External tasks to influence internal tasks

My way of exploring what I know of cognitive psychology to the selection of effective learning tasks is captured in the phrase – external tasks to influence internal tasks. Learners must accomplish learners themselves, but educators can provide experiences to learn from (exposure to information) and propose activities that potentially influence how learners process these experiences. The word potential is important here because the educator is assuming that the learner will apply the external task in a way that engages important cognitive tasks and the external task does not complete more effective cognitive activity learners might have applied on their own (i.e. busy work). When applied to a group which is most commonly how assignments are made, these caveats are probably both violated for certain individual students.

This analysis may sound obvious but as is usually the case the devil is in the details. There must be some understanding of what cognitive behaviors produce learning and which of these cognitive behaviors might be engaged by the assignment of an external task. Both requirements have been addressed by great numbers of research studies.

Many cognitive psychologists use the phrase generative learning to refer to the approach I have described in my own way. To move this presentation toward application it would be useful to read a 2016 paper by Fiorella and Mayer. These authors identify general categories of activities that have shown to have effective generative capabilities. The paper references multiple studies that evaluate examples of the application of each type of task.

This specific article identified eight learning strategies that promote generative learning and provides a review of research relevant to each strategy.

Summarizing
Mapping
Drawing
Imagining
Self-Testing
Self-Explaining
Teaching
Enacting

As a way of simplifying what these generative tasks ask of learners consider the following two ways of simplifying what the tasks require.

The first four strategies (summarizing, mapping, drawing, and imagining) involve changing the input into a different form of representation.

The final four strategies (self-testing, self-explaining, teaching, and answering practice questions) require additional elaboration.

Just example of how this type of consolidation of research might be applied consider how the list might be applied to note-taking another of the topics I have been addressing lately. The Cornell note template is popular with educators. The template asks that learners use two items from this list in the full application of the Cornell method. The template includes an area for summarization and encourages the use of the column that normally appears to the left of the area for taking notes for questions.

Fiorella, L., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). Eight ways to promote generative learning. Educational Psychology Review, 28(4), 717-741.

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