Cognitive Principles

Following is a summary of a very complex thinking process under five general principles,

1. Constructivism principle - when the students receive new information they recall (make connections with) their long term memory. In this manner students may do mistakes and it’s not a surprise.  In exams if the students were given a chance to tell (vocally or in words) us what they think, we can test what they really know also in case we can provide them relevant cues.

1. Context principle – it has been proven by research there is a content dependence on responses of the students for problems. Though we need students to build their knowledge in wide range of contexts, it’s easy to use day today examples to ease students to understand tough theories.

1. Change principle – new information should be always presented to the students in a way that’s familiar to them. But it’s obvious that it varies from student to student what they know or familiar with. This hard process can also explained by using Bull’s eye. In this case it’s ideal to use day to day examples to illustrate theory stuff (kind of a story line structure), but not to use terms that students are not familiar with. Students create own knowledge (may be correct or incorrect) depending on what they gain from teacher and what they already know. At the end of each class, it’s good if the teacher can stop with something can be used for next class. From one aspect it’s often inefficient to repeat the problems with same structures and methods as the students may follow the steps without thinking, to overcome this we could change the format. Ex- we could give problems with same stuff covering at the background but presented as multiple choices or essay problems.

1. Individuality principle – it’s obvious to expect large standard deviation in educational studies because any collection of students may have large cognitive variables or thought processes, therefore the average approach is not reliable. Students have different approaches as they have different conclusions according to their experiences. Students may have different preferences for studying methods, but we can’t think it’s lack of capabilities in other situations. There is no any certain teaching approach to teach a particular subject material, the best way is to use a mix of approaches. On the other hand it’s not good to stick to a fixed plan, as we need to reach many of the students we must listen to the children and should be flexible. There are so many factor like creativity and interpersonal skills, which make an individual worth than the subject matter, therefore we can’t categorize students intelligent or not by looking in to subject performances only.

1. Though the learning process seems to be much efficient when it comes to group version, but in physics most of the time learners tend to be self learners.