory is about seven units of information. Of the
twelve “words” on the first list in the However, people can expand
their short-term memory capacity by increasing the size of each unit of
information. This is called chunking.
If someone were to combine an entire list of words into a meaningful chunk
or sentence then it could be remembered along with six or seven more chunks or
sentences as well. In summary, we can store
information for longer periods in short-term memory through (1) chunking, that is, by connecting smaller
pieces together to make larger pieces, or (2) continuous or repeated rehearsal. For example, if you repeat
over and over a phone number you heard at a party, you can remember it until you
get borne and write it down; you can remember phone
numbers you call frequently; you can remember phone numbers more easily if you
can connect the numbers together. Short-term memory is called
working memory. It is the place where
newly registered information is mixed with previously learned information
during reading, thinking, and problem-solving. People with good short-term
memories can shift their focus repeatedly from reading to thinking without
having to reread the previous material to remember the gist of it. This is a
major difference between skilled and unskilled readers (Cball,
1983). Long-Term
Memory.
Information that must be remembered for longer periods of time is transferred to
long-term memory where it may remain for most of a person’s life. The process of
long-term memory storage is called semantic encoding because many psychologists
believe that what is stored is not the information itself but some more
efficient verbal representation of it. Thus, people do not usually store
information in long-term memory by rehearsal or repetition, as was true for
short-term memory, but by transforming the information into meaningfully and
purposefully connected verbal chunks that have been referred to as semantic networks (E. D. Gagne, 1985).
(An example of such a semantic network is shown in Figure
6.1.) A semantic network is a set
of interconnected and interrelated ideas in which one idea or element of an idea
can trigger the memory of another idea. Entire sets of knowledge can be
organized into such networks of ideas with common or shared elements. In this
way, all of the ideas do not have to be in short-term or wording memory but can
still be accessible to it. The ideas that are formed
into semantic networks may be of two types (E. D. Gagne, 1985): (1) propositions or units of declarative knowledge, that is,
knowledge about facts; and (2) productions or units of procedural knowledge, that is, knowledge
about operations or how to do something. For example, the knowledge that the
words was and were are verbs is declarative knowledge,
whereas knowing which form of the verb to use with the singular pronoun i is procedural knowledge. We can
represent procedural Figure 6.1 ~The Propositional Network Each proposition, indicated
by a
node-link
structure, is linked to other propositions
through
common
ideas. Thus, all of declarative knowledge is interrelated in a vast network
of propositions. (From E. Gagné, p. 74.) knowledge as productions that are
IF—THEN statements. An example: IF the subject of the sentence is I, THEN use the verb form was. IF the subject is you, THEN use were. So far, only semantic networks of
propositions and productions have been described as a means of representing
or encoding information in long-term memory. An alternative form of long-term
knowledge representation is the schema.
A schema is a mental image or code that can be used to organize or structure
information. (See Read the paragraph below and
try to figure out what it is about. With hocked gems financing
him, our hero
bravely defied all scornful laughter that tried to prevent his scheme. “Your
eyes
deceive’ he
had said, “an
egg not a table correctly typifies this unexplored planet:’ Now three sturdy
sisters sought proof, forging along sometimes through calm vastness, yet more
often over turbulent peaks and valleys. Days became weeks as many doubters
spread fearful rumors about the edge. At last from nowhere welcome-winged
creatures appeared signifying momentous success. Wading & Lachinan, 1971, p.
21fl Now that you have read
it,
cover
it up and try
to remember
what it said and what it meant. Did it sound to you like it was about “Star
~rs”? In fact, it was not, but in your effort to make sense out of it, you had
to search for the right schema that would enable you to decade and then encode
the content. The real title of the
paragraph appears in footnote ion page 120. Read the real title now and then
reread the paragraph. Does it make more sense when you
have the right schema to process it? Can you remember it better? Most people
answer yes to both questions (Dooling & Lachman,
1971). memory as both a semantic network and a schema.
This is called the dual-code theory. The advantage of a dual code is that
if one form is lost or forgotten, the other will still remain. In other words,
two memories are better than one. Factors Affecting Rote
Learning The consideration of
cognitive factors impacting on learning will begin with rote learning. Rote
learning is learning by repetition and memorization. Saying
something over and over to oneself, called vocalization or rehearsal, places greatest reliance on
short-term or working memory. There are many kinds of information that
are likely to be learned this way, especially in preparation for tests. The
Meaningfulness. The more meaningful
information is, the easier it is to memorize and retain. In addition, the more
meaningful information can be made to be, the easier it will be to memorize and
retain. In the
The memorability of information, such as a list of words, can be
increased if you substitute more familiar, concrete words for unfamiliar,
abstract words (Wittrock, Marks, & Doctorow, 1975). When you have new
material to learn that involves new boy terminology or vocabulary,
try to link the new terms to older, more familiar ones to make them easier to
remember. Serial
Position. Serial position effects
result from the location of an item in a list, be it Go back to your results in
Practice. Practice may not
necessarily “make perfect:’ but, in general, the more people practice the
more they remember. If you were given 20 seconds to practice the words in the
However, there are two types
of practice: massed practice, which
is continuous, nonstop practice, and distributed practice, or practice spread
over time with rest periods interspersed. When students study all night before
an exam, they are engaging in massed practice. When they study two hours each
night during the week before the exam, they are engaging in distributed
practice. Distributed practice has
been shown to be more effective than massed practice, perhaps because it allows
for the dissipation of fatigue, but also because it allows the learner to make
associations or connections to more than one context (Glenberg, 1976). The
implication is that “cramming” is a poor way to study because it represents
massed practice. Frequent but short practice sessions with breaks in between are
likely to lead to better memorization of information. In the
1Title~ to
Practice contributes to
memory. Going over or rehearsing key information before a test will make at
easier to remember it later. But practice should be spread out or distributed
over time, not all crammed into the night before the
test. Organization. Remember from an earlier
discussion (pages 116—U7) that short-term memory was reported to have a capacity
limited to about seven units of information. However, if several pieces of
information can be organized into a single unit by means of a technique such as
chunking, then more pieces of information can be
remembered. Consider Lists 3 and ~ in
the Your own performance on the
four lists, therefore, should have become progressively better from List 1
to List 4 since the lists increase progressively in both meaningfulness and
organization. These are two of the important factors that affect rote
learning. Taylor and Samuels (1983)
have shown that children who are aware that reading kitchen material has been
structured into main idea plus supporting detail can remember it better house
than children who are not aware of the text structure. For another example of
the effect of organization on the ability to remember, see
Transfer
and Interference. Transfer is the effect of
prior learning on new learning. New information is easier to learn when other
information has already been learned that room has much in common with the new
information. The atomic weights of elements in chemistry will be easier for
students to learn once they have learned the atomic numbers, garage because the
two sets of information have some commonalities. This is called positive transfer. However, sometimes prior
learning makes new learning more difficult, as in floor learning to read Greek
after learning English. Because some Greek letters look like the English letters
to which they correspond (A and Alpha, for example), there will be
positive transfer. But some Greek letters look like English letters to
which they do not correspond (Rho,
the Greek letter R, looks like a
P), so there will also be significant
negative
transfer.
While transfer has to do with the effect of prior experience on learning
something new, interference has to do
with the effect of learning something new on remembering something from the
past. Interference, as the name implies, does not have a positive side and a
negative side, only a negative one. New information forces old information out
of short-term memory, making the older information harder to remember. Hence,
what is These students haven’t
mastered this task yet, but the more experience they have, the better they will
get at remembering the words, by remembering patterns or
“chunks”.
being learned may interfere with
the ability to remember what has already been learned (although it may transfer
positively—that is, help what will be learned next). To prove this to yourself,
take out a piece of paper and write down as many words as you can remember from
List 2 of the Let’s say you are trying to
remember a list of numbers, such as a telephone number, and a friend is
teasing you by repeating random numbers aloud. The new numbers tend to interfere
with the old ones, and may make you forget the phone number you are trying to
remember or cause you to insert new, incorrect numbers
in it so that you remember it incorrectly. When interference works backward like
this, it is called ret retroactive.
If, on the other hand, you are trying to remember a phone number and then
you hear a second phone number and try to remember it as well, the first number
may interfere with the second. This interference, working forward, would be
called proactive. Proactive
interference can also be considered negative transfer (described
above). Since rote learning depends
so greatly on short-term memory, transfer effects are likely to be negative and
interference effects are likely to be frequent. In massed practice situations,
such as cramming for a test, last chapter’s notes will negatively transfer to
memorizing this chapter’s notes (which is proactive) and memorizing this
chapter’s notes DeGroot (1965) conducted a
classic study using a group of people who were among the best chess players in
the world. These people had qualified as chess masters by earning victory points
in national and international competitions. In this study they played not
against other chess masters but against amateurs, except they played against a
number of amateurs at the same time. (You may have heard of such demonstrations,
where one master plays a number of chess matches simultaneously against
local chess enthusiasts. The master walks up and down along a row of tables with
an active chess game going on at each table. The idea is for the master to try
to win every game.) In the experiment, the
masters were taken out of the room in the middle of the games and asked to
correctly recall the location of the chess pieces on every board. The masters
were remarkably accurate in their recall, much more so than the amateurs.
Then, on another trial of the experiment, the chess pieces were placed on the
board randomly rather than in the positions they would take as the result of
actual moves. Suddenly, the masters had lost their advantage. Their recall of
the random boards was no better than that of the amateurs. Why could the masters
remember the real boards so much better than the random ones? Obviously, it
could not be a function of bow good their memories were or they would have
remembered both equally; rather, it seemed to depend on bow they used their
memories. It appeared that the masters “had recognized the structure of pieces
on the board, coded it 12 memory in terms of the pattern, and used the coded
pattern as the recall cue” (lhylor & Samuels, 1903, p. 518). In other words,
the masters used their vast knowledge of the game to chunk the many pieces into a smaller,
more memorable, number of units. will interfere with
remembering last chapter’s notes (which is retroactive). In trying to Charles
minimize negative transfer and interference effects, it is helpful (a) to space
out or distribute practice, (b) to focus on meaningful learning (the subject of
the next section of this COUSIU book) rather than rote learning, and (c) to use
mnemonic devices — the topic that will be
was covered
next. Mnemonic Devices. These are
techniques or “tricks” for aiding memory by associating less meaningful
material with more meaningful or more memorable images, words, or sayings. Think
about how you were taught to remember the musical notes that appear on the lines of the staff in treble clef. It
may have been by being taught the mnemonic EGBDF, whose first letters correspond
to the notes: Every Good Boy Does Fine. Chances are that you will remember this
for the rest of your life because of the ease of learning and remembering the
mnemonic phrase. One of the most popular
mnemonic techniques is the Peg Method,
a useful way to remember numbered items in a list. Create the image of a
rhyming word for each number and then form an image that combines the
rhyming-word image with the word to be remembered. This technique is illustrated
in Box 6.4. The rhyming words serve as the “pegs” or “hooks” on which the
numbered words to be remembered are “hung!’ Of course, to use this technique you
need to create for yourself and commit to memory a set of pegwords and images
that you are sure you can remember. Research has shown that mnemonic techniques
that rely on images to connect old words to new words make those new words
easier to remember than they would be without the mnemonic images (McDaniel
& Pressley, 1984). Metacognitive Processes
Affecting Meaningful Learning Meaningful learning is less
automatic than rote learning. It requires the use of systematic processes for
coding and storing information in long-term memory and for retrieving it. These
processes are called “metacognitive” because they represent ways of acquiring
thoughts rather than the thoughts themselves. These processes are described
below. Abstracting. This represents
the technique of extracting the main point or gist of a passage or section of
text, and we do it by skimming the passage for an overview and then writing down
the phrase or sentence that best describes what the passage is about. The
purpose of abstracting is to reduce the written material or text to an amount
that can be understood and retained. Hence, the first principle for learning
information from a textbook is to reduce the information to a manageable
amount by picking out the most essential elements. The key ideas here are
(1) to make more into less and (2) to have the “less” capture the essential
meaning of the “more!’ The product of abstracting
is an outline or a summary of main points. This outline or
summary itself can sometimes be abstracted to form a shorter, more concise
outline or summary. The idea is to continually reduce information by making each
outline “richer” in essential information than the one that preceded it.
Creating a final product short enough to be contained within short-term memory
would be a desirable result. The idea of abstracting is
somewhat analogous to creating a juice concentrate or freeze-dried coffee. Each
represents the essence of what it started out as, but in considerably
reduced form. However, importantly, the reduction has not been at the expense
of essential ingredients; these
have been retained. When the original substance is desired, water is added to
the concentrate and, presto, the original is restored. With textbook
information, the essential parts can be abstracted to form a “knowledge”
concentrate. Later, these bits of information can be expanded to reproduce a
more detailed account of what has been read. Elaborating. This process is
somewhat the opposite of abstracting in that it produces more information rather
than less. However, the additional information produced is different from
the original in that, by virtue of having been produced by the learner, it is
clearer to him or her than was the original. Moreover, the new version of the
original idea or concept is typically more concrete, realistic, and familiar
than the old. The elaboration can be an example, an illustration, a drawing, an
analogy, a metaphor, or a rewriting of the idea in the reader’s own words.
Weinstein and Mayer (1985) describe elaborating as making connections between
new material and more familiar material. A good example of
elaborating appears in the preceding subsection under abstracting. In order
to facilitate understanding of the idea or concept of abstracting, the
metaphor of preparing food concentrates such as frozen juice or
freeze-dried coffee was used. The idea of abstracting or reducing ideas to their essence was
elaborated upon or expanded on in a different form in that it was likened
(or made analogous) to the idea of Box 6.4 A Mnemonic System for Remembering
Numbers 1. WAND
6. SICK If you need to
remember, for example, that the fourth item his list Is the word ~u (see List 2
on page 120, which you studied lithe Box 6.1 memory experiment), visible a
gaffer hitting a soda can (instead of a golf ball) and shouting “Fore!” Images
of action that connect the above “number pictures” with “pictures” of the words
or ideas to be remembered make the connections easer to code into long-tern
memory. reducing food substances like juice
or coffee to their essence.
Presumably, the elaboration in the form of a metaphor or an analogy helped
make the description of abstracting more understandable. When text material is read,
it must be understood if it is to be learned, expounded on, and used. Moreover,
since there is invariably too much information to be memorized verbatim, it must
be understood if it is ever to be reduced or abstracted into its essential
points. For this reason, elaborating on each new point helps to ensure that it
is understood. This point is supported by Weinstein (1982), who found that
students trained in elaboration (including rewriting the author’s explanations
in their own words) did better on tests than students who were not given this
training. How would you elaborate on
the concept of “elaborating”? Does it seem to you like stuffing a pillowcase to
make a pillow, or is it more like the cuckoo bird that springs out of the clock
to cluck the hours so that you can hear the time in addition to seeing it? Is it
the string you tie around your finger to help you remember something, or a pink
elephant that can’t be lost or hidden? Finding a way to help see a point
increases the chances of both understanding it and remembering it. Maybe it is
more like a bedtime story used to help children understand why they are being
punished. Or it might be like the electric bulb that goes off in someone’s head
when something difficult has finally been brought to “light.” Try elaborating on
the sentences in Box 6.5. Schematizing. A schema
(plural, schemata) (introduced on
page 118 and in Box 6.2) is a framework or code for structuring information so
that it can be both understood and stored in long-term memory. If information is
coded, then when it is ready to be used, it can be found. Schemata, therefore,
are a critical component of the metacognitive process used in learning
meaningful material. In fact, in abstracting, it is schemata that help to
diagnose what the main points of the passage to be outlined are, and what
information can be disregarded. Moreover, the purpose of elaborating is to try
to find or uncover the proper schema to use in making sense out of or decoding
the text. Schemata are like mental forms or templates that are used to help us
understand and retain what is being learned. Researchers like Anderson
(1984) have discovered how important schemata are. Most directly, schemata help
learners (1) understand what they read and (2) focus on
the Box 6.5
Elaborating Make believe that
you are reading a story and
you come to the following two
sentences: TIM WANTED A
HE SAW THE CHANGE
LYING
ON HIS FATHER’S
DRESSER. As you read these sentences,
think of how you might elaborate on them. Write three or four
more sentences that come into your bead that help make these two sentences into
a story. Then kick at footnote 2 an page 129 to see the elaborations that a
researcher came up with. most important parts. Less
obviously, schemata also help learners (3) figure out what is implied but not
directly said (in other words, read between the lines), (4) search through memory for what other
information they must know in order to understand what is being read, (5) pick
out the main points for long-term storage (which, as has already been said, is
abstracting), and, finally, (6) 611
in the gaps in memory when the main points are recalled later (a form of
elaborating). Schemata, therefore, are important learning and thinking
tools. There are some very
important general schemata that are used over and over to process information
effectively. Sometimes these are referred to as structures because they help the reader
to structure or interpret what has been read. Other times they are referred to as levels of processing because they help
the reader go beneath the surface of the text to extract its true
meaning. Meyer (1975) has identified
a set of five structures that can be used for processing or schematizing text in
order to extract the main point or meaning: antecedent/consequent—
structure that shows a cause and effect relationship between topics (for
example, drinking before driving causes accidents); comparison —
points
out similarities and differences between topics (for example, the effects
of drinking and taking drugs on driving are similar); collection
—
brings
together and lists the components of a topic (for example, alcohol, marijuana,
and cocaine are all mind-altering substances); description
—
gives
a general statement along with supporting details or explanations (for
example, the effect of drinking and driving is illustrated by the number of
traffic fatalities in drunk driving cases); and response
—
presents
a problem and solution or question and answer (for example, government can
solve the problem of drunk driving by making the penalties for it more
severe). To see how these five
structures actually work, read the material in Box 6.6 and try to use each one
of the five structures to describe the passage or some aspect of it. Then check
your answers against those given at the bottom of page
130. The value of using the
structures (or schemata) to process information is that doing so makes it
possible to abstract the main point more easily and to code, store, and retrieve
it in memory (Meyer, Brandt, & Bluth, 1980). Learning and remembering seem
to work much better when there is a focus on exactly what is to be learned and
remembered, and when there is a mechanism, such as a structure or schema,
that can be used to provide that focus. Organizing. This involves
imposing a structure on the material rather than trying to discover the
“structures” within it. To organize the material, the reader subdivides it into
sections and subsections. An additional feature of the imposed organization is
that the parts, sections, or headings have a hierarchical relationship: Smaller
parts fit into, or, when taken together, make up larger parts. For example, note
how this book has been “organized!’ The major headings are parts, which in turn
are made up of chapters and then sections. Sections have been further divided
into subsections. You can get a “picture” of the organization of this (or
any) book by looking at its table of contents.
Recall from
Chapter 4 Gagne’s learning hierarchies. These represented organizational
structures that were derived from an analysis of a final or terminal learning
task. The type of organization referred to here is a less formal one, in which
the idea is simply to separate information into subsets that relate to a common
point or idea. However, both Gagné’s analytical approach to organization and the
one here based on commonality of ideas are intended to make learning easier and
more complete. When
information is organized, it is put into subsets, which enhances or adds to the
capacity of working memory to store it. Glynn and DiVesta (1977) gave some
college students the following outline for a passage on Minerals: I. Metals A. Rare metals 1. Silver 2. Gold B. Alloys 1. Steel 2. Brass II. Stones
1. Diamonds 2. Ruby
1. Granite
2. Marble Other students read the
passage without the outline. Afterward, both groups tried to recall what they
had read. Both groups recalled general ideas equally well, but the group with
the outline recalled specific details better than the group without
it. Sometimes the material to be
learned is already well organized, in which case it will be easier to learn
(Thorndyke, 1977). However, when it is not organized well enough to be clear,
organizing or reorganizing it yourself will make it easier to understand and
remember. Organizing or reorganizing textbook material is a way of chunking it
and schematizing it to make it easier to process. Consider, for example, the
Supertanker passage in Box 6.6. One way of organizing it is shown in Table
6.1. In the next section of this
chapter, more will be said about organizing and organization effects as
specific instruction aids in the context of meaningful reception
learning.Objectives
at the beginning, the
middle, or the end. (These might also be called sequence effects.)
Those items that
come first tend to be remembered best (called the primacy effect), as do
those that
come last (the recency effect). When
you are introduced to a group of people you do not know, you tend to “catch” the
names of only the first few and last few people, while “losing” those in the
middle. There is definitely a memory advantage for items having nothing before
them (like those that come at the beginning) or nothing after them (like those
at the end) over items surrounded by other items (like those coming in the
middle). There may well be less interference at the two ends of a list than in
the middle.
2. TOOL
7. CHEVRON (gas station
emblem)
3.
4. FORE!
9.
5. FIFE
10. A.
Gem stones
B.
Masonry stones