Effective Learning Strategies: Cognitive Processes & Techniques

Posted on Feb 22, 2025 in Other university degrees and diplomas

Effective Learning Strategies

Rating:

Strategy Selection

Procedures designed to relate new information to prior knowledge. This involves using topical knowledge and discarding irrelevant information to simplify and process information more quickly and easily.

  • Stress: Highlighting the main ideas of a text.
  • Summary: Capturing the essential ideas and reducing the size of the work. This involves organizing the gist of a text or work.
  • Extract Main Ideas: Selecting only the main ideas from the text to improve understanding.
  • Schematic: Similar to an abstract, with the objective of capturing essential ideas and reducing the length of the text.

Repetition Strategy

Retaining learned information in short-term memory for a defined time to transfer it to long-term memory. The goal is to keep the information active in short-term memory by reciting it repeatedly.

Organizational Strategy

Combining, grouping, or linking selected content in a coherent and meaningful way. Two objectives:

  • Separating information when it is abundant.
  • Establishing relationships between elements of information that have no logical relationship.
  • Sorting: Organizing learning into related units.
  • Knowledge Networks: Identifying important ideas in a text.
  • Higher-Level Structures: Organizing the contents of a text in a tree structure. Types include:
    • Cause and effect
    • Comparison
    • Collection
    • Description
    • Response
  • Concept Maps

Development Strategy

Linking new knowledge with previous knowledge stored in memory to facilitate retention and recall.

  • Inquiry and Interrogation: Wondering why the facts are as they are.
  • Analogies: Explaining abstract content through simple examples.

Mnemonic Techniques

Procedures that associate materials to be learned with pictures. The most used four rules are:

  • Method of loci (places)
  • Peg system (method of perch)
  • Keyword method
  • Link system (method loop)

Support Strategies

Techniques that help all students learn.

  • Intrinsic Motivation: Techniques that help motivate students to learn, such as:
    • Challenges
    • Curiosity
    • Control
  • Attitudes and Facilitators: Ingredients that facilitate learning include:
    • Learning climate
    • Sense of security
    • Personal satisfaction
  • Control of Anxiety: Refers to the self-perception that the student has about learning. Anxiety can be prevented using systematic desensitization.

Assessment Methods

  1. Note: Technique used for information on the various cognitive processes used by the subject to execute the task.
  2. Interview: Its purpose is to know what strategies a student uses when performing a cognitive task.
  3. Self-Reports: Information that students provide to describe orally or in writing the processes used to solve a task.
  4. Inventories: A quick formula for diagnosing learning strategies. An advantage is that it allows us to quickly obtain a profile of each student.

Examples of Learning Strategy Inventories

  • Inventory of Methods of Study (Approaches to Studying Inventory – ASI): Designed to consider the influence of context factors on students’ learning styles.
  • Inventory of Learning Processes (ILP): Designed from an analysis of learning in laboratory contexts.
  • Inventory of Learning and Study Strategies (LASSI): Analyzes different learning strategies from a cognitive perspective, based on studies and research relating to cognitive psychology.