Collaborative learning in project work

 Introduction  

Collaborative learning 

Collaborative learning  is a situation in which two or more people learn or attempt to learn something together. Unlike individual learning, people engaged in collaborative learning capitalize on one another’s resources and skills (asking one another for information, evaluating one another’s ideas, monitoring one another’s work, etc.).  More specifically, collaborative learning is based on the model that knowledge can be created within a population where members actively interact by sharing experiences and take on asymmetry roles. Put differently, collaborative learning refers to methodologies and environments in which learners engage in a common task where each individual depends on and is accountable to each other. These include both face-to-face conversations  and computer discussions (online forums, chat rooms, etc.). Methods for examining collaborative learning processes include conversation analysis and statistical discourse analysis

Project-based learning

John Dewey initially promoted the idea of "learning by doing". In My Pedagogical Creed (1897) Dewey enumerated his beliefs regarding education: "The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these.......I believe, therefore, in the so-called expressive or constructive activities as the centre of correlation."

Project-based learning (PBL) is considered an alternative to paper-based, rote memorization, or to teacher-led classrooms. Proponents of project-based learning cite numerous benefits to the implementation of its strategies in the classroom - including a greater depth of understanding of concepts, broader knowledge base, improved communication and interpersonal/social skills, enhanced leadership skills, increased creativity, and improved writing skills. Another definition of project-based learning includes a type of instruction, where students work together to solve real-world problems in their schools and communities. Successful problem-solving often requires students to draw on lessons from several disciplines and apply them in a very practical way. The promise of seeing a very real impact becomes the motivation for learning.

Problem-based-learning approaches are a close cousin of project learning, in which students use complex problems and cases to actively build their knowledge. Much of the research for this approach comes from medical education. Medical students are given a patient profile, history, and symptoms; groups of students generate a diagnosis, conduct research, and perform diagnostic tests to identify causes of the pain or illness. Meta-analyses of multiple studies have found that medical students in problem-based curricula score higher on clinical problem solving and performance.

Use of problem-based cases in teacher education has helped student teachers apply theory and practical knowledge to school contexts and classroom dilemmas; these cases, for example, have enabled teachers to take alternative perspectives to better appreciate cultural diversity.

Application

Collaboration During  Project Work

In today’s age of information, success hinges on effective application of knowledge to solve problems and create new ideas and information. Working collaboratively during project work prepares students for modern citizenship and work, as most complex communal, social, and workplace problems are solved by groups, not individuals. Having students work together to achieve a goal helps them recognize the value of the contributions and perspectives of all team members and prepares them for life in the 21st century. 

Working in teams on complex problems requires a variety of skills and expertise. As team members identify and explore their own strengths, weaknesses, and skills, they gain an understanding of how combining the various skills of several individuals contributes to greater success than can be achieved by one person alone. To achieve the team goal, students must capitalize on each member’s strengths and varying perspectives. 
Traditionally it has been held that the primary benefits of collaborative work are social: interpersonal communication, trust, and skill in working with others. However, a collaborative and cooperative learning experience can also lead to significant advances in individual understanding.

Collaborative learning entails more than just students working next to each other or even helping one another. As students work to formulate an answer to an open-ended task, they talk and work together. When students exchange ideas and insights, they work through misunderstandings, absorb content more effectively, and help each other achieve true understanding (Cohen & Lotan, 1997)

In collaborative learning, students may still work toward a goal or develop an end product, but the process is characterized by self-responsibility and awareness, respect for others, and contributions from different perspectives. Collaborative projects tend to be student-centered and student-directed.
To be successful in a collaborative environment, students must learn to communicate freely and directly, support their team members, and value each member’s contribution. Making collaborative groups heterogeneous helps students learn these important skills. 

A heterogeneous group includes team members who:

• are different genders
• are different ethnicities
• prefer different subjects in school
• do not know each other very well
• have different “intelligences”
• have varying levels of academic proficiency
• have varying levels of technology proficiency

You can assign specific roles to each student or let the students assign roles within the group. Having team members rotate through the various roles requires them to tackle several different sets of skills and helps them see the value of each role.

		Leader When in this role, students facilitate group success by assessing progress toward the team goal and keeping the team on task and on track. Leaders are responsible for getting all team members to participate and for making sure that all team members understand the concepts and information necessary for the project.
		Recorder When in this role, students collect and share the information discussed during team work, create a written record of work being done, write out solutions, keep copies of each member’s work, and prepare the materials for final project submission.
		Encourager When in this role, students encourage other team members by listening carefully, sharing ideas, making connections, and expressing feelings.
		Checker When in this role, students make sure that each team member understands what is being said, what work needs to be completed, and what the group has determined to be the project goals.
		Timekeeper When in this role, students make sure that the team is on track to meet deadlines and complete the project on time.
		Runner When in this role, students locate the person or thing which will help answer a question or find the resources team members need to complete project work.
		Questioner When in this role, students should challenge the prevailing ideas, encouraging new ideas and helping the team work in new directions.

You will want to further clarify these roles as they pertain to the specific project work your students are completing. You may also find that you want to divide or combine roles depending on the number of members in each team.

To achieve maximum results, a team needs to have someone working from each style at some point during the project-building process. Many times, these roles can be achieved by the same person. The true importance of knowing these work styles is to help all team members value one another’s contributions, as well as help the team overcome obstacles when work styles are conflicting.

Collaboration enhances student learning by modeling authentic work in the 21st century and helping students achieve the large-scale goals of a project in the time allotted.


Benifits

Benefits from small-group learning in a collaborative environment include:

	Celebration of diversity. Students learn to work with all types of people. During small-group interactions, they find many opportunities to reflect upon and reply to the diverse responses fellow learners bring to the questions raised. Small groups also allow students to add their perspectives to an issue based on their cultural differences. This exchange inevitably helps students to better understand other cultures and points of view.
	Acknowledgment of individual differences. When questions are raised, different students will have a variety of responses. Each of these can help the group create a product that reflects a wide range of perspectives and is thus more complete and comprehensive.
	Interpersonal development. Students learn to relate to their peers and other learners as they work together in group enterprises. This can be especially helpful for students who have difficulty with social skills. They can benefit from structured interactions with others.
	Actively involving students in learning. Each member has opportunities to contribute in small groups. Students are apt to take more ownership of their material and to think critically about related issues when they work as a team.
	More opportunities for personal feedback. Because there are more exchanges among students in small groups, your students receive more personal feedback about their ideas and responses. This feedback is often not possible in large-group instruction, in which one or two students exchange ideas and the rest of the class listens.

Disadvantages

• Making members of the group responsible for each other's learning. This can place too great a burden on some students. In mixed-ability groups, the result is often that stronger students are left to teach weaker students and do most of the work.
• Encouraging only lower-level thinking and ignoring the strategies necessary for the inclusion of critical or higher-level thought. In small groups, there is sometimes only enough time to focus on the task at its most basic level

Problems and Solutions

Students are not all involved or on task:	Assign specific tasks to all students.
Groups are too noisy:	Have students move closer together.
Members act out:	Use motivation tactics to hold each person responsible for his actions -- for example, remind students that their participation in the group and their individual work are both being graded.
Work is slow or incomplete:	Work with students to set specific goals each day; have students create a timeline for their project and stick to it.

References

http://www.edutopia.org/inquiry-project-learning-research
http://creativeeducator.tech4learning.com/v03/articles/Collaboration#ixzz3b2jNlQET
http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/coopcollab/credit.html
http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/coopcollab/implementation.html

more read

Cognitive theory of multimedia learning

Mayer's Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning




For hundreds of years verbal messages such as lectures and printed lessons have been the primary means of explaining ideas to learners. Although verbal learning offers a powerful tool, this book explores ways of going beyond the purely verbal. Recent advances in graphics technology and information technology have prompted new efforts to understand the potential of multimedia learning as a means of promoting human understanding. In Multimedia Learning, Second Edition, Richard E. Mayer examines whether people learn more deeply when ideas are expressed in words and pictures rather than in words alone. He reviews 12 principles of instructional design that are based on experimental research studies and grounded in a theory of how people learn from words and pictures. The result is what Mayer calls the cognitive theory of multimedia learning, a theory first developed in the first edition of Multimedia Learning and further developed in The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning

The Science of E-Learning

Mayer (2003) defines a science of e-learning as including three elements: evidence, theory, and applications. According to Mayer, the element of evidence means that there is a base of replicated findings from rigorous and appropriate research studies. The element of theory requires that there must be a research-based theory of how people learn in electronic learning environments, which yields testable predictions. Applications are theory-based principles for how to design electronic learning environments, which themselves can be tested in research studies. As part of his evidence-seeking efforts for the science of e-learning, Mayer (2001, 2003) presents nine major effects which developed out of dozens of studies. These replicated effects are: modality effect, contiguity effect, multimedia effect, personalization effect, coherence effect, redundancy effect, pre-training effect, signaling effect, and the pacing effect. An explanation of each of these nine effects, referred to here as principles (Moreno & Mayer, 2000), follows: 

Mayer’s 10 Principles of Multimedia Instruction

Five Principles for Reducing Extraneous Processing^[3]

1. Coherence Principle: People learn better when extraneous material is excluded from a multimedia lesson.
2. Signalling Principle: People learn better when essential words are highlighted.
3. Redundancy Principle: People learn better from animation with narration than from animation with narration and text except when the onscreen text is short, highlights the key action described in the narration, and is placed next to the portion of the graphic that it describes. In 2008, Mayer revised this principle to include the exception noted here.^[10]
4. Spatial Contiguity Principle: People learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near rather than far from each other on the page or screen.
5. Temporal Contiguity Principle: People learn better when corresponding narration and animation are presented simultaneously rather than successively (i.e. the words are spoken at the same time they are illustrated in the animation).

Three Principles for Managing Essential Processing^[3]

1. Segmenting Principle: People learn better when a narrated animation is presented in learner-paced segments rather than as a continuous presentation.
2. Pretraining Principle: People learn better from a narrated animation when they already know the names and characteristics of essential components.
3. Modality Principle: People learn better from graphics with spoken text rather than graphics with printed text.

Two Principles for Fostering Generative Processing^[3]

1. Multimedia Principle: People learn better from words and pictures than from words alone. This allows people to build connections between their verbal and pictorial models.
2. Personalization Principle: People learn better from a multimedia lesson when words are in conversational style rather than formal style. If people feel as though they are engaged in a conversation, they will make more effort to understand what the other person is saying

Putting it all Together
So now that we have covered an extensive range of vocabulary and concepts in just a few short pages, how do we apply all of it? The first thing is to recognize that I have only introduced most of these topics and that extensive literature is available on each of them. Two excellent introductory books for cognitive guidelines on multimedia instruction are Multi-media Learning by Richard Mayer (2001) and e-Learning and the Science of Instruction by Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard Mayer (2002). Searching for Intelligent Tutoring Systems on the Web will also give you an idea of some of the ways that cognitive theory is being applied to computer-based training. The ACT-R site (http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu) at Carnegie Mellon is also an interesting place to visit, plus they have an extensive library of freely downloadable publications related to ACT-R. My own experience in applying cognitive theory to multimedia education has been that my team has been creating online tutorials for several years now. Our mission is to provide training to staff and faculty on computer applications that are supported by the university’s Information Technology Services. This includes desktop software, the financial system, and the student-management system. But we are not immune to my own criticism. We have often violated many of the principles discussed in this paper and, in some cases, we continue to violate a few. It is a drawn out process to change a group’s practices when they have taken several years to form. The slowness of change can often also be attributed to the new skills or technologies that have to be acquired. The original search for better solutions came about because I suspected that many of the current educational technology theories were based on not much more than intuition or ivory tower theory that was not really grounded in any scientific method. While they sounded good, I was spending serious money from my budget and I wanted to be convinced, and more importantly I wanted to convince our stakeholders, that our efforts at instructional design were appropriate and really making a difference. As my team’s instructional technology and development skills improved, I began to wonder if we couldn’t improve our instructional delivery techniques by basing them in empirically tested theory. It was at this time that we began to look for a set of guidelines to make our instruction more effective and to provide a good return on investment to the university. It was at this point that we discovered and began to implement cognitive theory in our instructional design, specifically the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (Mayer, 2001, 2003). The team’s e-learning developers and I are currently focused on creating a rapid development process for online Flash-based animated tutorials. To create these tutorials, we first use Macromedia Captivate to capture our instruction on the computer and then we modify them directly in Macromedia Flash MX 2004. We had originally produced most of our videos with live instructor narration. They generally seem to do the job and seemed to follow the principles in the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning. Because live narration was very expensive and time consuming, however, we began to take the shortcut of creating courses which had video instruction, but used captions on the screen rather than narration. From our perspective, this was fine and an effective way to teach our end-users how to use new computer applications. However, once we discovered cognitive theory, the modality effect in particular, it became clear that this was probably not a very effective way to instruct. According to the modality principle, computer animation with narration produces better transfer than combining animation with on-screen text. This is because you need to try to use both working memory channels (visual and auditory) rather than overloading the visual channel with on-screen text and animation, while leaving the auditory channel practically unused. Some might point out that read text is actually converted into inner speech and held in auditory working memory, but then you could still argue that this is a violation of Sweller et al.’s (1998) split-attention effect which states that you should not design instruction that divides the learner’s attention between two tasks: studying the animation and reading the text. Because we did not have the time or resources to personally narrate every video, we eventually solved this problem by using a high-end computerized voice that transformed the captioned text into narration for each tutorial. This technology allows us to narrate in one or two days what used to take several days or even weeks to accomplish with a human instructor. One additional thing that I would eventually like to investigate is whether there is a difference in performance and transfer between recorded human narration and the slightly unnatural sound of computerized narration. Adding the computerized narration presented a new problem, however, that we are still working on at the time of this writing. Using Flash, we were able to add a button that toggles the narration on and off so that those who still prefer to read the captions in silence can do so, as well as doing something else such as listening to music or not disturbing their neighbors. But if the user wants to listen to the narration, we currently have not been able to hide the captions in a manner that we deem satisfactory for our end users. Once again, common sense might dictate that it is not that big of a deal to leave the captions up while the narration is playing, but according to the redundancy principle, this can overload the visual working memory and prevent learning. Because of this, our team has vowed to resolve this issue and will have a working solution with 100% performance soon. The end goal will be to have video tutorials in which the learner can toggle both the captions and voice on or off during the playing of the tutorial. It may have occurred to some readers that an apparent solution might be to simply not include the captions, but then the videos would not be accessible to the hearing impaired, which is an important consideration and a violation of Section 508 if you are creating the tutorials for a university or government organization in the United States. We had also seen other computer-based training where either an animated figure or a video of a person would “lecture” to the learner while text or animation appeared on the screen. My team had considered doing this because we had the capability to do it and it seemed like a good idea. We thought it would add sophistication and another dimension to the tutorials. But the coherence principle recommends avoiding using extraneous material such as irrelevant video or animations, which is what a talking head would be. This is also related to the split-attention effect from Cognitive Load Theory and is something we definitely should avoid. So the team scrapped the idea of including talking figures in our tutorials. We try to make or narrations as conversational in style as possible, (although this is sometimes difficult with computerized narration) and have tried to avoid using stiff third person narration. This follows the personalization principle which states that better transfer occurs when narration is conducted in a conversational first or second person style. The pacing principle states that learners should be able to control the speed and pauses in the multimedia lesson. We have accomplished this to a certain extent by including a control bar that Captivate generates when the movie is created. The control bar allows the learner to pause, rewind, and fast-forward the video. One additional feature that our clients have asked for is the ability to speed up or slow down the video, which we still haven’t accomplished yet. Controlling the speed of multimedia is one of the features called for in the pacing principle, however, and we won’t be satisfied until we have added that critical feature for our end-users. The other two principles that I haven’t discussed in this section, the pre-training principle and the signaling principle, are critical factors that I also want to include in our instructional planning, but that we currently seem to be doing more by accident than by design. They are equally important, though, and I plan to emphasize them with the team as soon as we have solved some of the other issues mentioned above. I also haven’t found a good way to promote self-explaining behaviors in this type of training yet, but it is an area that I plan to investigate as we solve some of the other issues. 


References:
http://inform.nu/Articles/Vol8/v8p263-279Sorden34.pdf http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521735351/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0521735351&linkCode=as2&tag=learningthe
http://etec.ctlt.ubc.ca/510wiki/Cognitive_Theory_of_Multimedia_Learning#Mayer.E2.80.99s_10_Principles_of_Multimedia_Instruction
http://www.google.lk/imgres?imgurl=http://image.slidesharecdn.com/citmedit8150-tpv5b-091201090721-phpapp02/95/cognitive-theory-of-multimedia-learning-8-728.jpg%253Fcb%253

HUMAN INFORMATION COGNITIVE THEORY

What is cognitive learning?

Not all cases of learning can easily be captured by classical and operant conditioning. Learning would be extremely inefficient if we had to rely completely on conditioning for all our learning. Human beings can learn efficiently by observation, taking instruction, and imitating the behavior of others.

"Cognitive learning is the result of listening, watching, touching or experiencing."

Cognitive learning is defined as the acquisition of knowledge and skill by mental or cognitive processes — ;the procedures we have for manipulating information 'in our heads.' Cognitive processes include creating mental representations of physical objects and events, and other forms of information processing.

Cognitive learning is a powerful mechanism that provides the means of knowledge, and goes well beyond simple imitation of others. Conditioning can never explain what you are learning from reading our web-site. This learning illustrates the importance of cognitive learning.

How do we learn cognitively?

In cognitive learning, the individual learns by listening, watching, touching, reading, or experiencing and then processing and remembering the information. Cognitive learning might seem to be passive learning, because there is no motor movement. However, the learner is quite active, in a cognitive way, in processing and remembering newly incoming information. 
Cognitive learning enables us to create and transmit a complex culture that includes symbols, values, beliefs and norms. Because cognitive activity is involved in many aspects of human behavior, it might seem that cognitive learning only takes place in human beings. However, many different species of animals are capable of observational learning. For example, a monkey in the zoo sometimes imitates human visitors or other monkeys. Nevertheless, most information about cognitive learning is obtained from studies on human beings.

Information Processing theory:

theoretical perspective that focuses on the specific ways in which people mentally acquire, interpret and remember information and how such processes change over the course of development.

• Key ideas:
  • Input from the environment provides the raw material for learning and memory.
  • In addition to a sensory register, human memory includes two other storage mechanisms: working memory and long-term memory.
    • Working memory: component of memory that enables people to actively think about and process a small amount of information.
    • Long–term memory: component of memory that holds knowledge and skills for a relatively long period of time.
  • Attention is essential to the learning process.
  • A variety of cognitive processes are involved in moving information from working memory to long-term memory.
  • People control how they process information.
    • The central executive is the component of the human information processing system that oversees the flow of information throughout the system.
  • Cognitive development involves gradual changes in various components of the information processing system.

• Sensation and Perception
  • Most sensory and perceptual development occurs in infancy.
  • Some sensory and perceptual capabilities are present at birth. Other emerge within the first few weeks or months of life.
  • Infants show consistent preferences for certain types of stimuli, especially social ones.
  • Perceptual development is the result of both biological maturation and experience.
• Attention
  • Children’s attention is affected by stimulus characteristics and, later, also by familiarity.
  • With age, distractibility decreases and sustained attention increases.
  • Attention becomes increasingly purposeful.
    • Anticipation in infancy – for learning in preschoolers
• Working Memory and the Central Executive
  • These are largely responsible for what children pay attention to, how they think about the information, and how well they remember it.
  • Processing speed increases.
    • Children eventually develop automatization- process of becoming able to respond quickly and efficiently while mentally processing or physically performing certain tasks.
  • The capacity of working memory increases with age.
  • The central executive increasingly takes charge of cognitive processes.
• Long-Term Memory
  • The capacity to remember information in long-term memory appears very early and improves with age.
  • Children increasingly have conscious awareness of past events.
    • Children typically have little if any conscious recall of things that happened during their first two years- infantile amnesia
  • The amount of knowledge stored in long-term memory increases many times over.
  • Children’s knowledge about the world becomes increasingly integrated.
    • Children and adults alike sometimes organize their knowledge into schemas and scripts.
      • Schemas: tightly integrated set of ideas about a specific object or situation.
      • Script: schema that involves a predictable sequence of events related to a common activity.
    • Schemas and scripts increase in number and complexity as children grow older.
• Thinking and Reasoning
  • Thought increasingly makes use of symbols- mental entity that represents an external object or event, typically without reflecting its perceptual and behavioral qualities.
  • Logical thinking abilities improve with age.
  • Gestures sometimes foreshadow the emergence of more sophisticated thinking and reasoning.
• FOR THE TEACHER: Facilitating Basic Cognitive Processes
  • Provide a variety of sensory experiences for infants and young children.
  • Help children pay attention to things that are important for them to learn and remember.
  • Relate new information to children’s existing knowledge.
  • Remember that children can think about only a small amount of information at any one time.
  • When determining what children know or are ready to learn, consider not only what they say but also what they do.
  • Give children ongoing practice in using basic information and skills.

Metacognition and Cognitive Strategies

• Metacognition is knowledge and beliefs about one’s own cognitive processes, as well as efforts to regulate those cognitive processes to maximize learning and memory.
• Cognitive strategies are the specific mental processes that people intentionally use to acquire or manipulate information.
• Learning Strategies
  • Rehearsal
    • Attempt to learn and remember information by repeating it over and over.
  • Organization
    • Process of identifying interrelationships among pieces of information as a way of learning them more effectively.
  • Elaboration
    • Process of using prior knowledge to embellish on new information and thereby learn it more effectively.
• Problem Solving Strategies
  • By the time children are a year old, they have some ability to think about and solve problems. As they get older, their problem solving strategies become increasingly mental rather than behavioral.
  • From an information processing perspective, development of strategies is slow and increases in frequency and effectiveness over a lengthy period, up to months or years.
    • The rise and fall of strategies is similar to overlapping waves.
• Metacognitive Awareness
  • Metacognitive awareness is the extent to which one is able to reflect on the nature of one’s own thinking processes.
• Self-Regulated Learning
  • As children and adolescents gain awareness of their learning nf memory processes, they become more capable of self-regulated learning-directing and controlling one’s own cognitive processes in order to learn successfully.
    • Ex: setting learning goals, planning study time, motivating and persisting.
  • One especially important aspect of self-regulated learning iscomprehension monitoring- process of checking oneself to make sure one understands what is being studied.
• Epistemological Beliefs
  • Beliefs regarding the nature of knowledge and knowledge acquisition
• FOR THE TEACHER: Promoting Metacognitive and Strategic Development
  • Engage children in discussions about the mind.
  • Model and teach effective cognitive strategies.
  • Expect and encourage increasingly independent learning over time.
  • Provide opportunities for children to evaluate their own learning, and help them develop mechanisms for doing so effectively.
  • Promote more sophisticated epistemological beliefs.

Adding a Sociocultural Element to Information Processing Theory

• With the social nature of human beings in mind, some theorists have suggested that a combination of information processing and sociocultural perspectives provides a better explanation of how cognitive development occurs than either.
• Intersubjectivity
  • Awareness of shares perceptions and understandings that provide the foundation for social interaction.
    • Begins around 2 months of age
  • Joint attention
    • Phenomenon in which two people simultaneously focus on the same object or event, monitor each other’s attention, and coordinate their responses.
    • Around 9-10 months of age, intersubjectivity takes the form of joint attention.
  • Social referencing
    • Looking at someone else for clues about how to respond to a particular object or event.
    • Early in the second year.
• Enhancing Information Processing through Social Interaction
  • Regularly engage infants in social exchange.
  • Talk with children about their experiences.
  • Involve children and adolescents in joint activities that require new strategies.

Chidlren’s Construction of Theories

• Theory theory: theoretical perspective proposing that children construct increasingly integrated and complex understandings of physical and mental phenomena.
• Facilitating Children’s Theory Construction
  • Encourage and answer children’s why and how questions.
  • When teaching a new topic, determine what children already know and believe about it.
  • When children have misconceptions about a topic, work actively to help them acquire more accurate understandings.
    • Help youngsters undergo conceptual change– revision of one’s knowledge and understanding of a topic in response to new information about the topic.

Exceptionalities in Information Processing

• Learning Disabilities: significant deficit in one or more cognitive processes, to the point where special educational services are required.
• Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): Disability characterized by inattention, by hyperactivity and impulse behavior, or by all of these characteristics.
• Working with children who have information processing difficulties:
  • Examine children’s work for clues about specific processing difficulties.
  • Help children keep their attention on the task at hand.
  • Teach strategies for controlling hyperactivity and impulsivity.
  • Provide extra scaffolding for studying, doing homework, and completing other learning tasks.
  • Teach social skills.

Sensory memory (STSS). Sensory memory is affiliated with the transduction of energy (change from one energy from to another). The environment makes available a variety of sources of information (light, sound, smell, heat, cold, etc.), but the brain only understands electrical energy. The body has special sensory receptor cells that transduce (change from one form of energy to another) this external energy to something the brain can understand. In the process of transduction, a memory is created. This memory is very short (less than 1/2 second for vision; about 3 seconds for hearing).
It is absolutely critical that the learner attend to the information at this initial stage in order to transfer it to the next one. There are two major concepts for getting information into STM:

First, individuals are more likely to pay attention to a stimulus if it has an interesting feature. We are more likely to get an orienting response if this is present.
Second, individuals are more likely to pay attention if the stimulus activates a known pattern. To the extent we have students call to mind relevant prior learning before we begin our presentations, we can take advantage of this principle.

Short-term memory (STM). Short-term memory is also called working memory and relates to what we are thinking about at any given moment in time. In Freudian terms, this is conscious memory. It is created by our paying attention to an external stimulus, an internal thought, or both. It will initially last somewhere around 15 to 20 seconds unless it is repeated (called maintenance rehearsal) at which point it may be available for up to 20 minutes. The hypothalamus is a brain structure thought to be involved in this shallow processing of information. The frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex is the structure associated with working memory. For example, you are processing the words you read on the screen in your frontal lobes. However, if I ask, "What is your telephone number?" your brain immediately calls that from long-term memory and replaces what was previously there.
Another major limit on information processing in STM is in terms of the number of units that can be processed an any one time. Miller (1956) gave the number as 7 + 2, but more recent research suggests the number may be more like 5 + 2 for most things we are trying to remember. Because of the variability in how much individuals can work with (for some it may be three, for others seven) it is necessary to point out important information. If some students can only process three units of information at a time, let us make certain it is the most important three.
There are two major concepts for retaining information in STM: organization and repetition. There are four major types of organization that are most often used in instructional design:

• Component (part/whole)--classification by category or concept (e.g., the components of the teaching/learning model);
• Sequential -- chronological; cause/effect; building to climax (e.g., baking a cake, reporting on a research study);
• Relevance -- central unifying idea or criteria (e.g., most important principles of learning for boys and girls, appropriate management strategies for middle school and high school students);
• Transitional (connective) -- relational words or phrases used to indicate qualitative change over time (e.g., stages in Piaget's theory of cognitive development or Erikson's stages of socioemotional development)

A related issue to organization is the concept of chunking or grouping pieces of data into units. For example, the letters "b d e" constitute three units of information while the word "bed" represents one unit even though it is composed of the same number of letters. Chunking is a major technique for getting and keeping information in short-term memory; it is also a type of elaboration that will help get information into long-term memory.
Repetition or rote rehearsal is a technique we all use to try to "learn" something. However, in order to be effective this must be done after forgetting begins. Researchers advise that the learner should not repeat immediately the content (or skill), but wait a few minutes and then repeat. For the most part, simply memorizing something does not lead to learning (i.e., relatively permanent change). We all have anecdotal evidence that we can remember something we memorized (a poem for example), but just think about all the material we tried to learn this way and the little we are able to remember after six months or a year.

Long-term memory (LTM). Long-term memory is also called preconscious and unconscious memory in Freudian terms. Preconscious means that the information is relatively easily recalled (although it may take several minutes or even hours) while unconscious refers to data that is not available during normal consciousness. It is preconscious memory that is the focus of cognitive psychology as it relates to long-term memory. The levels-of-processing theory, however, has provided some research that attests to the fact that we "know" more than we can easily recall. The two processes most likely to move information into long-term memory are elaboration and distributed practice (referred to as periodic review in thedirect instruction model).

There are several examples of elaboration that are commonly used in the teaching/learning process:

• imaging -- creating a mental picture;
• method of loci (locations)--ideas or things to be remembered are connected to objects located in a familiar location;
• pegword method (number, rhyming schemes)--ideas or things to be remembered are connected to specific words (e.g., one-bun, two-shoe, three-tree, etc.)
• Rhyming (songs, phrases)--information to be remembered is arranged in a rhyme (e.g., 30 days hath September, April, June, and November, etc.)
• Initial letter--the first letter of each word in a list is used to make a sentence (the sillier, the better).

USING THE INFORMATION PROCESSING APPROACH IN THE CLASSROOM
Principle	Example
1. Gain the students' attention.	Use cues to signal when you are ready to begin. Move around the room and use voice inflections.
2. Bring to mind relevant prior learning.	Review previous day's lesson. Have a discussion about previously covered content.
3. Point out important information.	Provide handouts. Write on the board or use transparencies.
4. Present information in an organized manner.	Show a logical sequence to concepts and skills. Go from simple to complex when presenting new material.
5. Show students how to categorize (chunk) related information.	Present information in categories. Teach inductive reasoning.
6. Provide opportunities for students to elaborate on new information.	Connect new information to something already known. Look for similarities and differences among concepts.
7. Show students how to use coding when memorizing lists.	Make up silly sentence with first letter of each word in the list. Use mental imagery techniques such as the keyword method.
8. Provide for repetition of learning.	State important principles several times in different ways during presentation of information (STM). Have items on each day's lesson from previous lesson (LTM). Schedule periodic reviews of previously learned concepts and skills (LTM).
9. Provide opportunities for overlearning of fundamental concepts and skills.	Use daily drills for arithmetic facts. Play form of trivial pursuit with content related to class.

References:

http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/cognition/infoproc.html
https://kkchilddevelopment.wordpress.com/child-development-2/cognitive-development-2/

http://etec51264b2010cip.pbworks.com/w/page/30354214/Conceptual%20Overview%20of%20Cognitive%20Theories