Through reading materials for this week, I didn’t only know several theories like the constructivism and information processing theory and several concepts like cognitive skills and general heuristics but also recognized the relationship among them.
When reading Chapter 6 Foundations of ID(Reiser & Dempsey, 2017), I learned detailed the concept of constructivism and information processing theory. Constructivism is to learn or construct new knowledge based on their existing cognitive. However, the information processing theory is to obtain knowledge through storing new objects of the environment in the memories of learners, here, the concept of a memory system is introduced, the memory system contains three subsystem-sensory, short-term, and long-term memory. Hence, the running principle of constructivism and the information processing theory is in contrast.
In the article of Are Cognitive Skills Context-B(Perkins & Salomon, 1989), cognitive skills and general heuristics particularly impressed me. This article begins with a story that the leader of an ancient nation developed a chess master as a military strategist in order to enhance the military strength of one's own country, and further let the new military strategist led the military to win the war. This sounds very interesting. I think this is a very good method to attract audiences’ attention. With the interesting story, the author introduced the cognitive skills, and further introduced general heuristics. At the same time, the author indicated the close relationship between cognitive skills and general heuristics, which is different from the relationship between constructivism and information processing theory. There is a complementary relationship between cognitive skills and general heuristics. In other words, cognitive skills can be applied better with the help of general heuristics.
Reference
Perkins, D., & Salomon, G. (1989). Are Cognitive Skills Context-Bound? Educational Researcher, 18(1), 16–25. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X018001016
Reiser, R. A., & Dempsey, J. V. (Eds.). (2017). Trends and issues in instructional design and technology (Fourth edition). Pearson.
Hi Xiaojiao,
Constructivism is my first concept I learned when entering into the education field, as we see it is a so fundamental and important theory. It seems a little different between constructivism and information processing theory, but they are interwined with each other. We got to know or learn about new things based on the memory and cognition both stored in our mind. Hence learning is a complicated process combination internal retrieve and external stimulation. We need to learn more about the theories of learning mechanism and then to learn better for ourselves. It is interesting!
-Xiaoying
Hi Xiaojiao,
Thanks for sharing your comparison of the theories and a little bit of analysis on how the author laid out the article. How you compared constructivism and information processing theory seemed interesting to me. It would be nice to see more of your elaboration. :)
-Renee