The Cognitive Model In Depth
It is our intent to help you develop a deeper understanding of how students learn and how technology might contribute to this process. We emphasize a cognitive approach in an effort to help you understand the mental activities of learners and how learning tasks influence student thinking. We do think that how you understand learning matters because you must make important decisions for how students you work with will spend their time. Advocates with good intentions are presently involved in disagreements regarding both the knowledge and skills educators should be emphasizing and how students best learn these knowledge and skills. These disagreements are hardly a recent phenomenon and we certainly support the continued examination of how education might best support the development of young people and the optimization of the talents of all individuals throughout the lifespan. However, because those taking extreme positions hope to move education in very different directions and because technology seems to be a recent core component in some of the arguments, we will attempt to identify some of the competing perspectives.
Our personal approach in describing many issues is fairly moderate and we hope firmly rooted in data and sound science. We tend not to be advocates of a single approach to the complete exclusion of other approaches. In fact, we argue that a combination of learning experiences makes the most sense.
The contents of long term memory
The description of the various categories of long term memory content was necessarily sketchy. Here are some additional details.
Imagery. Experience tells us that we have the capacity to store imagery of different types (smells, sounds, visual representations). We are capable of recalling very specific smells (Mom's kitchen when she made chicken dinner on Sunday) or visual images (the house we grew up in) from long ago. Researchers, working mostly with visual images, have demonstrated just how remarkable our long-term storage is. In one creative experiment, researchers (Read and Barnsley, 1977) presented pages from elementary-school reading textbooks to adults who had not seen these books for as long as thirty years. The adults showed a significant level of accuracy in differentiating pages they had read from those they had not, especially when a picture was included.
Declarative and procedural knowledge. Many memory theorists have drawn a distinction between the verbal representation of what we know and the memory responsible for what we can do (Anderson, 1976, 1983; Gagne, 1985). This distinction is often described as the difference between knowing that something is the case and knowing how to perform a certain cognitive process or action. Declarative knowledge represents our factual knowledge base, and procedural knowledge represents the stored methods we use to do things.
Much of school learning has to do with the storage of declarative knowledge. We learn the names of things, significant dates, terms, definitions, numerical facts, theories and principles of this or that, and many similar categories of facts and concepts. We are also taught to do things: tie our shoes and button our coats, add and subtract, write, solve algebra problems, and argue for a position or evaluate the position taken by others. In reality, most accomplishments require both declarative and procedural knowledge. It is, for example, difficult to write without having something to say. To engage in an argument, we need the skills of logic and effective communication, as well as factual and conceptual knowledge.
One final point of clarification: Procedural knowledge is not the same as a verbal account of how to do something. Procedural knowledge is demonstrated by an actual performance, not by a description of how something should be done. The stored description of where the letter q appears on a keyboard is declarative knowledge. Pressing the q when desired is procedural knowledge. For many people, the only way they "know" the position of the q key is to execute the procedure.