Sept 14: Psychological Foundations of Learning

Video Link: http://www.learner.org/vod/vod_window.html?pid=9

I have to admit that I left class a little overwhelmed. I have always heard the importance of pretesting and schimas. I always looked at pretesting as a way to see if they already knew the material so that we could save time in class by skipping over it. I did use pretesting at times to learn that information and it was helpful. Today though I realized that I was missing something. I needed to pretest to discover misconceptions. For example, I'm sure that my students had misconceptions about Greek mythology (thank you Walt Disney!). I believed that their misconceptions were not a problem because I could simply wash them away by explaining the truth. I realize now that I was underestimating the power of "prior misknowledge."

Bransford talks about the importance of teaching metacognition. This reminded me of practice of Cognitive Apprenticship. Cognitive Apprenticeship contends that the same apprenticeship teaching strategies used to teach tangible and physical skills can be used to teach cognitive and metacognitive skills. Cognitive Apprenticeship’s primary purpose is to teach students the authentic skills that domain experts use in completing complex cognitive tasks. In order to teach complex cognitive skills the expert and novice need to externalize their internal cognitive processes. Once this is done their cognitive and metacognitive processes for completing the task can be compared. The master will then model correct cognitive skills, coach, and scaffold the apprentice in their independent attempts to use the same skills (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989). Cognitive Apprenticeships are based on Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development because the apprentice is asked to do tasks that are just beyond their independent capabilities. As the apprentice develops the scaffolding will fade away until the apprentice’s skills are close to that of the masters. I think that Cognitive Apprenticship and Active Learning go hand-in-hand. Through Cognitive Apprenticship a student could answer, "What strategies might [I] use to assess whether they understand someone else's meaning? What kinds of evidence do [I] need in order to believe particular claims? How can [I] build [my] own theories of phenomena and test them effectively?"