Educational Psychology: Learning Strategies and Cognitive Development

Posted on Dec 14, 2024 in Psychology and Sociology

Features and Functions of Learning Strategies

Strategies are procedures aimed, in part, at trainable skills. They are a set of operations and procedures that the student can use to acquire, retain, and evoke different kinds of knowledge.

The Functions:

• Condition the individual, improving their performance.
• Promote the development of autonomous learning by providing students with a fundamental role in the statement.
• Improve students’ ability to learn how to learn.
• Enable easier, faster, and better quality learning.

Learning Strategies

Metacognition refers to the trials that make students about their own cognitive abilities. Thus, if the subject knows the processes through which they learn, it will be easier and more efficient at directing them and adapting to different learning tasks.

The Main Components Are:

• Knowledge: The ability to know what processes and skills are needed to plan and acquire learning.
• Control of learning: Knowledge that the students have of how and when to use strategies to achieve learning goals.
• Planning: The thought that precedes any learning process.
• Regulation: The student monitors their progress and achievements.
• Evaluation: Evaluation of the efficiency of the learning process.

Scientific Status of Psychology of Education as an Educational Discipline

Although historically educational psychology emerged with the pretense of being a unified discipline in which both domains, psychological and educational, were taken into account simultaneously and prospects of each are mixed together into a coherent whole, the historical development and current status of the discipline is far from achieving this goal, although it may retain its validity as such today.

Sternberg, still emphasizing the difficulty of establishing the identity of the discipline, suggests the teaching-learning process as a unifying field of discipline.

Scientific Status:

• Unit: Application of general principles of psychology to the educational status.
• Independence: Educational Psychology is a science with theories, content, and methods themselves.
• Interdependence, interaction: General psychology dependent on its merits, but with autonomy in their development and implementation.

What are Learning Centers and What do They Serve?

It is about creating spaces in the classroom to ensure that all children have the same opportunities and handle and know the materials available in the eight domains. For those children who do not have the opportunity to work with paints at home, draw pictures and color them, or make stories, learning centers enable them to discover new areas and interests in which it might be noted. Through the learning center concept, children are introduced to the eight domains of knowledge.

Objects and Content of Educational Psychology

Since the beginning, educational psychology as a discipline has been considered a bridge between psychology and pedagogy and applied nature, that is, building their knowledge from an interdisciplinary approach. So our discipline has been attacked from psychology and from the same approach. From the first, it has been criticized for the excessively applied psychology of education through greater focus on the implementation of procedures and results from other fields. From pedagogy, it has been criticized, however, because it is too theoretical, which makes it dependent on psychology.

Objective: To ambiguity in their study. Its nucleus is learning, focusing on that which occurs in the classroom (formal education) but must also deal with education outside the classroom (informal education: family, peers, etc.). Extending the boundaries makes it difficult to determine their identity.

The student who changes and builds their own learning. The objective of the study is, therefore, student characteristics (from formal and informal knowledge to the representation of information) and the factors that facilitate or retard the change (intelligence, motivation, etc.).

Within the classroom, the teacher’s scenario corresponds to organizing and structuring learning experiences to produce the desired changes.

The object of study of Educational Psychology and, therefore, the competence of teachers to know well:

• What to teach: Content curriculum (math, writing, social science knowledge…), procedural and attitudinal.
• Teaching: Learning procedures and strategies to optimize the transmission of experiences and content.
• Where to develop the teaching-learning process: The classroom.

Contents: Educational Psychology is not a science with a specific field, but has an open nature between psychology and education, so it is nurtured in the educational process and from there, chooses those that provide a better basis for teachers. Educational Psychology is increasingly moving to focus more on the teaching-learning process as its core content.

The nuclei of the Educational Psychology study are:

• Learning processes and variables that explain the changes in the behavior of the subject.
• Cognitive and social development of students. They are classics of the core, “the theory of cognitive development” of Piaget, the “sociocognitive” of Bandura, and the “genetics experiment,” also called “sociocognitive” of Vygotsky.
• Individual differences (factors and elements that promote or retard the learning).
• The social dimension of the classroom.
• Content and instructional design: Approaches to study the components of the curriculum.

Difference Between Gifted, Talented, and Precocious

Gifted: Exceptional child, noted for high intellectual capacity, performance, and creativity.

Talent: Extraordinary and specialized skills in specific areas.

Precocious: Refers to evolutionary uniqueness. Precocious children manifest behaviors that have not been acquired or strengthened by their peers.

The most obvious difference is centered on the concept of early compared to the other two: this term simply defines a student whose evolutionary development is ahead of their peers, so it stands out, but over time this superiority will disappear.

Gifted and Talented terms are related to children with exceptional abilities, in a positive sense. The difference is that while the gifted has high intelligence and creativity, the talent shows high skill in a particular field, so we’re talking about an exceptionally skilled individual.

Uniqueness and Giftedness: A Bidirectional Concept

Uniqueness is a term used to describe both the characteristics of individuals who show high intellectual ability and those with a low capacity. The characteristic of uniqueness is that:

• It appears with low frequency. It is small for the number of deficient humans; also, the frequency of the gifted and talented is low compared to the normal population.
• It differs from normal. Exceptional individuals have, in general, specific characteristics different from those of the normal population. Differences are of two types: quantitative and qualitative.
• It requires an educational response that is differentiated and diversified.

Characteristics of the Gifted

• Although each gifted child is unique, many share certain characteristics.
• No child has all the qualities of the list explained below.
• Easier to understand and remember what you learn.
• Has an extensive, advanced, and rich vocabulary.
• Reads a lot.
• Concentrated.
• Likes to solve problems.
• Tends to be obsessive.
• Takes risks intellectually (with complicated tasks, they are motivated and innovative).
• Easily bored by repetition or routine.
• Entrepreneurial.
• Takes risks.
• Has high expectations.
• Remembers details (holds in memory those it considers important).

Process of Identifying Gifted Children

The identification key factor is effectively using all available information sources. Among these are:

• Psychometric Resources:

Typically, the psychologist directs the teacher in the evaluation process. Psychometric resources available to the psychologist can be of 3 types:

• Intelligence test.
• Creativity test.
• Test specific skills.
• Informal tests: There are three types.
• Peer nomination: Students should be good detectors of their peers with great skill. They offer different and complementary information to that provided by parents and teachers, as it is not the same as the relationship between equals that between child and adult (child-parent / child-teacher).
• Nomination of parents: Provide information on:
• The evolutionary development of children and growth rate.
• Language development.
• Situations where it is more comfortable.
• Relative to the rest of the family.
• Scales teachers: They use the information by characteristics common to gifted children. Provide information on overall capacity, motivation, and creativity.

Types of Adaptation to the Curriculum of a Gifted Child

• Acceleration: Learn at a faster rate than their peers.
• Enrichment activities.
• Adapting curriculum: Objectives and content of subsequent courses.
• Compact curriculum: Providing a series of learning experiences and research on subjects of the curriculum.

Curriculum Enrichment

It is to provide a set of experiences that are additional and complementary to the provisions of the regular curriculum or textbooks, which have been properly planned according to the needs, interests, and abilities of students.

What is Creativity and What are Creative Thinking Skills?

Creativity is the ability to generate something new, whether a product, a technique, an approach to reality…

Creative Thinking Skills:

• Fluency: Number of ideas or solutions.
• Flexibility: Different ideas or solutions range.
• Originality: Novelty of the idea or solution uniqueness.
• Preparation: The amount of additional detail.

How do you Assess Creativity?

A first tool is the questionnaire of creativity. The most used is the questionnaire designed by Beltran and Rimm, with the aim of identifying skills and traits commonly associated with creativity.

Another objective tool is the Test of Creative Thinking in Torrance. The TTCT is responsible for assessing the four components of creativity: fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration on two subtests: a verbal expression and the other figures of speech.

Test Torrance’s Creative Thinking

Torrance designs the TTCT (Torrance Creative Thinking Test) based on his conception of creativity.

It aims to assess the creativity of children and adolescents.

The objective is to assess 4 components of creativity:

• Fluency (number of ideas)
  • Flexibility (variety of ideas)
  • Originality (uniqueness)
  • Development (many details)

This instrument is a set of tests that evaluate the creative process.

Each test is unique and different.

Aimed at interesting and stimulating activities from kindergarten to secondary education.

Consists of:

• Verbal test: Its aim is to assess the ability of the pupil’s imagination when using language. It consists of: a) ask questions; b) imagine reasons; c) imagine the consequences; d) refine an object; e) new uses; f) original questions; g) imagine real situations.
• Figures Test expression: Its aim is to assess the level of imagination by design. It consists of: a) composing a picture; b) ending up drawing; and c) making different compositions using parallel lines.

Questionnaire Beltran and Rimm

One of the questionnaires used to assess creativity is the one designed by Martinez Beltran and Rimm (1985). The objective is to identify skills and traits commonly associated with creativity, which is flexibility, independence, curiosity, persistence, and variety of interests. We work with students of different levels of Primary Education. Its implementation is simple: record Yes or No. This questionnaire detects related to personality traits: imagination, independence, varied interests.

Development Program Developed by Renzulli Creativity

The training program developed by Renzulli creative is based on the theory of the structure of intelligence from Guildford, which includes a combination of two kinds of thinking: convergent and divergent, being, is the creativity go down, but without knowledge prior can not be created.

This program aims to encourage the development of creative abilities, taking into account the level of development and knowledge of the student. Creativity is to Torrance, a dynamic process that involves a form of “looking at things.”

The program consists of five manuals designed to encourage divergent thinking, and each manual includes, in turn, 24 training activities for creativity, worked along the following principles:

• Show the tasks interesting and challenging, where children learn to say NO: “I can not do.”
• Design activities according to the principles of meaningful learning. Two conditions:
  • Fit the developmental level and interests of the child.
  • Save a logical order.
• Contemplating the significance of what is learned to other situations.
• Create a flexible framework where every idea has no place.

Process, Strategy, and Technique

Strategies: Set deliberate and planned process designed to achieve a goal, always conditioned and determined by a variety of intrinsic and extrinsic to the subject itself. Would be the means used to select and / or apply one or more tactics. They assume choice, developing a control plan and to acquire information.

Learning processes: Mental operations implied in the learning process. Examples of processes are attention, comprehension, acquisition, organization, etc.

Techniques or skills: Actions or activities that are carried out to achieve a strategy that allows specific or specific tasks. For example, the selection strategy information can be performed using the technique of emphasis or summary.

Define 3 Types of Intelligence

According to Gardner, human intelligence has eight dimensions:

• Linguistic intelligence: Refers to the ability to manage and structure the meanings and functions of words of language. (Writers, speakers…)
• Logical-mathematical intelligence: Students’ ability to perform calculations, testing hypotheses, etc. (Mathematicians, scientists, etc.)
• Visual-spatial intelligence: Refers to the ability to perceive the visual world accurately and space (sailors, pilots, etc.)
• Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence: Ability to control body movements and handle objects skillfully (athletes, dancers…)
• Musical intelligence: Ability to appreciate musical forms, and to be sensitive to rhythm, pitch, and timbre. (Composers, singers, musicians…)
• Interpersonal intelligence: Ability to respond appropriately to the moods, motivations, and desires of people. (Policies, counselors….).

How Would Favor the Teaching of Multiple Intelligences?

• Make school the home of thought, encouraging success against failure.
• Teaching to think, exploring different alternatives.
• Train teachers to guide to “exploit” the hidden potential of students.
• Identify the strengths of children in different areas or domains.
• Introducing children to a wide range of areas of learning.
• Promote the strengths of children and respect their diversity.
• Monetize the strengths to develop other areas through the transfer.

Implications of MI Theory in the Process of Teaching

Implications of the Theory in Schools and Curriculum

a) For schools:

• Make it like a home school of thought.
• Encourage success and reduce the levels of failure.

b) With respect to the curriculum:

• Using a methodology based on thought.
• Teaching students to transfer knowledge beyond the classroom.

Implications of Theory for Students and Teachers

a) For students:

• Teach them to think, exploring different alternatives.
• Develop organizational skills of knowledge.

b) For teachers:

• Train them on a methodology to “exploit” the hidden potential of students.
• Teaching strategy.

Basic Use of Portfolio

Within the various assessment strategies of multiple intelligences, we found a tool called “portfolio.”

This is a custom document property of the student, which are collected and recorded the thoughts, knowledge, and reflections of the child on their own learning processes. Thus, one can evaluate the performance, efforts, progress, and achievements of students during different times of the teaching-learning process.

Classification and Evaluation of Learning Strategies

1. Selection Strategy: Consisting of the topical knowledge and discard the irrelevant in order to simplify the information and process it more quickly and easily.

Underline Extract Summarize the main ideas. Schema.

2. Repeat Strategy: It consists in retaining what they learn in the short-term memory for a set time.

3. Organizational strategy: It is about combining or related group selected contents in a coherent and meaningful.

4. Development strategy: Connect the new knowledge with previous studies that we have stored in memory, in order to facilitate the retention and recall.

Principles Common to the Programs Teach Thinking

• Set of learning strategies.
• Repertoire of thinking skills.
• Interest towards encouraging the development of language as one of the most important instruction.
• Development of reflective thinking and divergent thinking.
• Metacognition as monitoring and evaluation process self-reflexive
• Motivation

Objectives of the PEI

Instrumental Enrichment Program, or IEP, is part of the so-called programs teach how to think, designed to improve students’ cognitive.

The teacher encourages the use of metacognitive components, requiring students to spell out what kind of functions used in solving various problems, how they use them, and why use them.

The utility and effectiveness of programs lie in the importance of strategies of learning, metacognition, and its teaching in this field.

The Cognitive Movement: Contributions to Psychology

Behaviorism maintained its strength until the 60s, but increasingly became more evident the idea that he had dispensed with the mind, its roots in the Gestalt, which is based on the study of the understanding of learning significant learning processes.

Cognitive psychology again retrieves the mind and character. The role of the subject is essentially active, since it is he who, from the information you provide sensory receptor constructs and interprets the information and plans, implements, and monitors the responses.

Cognitive psychology holds that individuals are active subjects, constructive and planners. The study of human activity from the standpoint of information processing, and putting more emphasis on knowledge in the responses.

Individuals are capable of two answers or solutions to their problems, which are conducive to learning.

Contributions of Behaviorism in Psychology of Education

Behaviorist psychology appears Watson, a few years after the emergence of scientific psychology, and soon had a great development, coming to be in such a high profile that came to overshadow all other psychological schools. The whole psychology behaviorism rejected earlier by “mentalist”, ie, having as object of study the mind or consciousness.

The object of psychology to behaviorism should be the study of behavior through external observation applied thermal stimulus and response under experimental control. Behaviorist psychology to human activity is reduced to the behavior, and all behavior is explained between stimuli and responses.

For these theories, all learning is reduced to a conditioning process, which is divided into two categories:

• Classical conditioning: (without reinforcement) contiguity between stimulus and response. In this way, we learn to respond automatically to a neutral stimulus that previously had no effect on our behavior. Paulor stand and Watson.
• Operant conditioning: (with reinforcement). A stimulus elicits a response, which produces a result in behavior. A result that applies a repetition or reinforcement producing a change in behavior.

Constructivism

The student is definitely an active subject, and where learning is no longer limited to receiving the knowledge of the teacher or the printed materials in a passive way, but is he himself who builds them using their previous experience and knowledge to understand and assimilate new information. Learning is the assimilation of knowledge, but that assimilation is not mechanical.

What is Meaningful Learning?

Part of the Theory of Cognitive Psychology.

• First, we need positive interaction between teacher and students, as it requires the ideas and feedback from students throughout the lesson.
• Second, the exhibition uses a lot of teaching examples and even insists on verbal learning, the examples may include pictures, graphics, or images.
• Third, this type of instruction is deductive, the more general and inclusive concepts are presented, and specific concepts later.
• Finally, sequential presentation of material in certain steps must be followed.

Observational Learning Process

Learning can be two ways: directly, based on the individual directly in the learning process, and directly, without the learner is involved in that process, but by observing the behavior of another, of a model.

Many of our reactions and behaviors that we can learn by watching others. In recent years, observational learning has gained momentum due to:

• It was found that observational learning is most effective.
• The influence of media (film and television) on the behavior of people.
• The four processes of observational learning:
  • Please note, the model features, their behavior and the observer.
  • Retention, storage of the features of the model in memory.
  • Performance or reproduction, if the model’s behavior is accepted, the consequences are positive, the subject is likely to repeat or run an incentive for more repetitions.

Differences Between Behaviorism and Cognitivism

Enrichment Curriculum in Gifted

It is to provide additional experiences that are complements to the provisions of the mainstream curriculum that have been planned according to the needs of students. These are some of them:

• Mentoring: Using experts from the education community to help the gifted to develop some area of interest that can not be satisfied by the school.
• Programs and activities.
• Adapting Curriculum: Is a strategy of attention to diversity in the LOGSE collection
• Compact Curriculum: Is to provide students with a series of learning experiences and research on issues of curriculum, in order to progress independently.

The curriculum in the classroom enrichment states:

• Advantages: Students are in heterogeneous groups, the gifted can make and receive knowledge.
• Disadvantages: Individualized instruction is enough work for teachers, in addition, some teachers are not prepared to carry out enrichment programs.

Programs to Teach Thinking

These are programs of cognitive improvement, which aims to make students learn to use skills and processes to think.

Instrumental Enrichment Program (EIP) aims to achieve better cognitive functioning of subjects. Is aimed at developing the basic processes involved in the different stages of information processing.

The teacher encourages the use of metacognitive components telling the students to tell them what kind of functions used to solve problems, how they use and why.

Evaluation Strategies

The most commonly used evaluation methods are grouped into four categories:

• Observation: Used to obtain information on the various cognitive processes used by the subject to execute a task.
• Interview: Directly asked the student.
• Self-reports: Students explain in writing the processes used to develop a task.
• Inventory: A set of tests to evaluate the strategies. For example, ACRA