DE Oracle @ UMUC

A View of Cognitive Approaches to Learning Development

Linda Smelser

Instructional Support Specialist

Non UMUC

Published: September-October 2010

Category: » Online-pedagogy » Teaching-strategies

Introduction

Recently, Jennifer Thompson, UMUC's Assistant Director of Psychology in the School of Undergraduate Studies, presented on the subject of cognitive approaches to development. I was struck by her thoughts on four researchers whose work can help us better understand how students learn—and how this, in turn, can help us be better instructors.

An important part of effective teaching is understanding the needs of learners. Each semester, UMUC faculty encounter new classrooms of students from a variety of backgrounds. Our hope is that our students have come to learn, will be interested in the learning process, and will share their learning experiences in our classrooms. As instructors, we enjoy the challenge of getting to know our students to help them learn effectively. UMUC student statistics note that 48% of our students are working parents, and the median age of stateside undergraduates alone in fall 2008 was 31 years old—which means that our classes may have students from the age of 19 to over 60. However, more information is needed to understand our adult learner population. This article provides a brief overview about cognitive approaches concerning student learning processes and what we as instructors can learn from the findings of some well-known educational researchers.

Information Processing

Instruction can be more effective when teachers understand that students process information in different ways. Many factors are involved in a human's ability to process information. Not only are there gender differences when it comes to learning, but students come with a variety of learning experiences, abilities, and skills. The brain's lifelong capacity for learning is also a factor in that it can reshape itself in response to experience. Recent research shows that the human brain remains plastic (National Science Foundation, 2008) and is impacted by maturation, life circumstances, and practice continuing to change and develop throughout our lives.

The following perspectives of four well-known educators help explain how learners progress through learning development in an unorganized fashion and may even regress or become resistant (stall) during the process of learning. The research shows that learning is developmental throughout adulthood, which has very real implications for the continuing acquisition of decision-making and critical-thinking skills.

Scheme of Intellectual and Ethical Development: William Perry

William G. Perry, psychologist and educational researcher at Harvard University, studied the development of male college students over a 15-year period during the 1950s and 1960s. During his study, Perry formulated a structure for understanding students' cognitive processes which includes both ethical and intellectual development.

Based on Perry's framework, called the Scheme of Intellectual and Ethical Development, students typically progress through nine positions through which they perceive themselves and the world. These positions can be grouped into four developmental stages, which represent shifts in ways of thinking and understanding, as noted below (Rapaport, 2008):

In Perry's scheme, learners start at the first developmental stage of dualism, where their knowledge is absolute and differing points of view are difficult to accept. In the second stage of multiplicity, learners consider the instructor to be the subject matter expert. During the third stage of relativism, learners understand the significance of forming their own point of view based on previous knowledge, experiences, and beliefs. The final stage of commitment finds students able to independently construct ideas through understanding the responsibility to integrate knowledge learned from others using personal experience and reflection.

Perry believed that we all make sense of the world differently due to factors such as gender, religion, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. At any given time we may find ourselves in different positions on different topics or events because the developmental process consists of continual transitions from one position to the next as we seek to make sense of the world around us (University of California Berkeley, n.d.). Development may even be reversed or arrested at a particular stage if the cognitive challenges are too great. For example, depending on their level of knowledge, students may resist learning content that challenges their beliefs, or they may argue that their answers are just as valid as a teacher's answers. At more advanced levels, students may begin to realize that valid disciplinary reasoning methods exist and begin to make choices and commitments to solutions that become a way of life. 

UMUC faculty can relate to Perry's scheme each time they teach a diverse classroom of students who come with a variety of backgrounds and maturity levels. With the goal of Perry's ninth post-commitment position, faculty hope to see their students able to integrate knowledge from others with their own experience that "involves significant qualitative changes" (Moore, 1995, ¶ 6). In his paper My Mind Exploded, Moore quotes from a student's "best class" essay as an example of qualitative change:

The class transformed my attitudes of myself as a student. I no longer played the role of a recorder of my prof's knowledge. I had the ability to go out on my own and seek knowledge although many times I needed guidance from the prof . . . The professor encouraged us not only to learn the material but to think it over and integrate it into our lives. (¶ 6)

Stages of Knowing: Marcia Baxter Magolda

Marcia Baxter Magolda, a professor in educational leadership at Miami University (OH), developed a model based on a longitudinal qualitative study on male and female students called Stages of Knowing. Her model suggests four phases in which certain patterns of knowing emerge: 1) absolute knowing, 2) transitional knowing, 3) independent knowing, and 4) contextual knowing (Carney, 2002).

In her research, Baxter Magolda found that 68% of first-year college students fell into the phase of absolute knowing, similar to Perry's dualism stage. UMUC faculty might find in their classrooms that according to Baxter Magolda's model, women at the absolute knowing stage are more likely to receive knowledge through listening while men are more likely to display a mastery of knowledge through questioning. Baxter Magolda found that 80% of juniors and seniors rely less on instructors in the phase she calls transitional knowing; at this stage, women show a pattern of gathering information through interpersonal relationships whereas men gather information by challenging others. In the independent knowing phase, 57% of students in their first year after college saw knowledge as uncertain and see themselves as active participants in producing knowledge; women connect with their peers and develop their own voice whereas men remain more individual and autonomy emerges more strongly. Baxter Magolda found that only 12% of students in their first year out of college had reached the last phase of contextual knowing, thinking for themselves and understanding that knowledge is based on an integration of evidence and ideas.

Andragogical Model: Malcolm Knowles

Malcolm Knowles, author of the andragogical model and the former executive director of the Adult Education Association of America, popularized the use of andragogy (teaching adults) and discussed it in terms of characteristics of the adult learner. In her presentation, Jennifer Thompson attributed the following six characteristics from Knowles' model to show how curriculum development and instruction are most effective when considering the needs of adult learners (personal communication, December 7, 2009):

The stages of Knowles's andragogy speak directly to the student population in UMUC's online classrooms: working adults with varied outside responsibilities that may include family, taking care of parents, and more. UMUC instructors find themselves teaching students who are at different stages of learning depending on their background, experience, and ability to manage time. The stages make an important statement about—and impact the delivery of—instruction:

Three Domains of Learning: Benjamin Bloom

As instructors, it is important to consider Bloom's idea that learning involves mental, emotional, and physical behaviors. Bloom's taxonomy of behavioral objectives include three domains of learning that impact the learning experience:

• Cognitive: mental skills (Knowledge)
• Affective: growth in feelings or emotional areas (Attitude)
• Psychomotor: manual or physical skills (Skills)

The cognitive domain involves the development of intellectual skills through "recall or recognition of specific facts, procedural patterns, and concepts that serve in the development of intellectual abilities and skills" (Clark, 2010, ¶ 5). Cognitive learning is a process that is demonstrated through a series of stages that represent increasingly higher-level thinking skills, including knowledge recall, comprehension of information, application of knowledge, analysis and synthesis of information, and evaluation of ideas based on existing knowledge. Churches (2008) notes that a former student of Bloom revised the taxonomy slightly in 2001, using the categories of remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. He simplifies the learning process in this manner:

Before we can understand a concept we have to remember it
Before we can apply the concept we must understand it
Before we analyze it we must be able to apply it
Before we can evaluate its impact we must have analyzed it
Before we can create we must have remembered, understood, applied, analyzed, and evaluated. (p. 5)

Cognitive learning is not an automatic process and comes to students in a variety of ways during different times in their educational journey, both in and out of the classroom. It takes practice and experience to be able to achieve each part of the learning process. Because cognition is not automatic and every student arrives in class at a different stage, Bloom came to the conviction that instructors should not compare students' acquisition of knowledge but rather recognize their differences and abilities and how they might contribute to the goals of the curriculum (Eisner, 2000). As an instructor, I especially resonated with this idea and keep it in mind throughout the semester. 

Summary

UMUC faculty are challenged to teach students from all walks of life. Perry and Baxter Magolda remind us that our students are at different stages of learning development when they arrive in our classrooms. As instructors, we can use our classrooms to challenge our students to move to the next level of processing information. Knowles's andragogical model reminds us that our adult students have specific needs that, when understood, can have an impact on the way we deliver content. And lastly, Bloom reminds us that at whatever stage of learning our students arrive in our classrooms, we should not compare them to one another but help them appreciate the level they are at and their ability to learn and grow.

Resources

Carney, K. C. (2002). Baxter Magolda's epistemological reflection model. Retrieved from http://www.uiowa.edu/~epls/faculty/pascarel/papers/carney.pdf

Churches, A. (2008). Bloom's digital taxonomy. Retrieved from http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/uploadedFiles/departments/techtraining/homepage/BloomDigitalTaxonomy2001.pdf

Clark, D. (2010). Bloom's taxonomy of learning domains: The three types of learning. Retrieved from http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/bloom.html

Eisner, E. W. (2000, September). Benjamin Bloom, 1913-99. Prospects: Quarterly Review of Comparative Education, 30(3), 387-395. Retrieved from http://www.ibe.unesco.org/publications/ThinkersPdf/bloome.pdf

Moore, W. S. (1995). My mind exploded: Intellectual development as a critical framework for understanding and assessing collaborative learning. In Assessment in and of Collaborative Learning (Washington Center Evaluation Committee, Eds.). Olympia, WA: Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education. Retrieved from http://www.evergreen.edu/washcenter/resources/acl/iia.html

National Science Foundation. (2008, June 5). Plastic brain outsmarts experts [Press release]. Retrieved from http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=111659

Rapaport, W. J. (2008). William Perry's scheme of intellectual and ethical development. Retrieved from http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/perry.positions.html

University of California, Berkeley. (n.d.). Theories of learning: William G. Perry. In Teaching guide for graduate student instructors. Retrieved from http://gsi.berkeley.edu/teachingguide2009/learning/perry.html