Cognitivism
Cognitivism
The focus
- Learning is an internal mental process.
- Processing, managing, and monitoring information.
- The working of human memory to promote learning.
The cognitivist view of memory
- Memory is an active, organized processor of information.
- Prior knowledge plays an important role in learning.
- Understanding short-term and long-term memory matters.
For the curriculum
- The individual learner matters more than the environment.
- The teacher should build the learner’s intelligence and cognitive development.
Cognitivism looks where behaviorism would not: inside the mind. It treats learning as an internal mental process, not just a change in outward behaviour. The interesting action happens between the ears, in the way a learner takes in, organizes, stores, and retrieves information.
The focus on the mind
Cognitivism centres on how information is handled. It studies the processing of information, the management and monitoring of it, and above all the working of human memory to promote learning. Where behaviorism asks what a learner does, cognitivism asks what a learner’s mind does with what comes in.
Its view of memory is distinctive. For the cognitivist, the memory system is not a passive store but an active and organized processor of information. New learning is shaped by what is already there, so prior knowledge plays an important role: a learner makes sense of the new by connecting it to the known. Understanding how short-term and long-term memory work is therefore central, because the path from one to the other is the path learning has to travel.
An internal mental process of handling information
It studies processing, managing, and monitoring information, and the working of memory. Memory is an active, organized processor, and prior knowledge shapes what is learned.
What cognitivism asks of the curriculum
Cognitivism shifts the emphasis toward the individual learner. A cognitivist curricularist stresses that the individual learner matters more than the environment, a clear reversal of the behaviorist focus on conditioning from outside. The mind doing the learning is the main thing, not the surroundings acting on it.
That changes the teacher’s job. The teacher should focus on building the intelligence and the cognitive development of the learner: strengthening how the learner thinks, remembers, and processes, not just what behaviours they show. The aim is a more capable mind, better at taking in and working with whatever it meets next.
Building the learner’s intelligence and cognitive development
It treats the individual learner as more important than the environment, so the teacher works to strengthen how the learner thinks, remembers, and processes, not just what they do.
How was this article?