Resources for unit 3

2.1. Description of cognitivism

Cognitivism is a learning theory that focuses on the internal mental processes involved in learning, such as thinking, memory, perception, attention, judgement, problem-solving and metacognition. It focuses on how people think, understand, and know about the world. It put emphasis on learning how people understand and represent the outside world within themselves and how our ways of thinking about the world influence our behavior. It emerged in response to the limitations of behaviorism, which focused only on observable behavior and ignored the mental activities of the learner (Giannoukos, G. (2024).

Cognitivism was influenced by technology like other sciences. Beginning in the 1960s, growing numbers of psychologists began to think about the brain and human behavior in terms of the computer, which was being developed and becoming publicly available at that time. Cognitivism focuses on mental processes which correspond well to the processes that computers perform. Cognitivists compare human thinking to the workings of a computer, which takes in information and transforms, stores, and retrieves it. In their view, thinking is information processing. Cognitivism view learners as active participants who process, store, and retrieve information. The theory suggests that learning occurs when learners make sense of and organize new information by connecting it with their existing knowledge. According to cognitivists, mental processes and past knowledge influence behavior or response more than external stimuli do (Schunk, 2021; Ormod, 2020).

Some of the important contributors to cognitivism include:

-      The German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909), who studied the ability of people to remember lists of words under different conditions;

-     The English psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett (1886–1969), who studied the cognitive and social processes of remembering;

-        Jean Piaget, George Miller, and Eleanor Rosch work to understand how people learn, remember, and make judgments about the world around them. For instance, the idea that our memory is influenced by what we already know was also a major idea behind the cognitive- developmental stage model of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) and

-    Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934), a Russian psychologist who worked on cognitive development.