I've read a lot about how we can apply cognitive science principles, particularly relating to memory, to classroom teaching. However, most of this work focuses on schools i.e. K-12 ages.
What, in your view, are the best ways to apply cognitive research to HE/university teaching? Bearing in mind the age of the students, and the fact that they are not novices. Are there certain things that lecturers, tutors, seminar leaders, supervisors etc should be doing more (or less)?
By the introduction and synthesis of belief and faith into the lesson.
Representations are the less explored area in Cognitive Science considering restoring and recalling the process. We remember much better when we know where to use the restored knowledge. Going one step further, (or inner) we remember better if we understand the content of our restored information in memory. A second idea "is incubation". How much energy do we save for the process of incubation before resolving a problem? A third idea is an "insight" considering the process of solving a problem. And finally, cognitive/mental barriers, mental consolidation, and functional habits prevent new knowledge or the transformation of previous knowledge. All the above ideas are based on representations and how they are categorized or organized as verbal, pictorial, or abstract information. We researched the university's future teachers considering the use of some concepts such as elephant, tree, etc and we provided again the same concepts to a new semantic context. The results were really poor on the transition from one context to another considering the new characteristics that the context could gain. I saw that spontaneous categorization is based on knowledge we have already acquired but new categorization is inhibited by mentally established representations.
Maria Koulianou That's very interesting. It sounds quite like issues of transfer, which are often considered to be very poor. If so, I'd agree that this is often overlooked. Educators may think that because the students understand something today, in this lecture/seminar, then it has been learned. But we need to be mindful of whether they can use it in another context, and if it can be the basis for new creative thinking.
Thank you for your reply, Troy! I think that the question of belief is central. Perhaps sometimes both students and staff strongly believe that learning is happening, but this is not always they case. Confidence can be misleading.
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