Cognitivism

More and more electronic textbooks are being developed by textbook publishers. How do you think an electronic textbook should be organized, and what instructional strategies should be embedded, that would help learners encode new textbook information so that it can easily be retrieved? Describe a textbook chapter including embedded activities, strategies, supplements, and text manipulations that would help facilitate learning, from a cognitive perspective.

Sometime in the middle of last week a story appeared about a doorman who was dismissed because of bad breath. The story received a great deal of attention, far more attention than is due a story about bad breath.

I first heard this story on the radio, in my car on the way to school. Later in the day I noticed a headline in the New York Post, the primary source for all things crude and salacious. I glanced at the article without really registering any of the information. That evening, while watching the TV news with my wife, I saw a story about the doorman who was suspended for a single day by the management company that operates the building where he has worked for the last 20 years. Because the man in question lives in Brooklyn, not far from where I live myself, the story caught my attention. When I finished watching the report I could identify the doorman, the building where he worked, and locate his house, all facts that I had not retained from either the radio report or the newspaper article.

Why is it that I learned from the TV report but not from the radio or newspaper? According to cognitive theory I learned because I was able to move facts from my sensory memory, through working memory and in to long-term memory. This happened when I paid more careful attention to the information provided by my senses, primarily because I connected that information to my existing knowledge.

The idea that learners learn because they add meaning to certain parts of the constant stream of information supplied by the senses, and they add that meaning because they connect facts to prior knowledge, is important to those who design instructional materials like textbooks. As we move towards an age where technology provides new vehicles for the transfer of information there are exciting new possibilities for textbook designers.

Much attention is paid to the differences in learning styles, but traditional textbooks have only been able to accommodate visual learners, specifically readers. The electronic textbook allows for the inclusion of video and audio so that learners who devote attention to those senses can have information delivered through the sense to which they are most likely to attend. In the meaningful electronic textbook text would be just one of many sources of information.

The real advantage to the well structured electronic textbook would be in its ability to consistently point towards prior knowledge and experience and thereby assist learners in attaching the value to information that moves that information from working memory to long-term memory. Concept mapping would be a key element to the electronic textbook so that learners could create a visible scaffold from prior knowledge to new ideas. Learners could customize instruction to match with prior knowledge and experience. The electronic math textbook could use information provided by the student to generate word problems that connect to real world experience in the areas of interest to the student.

The advantages of this kind of presentation extend to all subjects. Students in English could use photostory to add their own images to the stories they read and establish a visual connection to the text. Social Studies students learning about other parts of the world could see, hear and feel those places by communicating with people from those places. These are the kinds of experiences that students are sure to remember.