Cognitivism in Practice

This week I learned a lot about how advanced organizers can truly be successful tools in helping students to organize their thoughts. When completing the concept map for this week’s application I realized I was learning more about my trip then I thought possible. At the same time I was assessing my prior knowledge on the topic. This would be the same experience my students would have as they completed the concept map for our trip. Concept maps are an example of cognitive learning, as we are mapping or networking our ideas into a visual representation which Dr. Orey says is the use of sensory registers and improves learning by integrating multiple senses. This allows students to better remember the content and store it into long term memory with more than one way to recall the information. The same goes for note taking and summarizing, ques, and questions. All of these instructional stratifies that have embedded technology serve as tools to allow students to remember the most important topics and pieces of information on a topic and attach them to already stored information, therefore making more network connections. Cognitive learning theory stresses the importance of storing information into long-term memory and these instructional strategies all help to make the students active learners, creating numerous connections to stored information and fully comprehending and remembering what has been learned.