Cognitive theories of learning:

Piaget, Bruner, Gagne, Ausubel

•By the end of this lesson you must be able to explain
the concept of learning from the Cognitive theories
perspectives
•Identify the factors that play a role in the learning
process according to cognitive theories
•Be able to explain the Cognitive basic concepts and
principles of learning .
•Explain how you would use them to facilitate
teaching-learning among your primary school learners
Cognitive definition of learning
•Learning is a change in cognitive structure
•The change that is visible in our behaviour is influenced
not by stimuli or reinforcement as claimed by behaviourism
Our thoughts, reasoning, imaginations, perception, interest
and value are also important internal factors that play a
role in the process of learning. We act out of reasoning.
Cognitive theories emphasize the role of the mind in the
organization, analysis, mental restructuring,
interpretation, transformation of information into a
meaningful experience. We can measure learning by
measuring the thinking of our learners. Our behaviours
are a result of how we think
Perceiving, thinking, imagining and remembering are
cognitive mode of learning. Learning through insight
• While Behaviourism emphasise the role of the
teacher as a director of instruction, the one
who selects appropriate stimuli and
reinforcement, Cognitive theories see learners
as active participants who should manage
their own learning though attending,
processing, rehearsing storing, retrieving what
they have acquired.
• Cognitive theories also emphasise the role of
past experience in the interpretation of new
experience
Jean Piaget
Children understand and interpret their world differently
from that of adult.
Their capacity to organise, analyse and interpret information
differ from age and stages of their development. The
thinking and reasoning of children at sensory motor stage
and preoperational stage lack logic as compared to those
at concrete operational and formal operational stage.
Piaget advocate action based learning where children
manipulate objects. Pupils must be encouraged to
manipulate and explore a large number of materials and
objects
Learning as a continuous process of assimilation,
accommodation and equilibration
The role of perception in learning/ IPM model
Principles of organizing our experiences
This is the tendency of human mind to impose
structure to the information that comes
through our senses. We might be looking at
the same information but seeing interpreting
it differently. Cognitive theories stress the role
of thinking process in learning process. We
filter selectively what we want to learn. The
mind identify feature, select, reject, analyse
and store
 Factors that interfere with our perception

• Selective attention
Teachers need to use different strategies to
arouse and direct the attention of their
learners. Using a variety of teaching methods,
teaching and learning aids, posing question,
emphasis, underline, bold, silence, voice
change
The age of the learner and the amount of
material to be learned
• Sensory defects
• Over haste
• Premature closure
• motivation
Multi-store model/ Three port processing model
Sensory Register
Receptors receive information from the environment
Attention and recognition is needed to process received
information.
Process such as encoding, decoding
Attending to the feature of the learning materials.
What happen to the information we have not attended
to?
Different people have different level of attention.
During introduction the purpose is to make
learners interested and pay full attention
to what is going to happen.
• short term memory
Has a limited capacity to keep information
for 30 seconds maximum
Can be strengthened through rehearsals ,
elaboration and practice. Unless this
information is chunked and send to the
long term memory if it has to last longer
• Long term memory
Has a large unlimited capacity to keep huge
amount of information for a longer period.
It keeps three categories of memories
a) Episodic memories- our memories of times or
places
b) Semantic memories- meanings of ideas, facts and
concept
c) Procedural memories: steps used in a task or
learning of a particular skill
Jerome Bruner
Three modes of learning
Enactive mode: Touching tasting, moving and
grasping objects. Learning result from this
physical interactions with objects. Early learning
is motoric and action based.
• Iconic Mode: Concepts and principles can be
demonstrated physically or through pictures
and diagrams, slides, etc.
• Symbolic mode: language become the main
vehicle to acquire a wide variety of experiences
• Bruner stresses on Discovery learning.
Children to be allowed to discover things
independently. Teachers should allow children
opportunity to manipulate objects. Educational
tours, the use of visuals help children to form
images. At the later stage children will benefit
from verbal learning.
• Episodes of learning involves acquisition,
transformation and Evaluation.
Teachers should motivate learners to learn by
using different modes of learning in the lessons
 David Ausubel
Receptive learning/ Verbal learning/Sub-
sumption
The presence of cognitive structures facilitates
learning. Rote learning should be discouraged
through relating the new information to the
existing knowledge of the learners. The
language and communication should be very
well organized to facilitate meaningful
learning.
Receptive learning involves presentation of
factual information. Receptive learning do not
necessarily need to be passive reception.
When new learning is connected to what
learners already know it is likely to be retained
and applied.
• Existing mental structure is used to learn new
ideas
• Teachers should use advanced organiser when
presenting a new topic to their learners. The basic
concepts that would enable learners to
understand the rest of the topic should be covered
first to enable the learners to understand the rest
of the lesson. Expose your learners first to the
central ideas before you do them in much more
details-
• general overview of the topic. Use
mediators that enable learners to make
connections. Use chunking like BODMAS
to assist learners to remember. Teach
learners to identify main ideas from the
topics. This strategy is called Expository
teaching that aids the Mnemonic
devices to search and locate information
later.
• Concepts mapping, listing the key concepts in
the topic. All these strategies can be used to
help learners organise the information.
What is rote learning
Fixing information in your memory without
understanding its meaning. Information that
was not properly organised to allow the
learners to make connections with their
existing knowledge
Rote learning is influenced by the following
factors;
• Practice effect
Revising, repeating, rehearsing what you learned
by rote can later improve your understanding
Transfer effect. Connecting previous knowledge
to new lesson help learners to learn with
understanding.
Proactive interference effect.
A learner who have learned using the old
version of Microsoft word may find learning of
the new version difficult when trying to apply
the knowledge of other icons.
Serial position effect
How the alignment of the main ideas and basic
concepts are organised throughout the
presentation will reduce rote learning.
Positioned very well in the presentation to
have a good flow of ideas
Context effect
Putting one’s lesson in a context will improve
rote learning
Level effect
Presentation of information should be done at
different levels/ iconic, enactive, symbolic
Retro active interference
Learning of the new material disrupt what one
has learned previously
Organisational effect
Rote learning improve when the material is
organised from simple to complex
What is meaningful verbal learning
Successful abstraction and comprehension of
main ideas of the lesson learned
Factors influencing meaningful verbal learning
Providing learners with learning objectives
indicate the levels at which you want them to
do their abstraction.
Selectively note taking, ability to spot and jot
down key issues from the lesson
Teachers organisation of the material to be
learned
Instruction presented verbally, teacher
emphasize the main points
combining with demonstration,
visuals, mediators can positively
affect meaningful learning.
Learners who take notes while they learn
better as compared to learners who read
silently while trying to use photographic
memory on what they read.
Cognitive theories advices teachers to use
the following teaching strategies in their
presentation
• Advanced organisers

• Structured overviews

• Mediators

• Mnemonic devices
• Chunking. Elaborations
• Hierarchical retrieval systems

• Concept Mapping
Gagne
Learning is influenced by factors inside the learner as
well as outside the learners. Anger, pleasure, anxiety
and curiosity are perceived as natural motives that
need to be present in a learner to urge him to learn.
Basic skills should be learned first before the high level
skills
There are eight types of learning from the simple to the
complex
a) Signal learning
Hearing your father’s car approaching you have learned
to run to open the gate.
 b) Stimulus-Response learning
Anything that the teacher do to facilitate
learners to select the correct response will
make learning easier. Presenting learners with
objects that have common features is an
example of stimulus-response learning. This
would also facilitate the stimulus
discrimination of objects
c) Chaining
Structuring of related skills to be acquired
together is called chaining
d) Verbal association
Presenting objects and their names helps learners to
form the association between the word and the
object. Teaching vocabularies to young learners can
be done this way.
e) Discrimination Learning
Presenting object to help learners to compare and
contrast assist the learners to discriminate between
their attributes. The learning of shapes, sizes,
colours, textures, letters can be an example.
Learning become more complex as we proceed from
the former types of learning to other forms of
learning.
f) Concept learning
• A number of experiences is needed to form up
concepts. Children who had limited exposure to
objects and situation will experience difficulties
understanding certain abstract words. It is the
understanding of concepts that would facilitate the
learning of facts, ideas, principles and formulas.
• Children who brought a rich of sensory experience,
having seen many examples, exposed to grouping
and classification skills will be able to abstract and
conceptualise correctly using the language. “ A
picture is worth ten thousand words.” ( Behr:1975)
g) Rule Learning
To understand this rule, light objects float over the
water while heavy objects sink.
The learner should first understand the meaning of
basic concepts bolded if he is to transform this into
practice.
Factors inside the learner such as: prior learning,
language development, cognitive style of organising
and transforming, attitude and motivation of the
learner will influence learning. Situational factors as
to how teaching/ learning activities are structured,
selected teaching approaches, materials will also do
its parts
h) Problem solving learning
• When the teacher create a situation for
learners to apply learned concepts, ideas,
rules to related situations.
Gestalt view of learning
Wolfgang Kohler, Kurt Kafka, Max Wetheimer, Karl Dunker
• They emphasize the role of perception, the perceiver in the
learning process
• learning is a process of restructuring and reorganizing learning
experiences.
• It involves the arrangement of learning experiences in a
meaningful whole. The whole is greater then the parts and the
parts derive meaning from the whole.
• Learners should be assisted to perceive, process, store and
retrieve all the information
• Discovery of meaning creates learning and transfer to other
related situation.
• The whole emerge first before the parts
• Learning is a result of problem solving
• What is taught should be organized in a certain pattern
or sequence
• Learning is a process of seeing meaningful relationships
in a situation
• Reorganisation and restructuring of essential elements
of problems to be solved help learners to form new
cognitive structures
• Cognitive tension occurs when we are faced by
something disorganised and we are unable to solve it.
Anger and frustration follows when we do not
understand.
• Insight / A-ha experience breaks through when we
pieces of information's presented to us are structured
and related to each other.
Gestalt scholars established the following laws of organising
information
Figure –ground perception
• This organising tendency to spot and pick up main
features from the situation. Our ability to short out
relevant from irrelevant details. When you spot a
picture from the wall, a badge on a blazer, an
aeroplane against the sky or a song against the
beats. Items underlined are the figures and the
remaining are the background.
Law of Pragnanza/ similarities
The tendency to perceive objects that are similar as
belong together (similarities)
Law of Proximity: The tendency to group objects that are
closer to one another than those that are far apart
from one another.
Law of Continuity: Things that form a straight line tend
to be perceived together compared to things which
form curves
Form consistency: The form and size of a moving object
remain the same no matter .
Law of closure: Our brains are able to fill in the gaps and
complete the missing part of the information.
Too many items in the picture, too much details, failure
to scan for details, careless arrangement leads to
illusions and cognitive conflicts
• Our perception is influenced by our past
experiences, attention, attitudes, interest
One who does not a have a past experience of a
donkey and a mule will perceive them as the
same. Our previous knowledge helps us to
make sense of new information ( Schema
theory)
Learners who are not interested in what they
perceive are not ready to look for details.
They tend to close themselves off from the
incoming information
Kurt Levin's view: Field theory
• Learning is a dynamic activity influenced by the
learners’ intrinsic motivation. (Van Parreren’s theory)
• A learner set some cognitive goals that he anticipate
to achieve.
• Learning is also influenced by the valence quality of
the learning material. Its attractiveness, orderliness,
vividness and so forth.
• Every learners operates in his own life space when he
learn. Every learner perceive, organize and interpret
information differently and form his points of view.
Exposure to same information would not lead to the
same response.