1. Cognitive theories of learning:
Piaget, Bruner, Gagne, Ausubel
•By the end of this lesson you must be able to explain
the concept of learning from the Cognitive theories
perspectives
•Identify the factors that play a role in the learning
process according to cognitive theories
•Be able to explain the Cognitive basic concepts and
principles of learning .
•Explain how you would use them to facilitate
teaching-learning among your primary school learners

2. Cognitive definition of learning
•Learning is a change in cognitive structure
•The change that is visible in our behaviour is influenced not
by stimuli or reinforcement as claimed by behaviourism
Our thoughts, reasoning, imaginations, perception, interest and
value are also important internal factors that play a role in
the process of learning. We act out of reasoning.
Cognitive theories emphasize the role of the mind in the
organization, analysis, mental
restructuring, interpretation, transformation of information
into a meaningful experience. We can measure learning by
measuring the thinking of our learners. Our behaviours are a
result of how we think
Perceiving, thinking, imagining and remembering are
cognitive mode of learning. Learning through insight

3. • While Behaviourism emphasise the role of the
teacher as a director of instruction, the one
who selects appropriate stimuli and
reinforcement, Cognitive theories see learners
as active participants who should manage
their own learning through
attending, processing, rehearsing, storing, retr
ieving what they have acquired.
• Cognitive theories also emphasise the role of
past experience in the interpretation of new
experience

4. Jean Piaget
Children understand and interpret their world differently
from that of adult.
Their capacity to organise, analyse and interpret
information differ from age and stages of their
development. The thinking and reasoning of children at
sensory motor stage and preoperational stage lack
logic as compared to those at concrete operational and
formal operational stage.
Piaget advocate action based learning where children
manipulate objects. Pupils must be encouraged to
manipulate and explore a large number of materials
and objects
Learning as a continuous process of
assimilation, accommodation and equilibration

5. The role of perception in learning/ IPM model
Principles of organizing our experiences
This is the tendency of human mind to impose
structure to the information that comes
through our senses. We might be looking at
the same information but seeing interpreting
it differently. Cognitive theories stress the role
of thinking process in learning process. We
filter selectively what we want to learn. The
mind identify feature, select, reject, analyse
and store

6. Factors that interfere with our perception
• Selective attention
Teachers need to use different strategies to arouse
and direct the attention of their learners. Using a
variety of teaching methods, teaching and
learning aids, posing
question, emphasis, underline, bold, silence, voic
e change
The age of the learner and the amount of material
to be learned
• Sensory defect
• Overhaste
• Premature closure
• motivation

7. Multi-store model/ Three port processing model
Sensory Register
Receptors receive information from the environment
Attention and recognition is needed to process received
information.
Process such as encoding, decoding
Attending to the feature of the learning materials.
What happen to the information we have not attended to?
Different people have different level of attention.
During introduction the purpose is to make learners interested and
pay full attention to what is going to happen.
• short term memory
Has a limited capacity to keep information for 30 minutes
minimum.
Can be strengthened through rehearsals , elaboration and practice.
Unless this information is chunked and send to the long term
memory if it has to last longer

8. • Long term memory
Has a large unlimited capacity to keep huge
amount of information for a longer period.
It keeps three categories of memories
a) Episodic memories- our memories of times or
places
b) Semantic memories- meanings of ideas, facts and
concept
c) Procedural memories: steps used in a task or
learning of a particular skill

9. Jerome Bruner
Three modes of learning
Enactive mode: Touching, tasting, moving and
grasping objects. Learning result from this physical
interactions with objects. Early learning is motoric
and action based.
• Iconic Mode: Concepts and principles can be
demonstrated physically or through pictures and
diagrams, slides, etc.
• Symbolic mode: language become the main
vehicle to acquire a wide variety of experiences

10. • Bruner stresses on Discovery learning.
Children to be allowed to discover things
independently. Teachers should allow children
opportunity to manipulate objects.
Educational tours, the use of visuals help
children to form images. At the later stage
children will benefit from verbal learning.
• Episodes of learning involves
acquisition, transformation and Evaluation.
Teachers should motivate learners to learn by
using different modes of learning in the
lessons

11. David Ausubel
Receptive learning/ Verbal learning/Sub-sumption
The presence of cognitive structures facilitates
learning. Rote learning should be discouraged
through relating the new information to the
existing knowledge of the learners. The language
and communication should be very well
organized to facilitate meaningful learning.
Receptive learning involves presentation of factual
information. Receptive learning do not
necessarily need to be passive reception. When
new learning is connected to what learners
already know it is likely to be retained and
applied.

12. • Existing mental structure is used to learn new ideas
• Teachers should use advanced organiser when
presenting a new topic to their learners. The basic
concepts that would enable learners to understand the
rest of the topic should be covered first to enable the
learners to understand the rest of the lesson. Expose
your learners first to the central ideas before you do
them in much more details- general overview of the
topic. Use mediators that enable learners to make
connections. Use chunking and BODMAS to assist
learners to remember. Teach learners to identify main
ideas from the topics and write under them the
supporting. These strategies are called Expository
teaching that aids the Mnemonic devices to search
and locate information later.

13. • Concepts mapping, listing the key concepts in
the topic. All these strategies can be used to
help learners organise the information.
What is rote learning
Fixing information in your memory without
understanding its meaning. Information that
was not properly organised to allow the
learners to make connections with their
existing knowledge
Rote learning is influenced by the following
factors;

14. • Practice effect
Revising, repeating, rehearsing what you
learned by rote can later improve your
understanding
Transfer effect. Connecting previous knowledge
to new lesson help learners to learn with
understanding.
Proactive interference effect.
A learner who have learned using the old
version of Microsoft word may find learning of
the new version difficult when trying to apply
the knowledge of other icons.

15. Serial position effect
How the alignment of the main ideas and basic
concepts are organised throughout the
presentation will reduce rote learning
Context effect
Putting one’s lesson in a context will improve
rote learning
Level effect
Presentation of information should be done at
different levels/ iconic, enactive, symbolic.

16. Retro active interference
Learning of the new material disrupt what one
has learned previously
Organisational effect
Rote learning improve when the material is
organised from simple to complex
Serial position effect
This is when the main points and concepts are
Positioned very well in the presentation to have
a good flow of ideas.

17. What is meaningful verbal learning
Successful abstraction and comprehension of
main ideas of the lesson learned
Factors influencing meaningful verbal learning
Providing learners with learning objectives
indicate the levels at which you want them to
do their abstraction.
Selectively note taking, ability to spot and jot
down key issues from the lesson
Teachers organisation of the material to be
learned

18. Instruction presented verbally, teacher
emphasize the main points combining with
demonstration, visuals, mediators can
positively affect meaningful learning.
Learners who take notes while they learn better
as compared to learners who read silently
while trying to use photographic memory on
what they read.
Cognitive theories advices teachers to use the
following teaching strategies in their
presentation

19. • Advanced organisers
• Structured overviews
• Mediators
• Mnemonic devices
• Chunking. Elaborations
• Hierarchical retrieval systems
• Concept Mapping

20. Gagne
Learning is influenced by factors inside the learner as
well as outside the learners. Anger, pleasure, anxiety
and curiosity are perceived as natural motives that
need to be present in a learner to urge him to learn.
Basic skills should be learned first before the high level
skills
There are eight types of learning from the simple to the
complex
a) Signal learning
Hearing your father’s car approaching you have learned
to run to open the gate.

21. b) Stimulus-Response learning
Anything that the teacher do to facilitate
learners to select the correct response will
make learning easier. Presenting learners with
objects that have common features is an
example of stimulus-response learning. This
would also facilitate the stimulus
discrimination of objects
c) Chaining
Structuring of related skills to be acquired
together is called chaining

22. d) Verbal association
Presenting objects and their names helps learners to
form the association between the word and the
object. Teaching vocabularies to young learners can
be done this way.
e) Discrimination Learning
Presenting object to help learners to compare and
contrast assist the learners to discriminate between
their attributes. The learning of
shapes, sizes, colours, textures, letters can be an
example.
Learning become more complex as we proceed from
the former types of learning to other forms of
learning.

23. f) Concept learning
• A number of experiences is needed to form up
concepts. Children who had limited exposure to
objects and situation will experience difficulties
understanding certain abstract words. It is the
understanding of concepts that would facilitate
the learning of facts, ideas, principles and
formulas.
• Children who brought a rich of sensory
experience, having seen many examples, exposed
to grouping and classification skills will be able to
abstract and conceptualise correctly using the
language. “ A picture is worth ten thousand
words.” ( Behr:1975)

24. g) Rule Learning
To understand this rule, Heavy objects float over the
water while light objects sink.
The learner should first understand the meaning of
basic concepts bolded if he is to transform this into
practice.
Factors inside the learner such as: prior
learning, language development, cognitive style of
organising and transforming, attitude and motivation
of the learner will influence learning. Situational
factors as to how teaching/ learning activities are
structured, selected teaching approaches, materials
will also do its parts

25. h) Problem solving learning
• When the teacher create a situation for
learners to apply learned
concepts, ideas, rules to related situations.

26. Gestalt view of learning
Wolfgang Kohler, Kurt Kafka, Max Wetheimer, Karl
Dunker
• They emphasize the role of perception, the perceiver in the
learning process
• learning is a process of restructuring and reorganizing
learning experiences.
• It involves the arrangement of learning experiences in a
meaningful whole. The whole is greater then the parts and
the parts derive meaning from the whole.
• Learners should be assisted to perceive, process, store and
retrieve all the information
• Discovery of meaning creates learning and transfer to other
related situation.
• The whole emerge first before the parts
• Learning is a result of problem solving

27. • What is taught should be organized in a certain
pattern or sequence
• Learning is a process of seeing meaningful
relationships in a situation
• Reorganisation and restructuring of essential
elements of problems to be solved help learners
to form new cognitive structures
• Cognitive tension occurs when we are faced by
something disorganised and we are unable to
solve it. Anger and frustration follows when we
do not understand.
• Insight / A-ha experience breaks through when
we pieces of information's presented to us are
structured and related to each other.

28. Gestalt scholars established the following laws of organising
information
Figure –ground perception
• This organising tendency to spot and pick up
main features from the situation. Our ability to
short out relevant from irrelevant details. When
you spot a picture from the wall, a badge on a
blazer, an aeroplane against the sky or a song
against the beats. Items underlined are the
figures and the remaining are the background.
Law of Pragnanza/ similarities
The tendency to perceive objects that are similar as
belong together (similarities)

29. Law of Proximity: The tendency to group objects
that are closer to one another than those that
are far apart from one another.
Law of Continuity: Things that form a straight line
tend to be perceived together compared to
things which form curves
Form consistency: The form and size of a moving
object remain the same no matter .
Law of closure: Our brains are able to fill in the
gaps and complete the missing part of the
information.
Too many items in the picture, too much
details, failure to scan for details, careless
arrangement leads to illusions and cognitive
conflicts

30. • Our perception is influenced by our past
experiences, attention, attitudes, interest
One who does not a have a past experience of a
donkey and a mule will perceive them as the
same. Our previous knowledge helps us to
make sense of new information ( Schema
theory)
Learners who are not interested in what they
perceive are not ready to look for details.
They tend to close themselves off from the
incoming information

31. Kurt Levin's view: Field theory
• Learning is a dynamic activity influenced by the
learners’ intrinsic motivation. (Van Parreren’s
theory)
• A learner set some cognitive goals that he
anticipate to achieve.
• Learning is also influenced by the valence quality
of the learning material. Its
attractiveness, orderliness, vividness and so forth.
• Every learner operates in his own life space when
he learn. Every learner perceive, organize and
interpret information differently and form his
points of view. Exposure to same information
would not lead to the same response.