This week I will be discussing two instructional strategies, "Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers" and "Summarizing and Note Taking", and how they tie into cognitive learning theories.
"The instructional strategy cues, questions, and advance organizers focuses on enhancing students' ability to retrieve, use and organize information about a topic (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, & Malekoski, 2007, p. 73). The objective of a cue is to give insight to the students about what they are getting ready to learn about. Questions are there to simple spur their thinking, as well as trigger any prior knowledge (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, & Malekoski, 2007). I like to think of advanced organizers as graphic organizer, this helps them categorize things, as well as help organize their thoughts. These strategies directly tie into the cognitivist perspective. Cognitivist view learning as a mental process (Lever-Duffy & McDonald, 2007). Once information enters, it is manipulated, stored, and then pulled out for use (Lever-Duffy & McDonald, 2007). The strategy helps to pull information stored and makes sense of new information as it enters through the senses. I have found cues, questioning, and organizer be highly effective in the classroom. My students really grasp the information being given and categorizing it helps to put the information in perspective. I use graphic organizers daily and would recommend this site to create and print your own: http://www.teach-nology.com/web_tools/graphic_org/
The other strategy discussed this week is summarizing and note taking. "Summarizing and note taking focuses on enhancing students' ability to synthesize information and distill is into a concise new form"(Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, & Malekoski, 2007, p. 119). Again I think this focuses on manipulating and storing the information which links this to cognitive practices. As I was looking over the information provided on note taking I was a little surprised. Using Technology with Classroom Instruction recommends that the more notes taken the better. I have found that when too many notes are taken, students can become overwhelmed with information. Although, the book did recommend that teachers help students learn to separate important information from extraneous information (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, & Malekoski, 2007). I do not use the the practice of note taking in my own room because I work with first graders. We do summarize as a class in written and oral form. You might be surprised at their ability to summarize. They have to be taught the strategy of picking out the most important information but once they learn that tool many are able to summarize with ease.
Overall, I do feel that both strategies discussed in this weeks reading directly tie into cognitive learning strategies. The assist with synthesizing and learning new material.
References:
Lever-Duffy, J. & McDonald, J. (2008). Theoretical Foundations (Laureate Education, Inc., custom ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.
Pitler, H., Hubbell, E., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). Using technology with classroom instruction that works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Amanda,
ReplyDeleteI was surprised that the short-term memory has a very limited capacity for information, only being able to hold and synthesize at most about seven different "objects" at a time. The importance of graphic organizers was brought home to me because of this cognitive limitation of the human brain. I had seen concept maps long ago, but have never used them. In light of this weeks resources, I think it is about time I try Inspiration, or some other concept-mapping software.
I teach physics and there are certain areas that are a lot like biology in that there are many parts that fit together in a large scheme that has an overall organizational structure that is hard to take in all at once (particle physics comes to mind). A graphic organizer is possibly indespensible.
Tim
Tim,
ReplyDeleteI have not used Inspiration either, although I do use many graphic organizers. I am very interested to give it a try. These tools really do allow students to process the material. I remember taking physics and I think that it would be highly effective for your students. It would allow them to have a visual to go with the big picture. Thanks for commenting!