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Cognitivism

Our brains do an incredible job at keeping an ongoing record of a variety of things we have learned throughout our lives. When we begin to learn something new our mind goes through its personal files to access our prior knowledge about a particular subject to give a foundation of what you are already know to continue to build upon it. I remember when I was in school and we were learning about waves in the ocean, my teacher first started the lesson with asking the class if they had ever been to a beach. Being from Costa Rica, I had been to the beach many times so I knew what it smelled like, how the sand felt, how the waves would pull everything in and then push it back. My mind was recollecting the memories I had of the beach and my existing schema helped me to begin making new connections about what causes waves to happen in the first place. One of my classmates had never been to the beach so he didn't have any prior knowledge to help him understand what waves were like. Through this initial assessment my teacher was able to access our prior knowledge and see which students needed more visuals, explanations before moving forward to the bigger concept of the phenomenon of waves. 

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Cognitivism involves the mental processes that occur when people are learning something new, how the brain works in going through the mental files to access prior knowledge and creating new files to add to store new knowledge. 

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Let's look at some well known  researchers that played a major role in cognitivism. 

Lev Vygotsky (1896 - 1934)

Lev Vgotsky was a Russian psychologist who created the Social Development Theory where he believed that social interactions played a significant role in cognitive development. He emphasized the importance of play and the positive implications play had for future learning. 

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Vygotsky also created the concept known as the Zone of  Proximal Development (ZPD),  which helped create scaffolding where learners go through different levels of learning through assistance as needed.  Learners are supported and guided based on their various needs. 

The Zone of Proximal Development helps teachers see what tasks a learner can do on their own and what support is needed through the assistance of a more knowledgeable person. This helps  create lessons that will challenge the learner but allow them to successfully complete tasks through scaffolding where support is provided and slowly fades away as the learner is able to do it on their own. 

Implications of Cognitivism

INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN 

  • Accessing prior knowledge at the beginning of a course through pre-assessments or interactive media to grab the learners attention. 

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  • Information should be laid out in a structured, easy to read manner that minimizes distraction. Information can be presented through an infographic, video, picture. Keeping things simple is important especially when discussing a difficult topic. 

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  • Simulations are important to embed within a course so the learner can retain the information through modeling and repetition. 

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  • Including real life scenarios that help learners connect and also encouraging discussion with peers to help deeper understanding. 

Cognitivism in government/military learning modules 

Strengths 

Limitations

  • Help soldiers think critically about real life scenarios and how to analyze them through critical thinking. 

  • Dividing difficult tasks into manageable steps that build upon one another, allowing the learner to have a foundation to build upon. 

  • Having repetition in the learning modules which help the learner with retaining the information through repeated exposure. 

  • Since cognitivism focuses heavily on the mental process of a concept this may not be useful when it comes to the physical action of a specific procedure. 

  • Soldiers will be able to take their time learning the steps in a process, how to critically think about handling a situation but when faced with this situation in real life they may not know how to react in a quicker pace. 

Wax Seal Tutorial 

This is a tutorial on how to create a wax seal using a glue gun. The supplies needed are shown and the video is recorded in a visually appealing way that the learner can clearly see each step of the process. The tutorial also gave some neat tips such as using a bag of ice so that the seal dries quicker and marking the stamper so the design doesn't get sealed upside down. 

 

Extraneous cognitive load: This video is done in a way that allows the user to access it, it has sections of the video divided for easy navigation and clearly models each step of the way. I appreciated showing the different angles of sealing the envelope. The step by step approached made it very easy to retain the information. 

 

Germane cognitive load: The simplicity of the way every aspect of the process was presented from starting small where the supplies needed were shown to actually doing the action of using the glue gun to create a wax seal made the mental effort minimal and I felt confident I could repeat the process. 

 

Overall I feel that this video did a wonderful job at providing the needed steps to achieve the final product and present the information in a concise and organized matter. I never once felt confused and I liked seeing the divided sections of the steps so I could go back to any section easily if needed.  

References

© 2025 by Maria Jacobs  and secured by Wix. This work is licensed under CC BY 4.0

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