The Cognitive Movement in Instruction

ed from the article of the same title in the Educational Psychologist, Volume 13, 1978. Copyrighted by the Division of Educational Psychology of the American Psychological Association. A cognitive approach implies that learning from instruction is scientifically more productively studied as an internally, cognitively mediated process than as a direct product of the environment, people, or factors external to the learner. The approach involves understanding relations or interactions beween the learners' cognitive processes and aptitudes, such as attribution, motivation, encoding, memory, cognitive styles and cognitive structures, and the characteristics of instructional treatments. The cognitive movement thus brings a unity of interest to people who study individual differences, learning and instruction, and a unifying synthesis to many recent research findings (Bandura, 1969). It also encourages research on comprehension, understanding, and transfer, several areas of fundamental importance to education. In educational research, a cognitive approach implies that it is more useful and meaningful to study, for example, how teaching style influences the learners' attention, motivation, and understanding, which in turn influence behavior, than it is useful and meaningful to study how teaching style directly influences student behavior. A cognitive model emphasizes the active and constructive role of the learner. From this point of view, the art of instruction begins with an understanding and a diagnosis of the cognitive and affective processes and aptitudes of the learners. From these one designs different treatments for different students in different situations to actively induce mental elaborations that relate previous learning and schemata to stimuli. In this conception the learners are active, responsible, and accountable for their role in generative learning. That theme expresses a centrally important part of the cognitive movement in instruction and of the state of the art of instruction.