educ 103

• Cognition – refers to our mental abilities such as perceiving, attending, remembering, memorizing, and problem solving
• Our everyday experience are replete with simple to complex events that call for cognitive process.
• Perception. Described as an attempt to influence others when we interact with them as we communicate through speech, expressive gestures, and paralinguistic techniques. Through various language modalities, we use a full range of paralinguistic techniques and utilize non-symbolic forms of communication.
• Sociologists


  Emphasize the symbolic aspects of social interactions
• Sociologists postulated that cross-cultural linguistic patterns indicate a wide range of differences in the way we perceive and think about the world
• Memory


  Human uniqueness in interactions, interpreting behaviors of others and reacting to them based on perceived meanings
• Language


  Communication and influence through unintentional, unconscious, non-symbolic, and non-verbal ways
• Anthropologist Benjamin Whorf: 'The structure of our thoughts is reflected in how we use language'
• Reasoning


  Higher cognitive processes involving the ability to reason, think critically and reflectively, use symbols, transform information, modify knowledge, and transmit information across cultures
• Decision making


  Communication modes and shared characteristics in various cultures, despite variations in gestures and meanings
• Problem solving


  Differences in opinion, thought processes, language, or beliefs leading to conflicts, but understanding human complexity and shared emotional dispositions globally
• Cognition


  Influenced by heredity, maturation, and environment
• Analogical Processes


  Reasoning and problem solving involving metacognitive tasks and structures, understanding the role of analogical processes in learning transfer
• Analogical processes


  1. Retrieval

  2. Mapping

  3. Access

  4. Abstraction

  5. Representation

  6. Evaluation
• Transfer of learning is the effect of prior learning
• Positive transfer


  Students have the ability to harness strong associations for some recall in the future
• Positive transfer can be shown when previous learning is used to acquire present learning
• Negative transfer


  Students find two events or items similar when in fact they are not
• Negative transfer happens when two materials are different
• Vertical transfer


  Complex skills are more easily learned because of simple skills that are acquired before
• Lateral transfer


  Students possess the ability to use their knowledge and skills previously learned to new situations
• Knowledge or skill is neither acquired nor complex at all in lateral transfer
• Gagne (1985) provided other ways of looking at transfer
• Gagne proposed that there are two types of transfer: vertical and lateral transfer
• Ways to promote Transfer of learning

  • Similarity
  • Association
  • Degree of original learning
  • Critical attributes
• Similarity


  Transfer can be generated by the similarity of a given learning situation. If something is being learned, that learning can also be used in another similar situation
• Similarity


  • Learning new vocabulary words with similar spelling patterns like hill, mill, pill, sill, bill, beat, heat, meat, feat, neat, peat
• Association


  Feelings, events, or actions are held together if they have established relationships or associations
• Association


  Associations enable individuals to see the relationship between their feelings and the environment
• Degree of original learning


  Everything falls within the range or degree of performance, categorized as easy, average, or difficult
• Degree of original learning


  Performance of a desired behavior may be classified as poor, good, or best
• Critical attributes


  Attributes are qualities or things caused by certain circumstances. Critical attributes are qualities that make an object different from the rest
• Brain development


  1. Cells of the brain start to divide and re-divide at an incredible rate

  2. Brain cells make themselves familiar with the various parts of the body surrounding them

  3. Different brain cells send out connectors (axons and dendrites) that branch out to make connections with the other brain cells

  4. Failure to make connections with others causes the death of brain cells
• Neurons


  Cells that transmit information throughout the body
• Axon


  Thread-like cells that transmit impulses outward the cell body
• Dendrites


  Extensions of nerve cells that receive electrical signals from other neurons
• When the axon is at rest, no action potential moves
• When the axon is active, the action potential moves quickly down the myelin sheaths
• Sensory information travels


  From one neuron to the other at synapses (junctions between two nerve cells)
• Cell body


  Provides nourishment for the neurons