Cognitive Processing and Learning

 

Each student's cognitive strengths and weaknesses directly impact on teaching and learning, which frequently manifest themselves academically and behaviorally. For example, when a student doesn't attend to a particular subject he will have difficulty remembering what is taught. In addition, because he is not attending to what he should, on some level he's doing something he shouldn't. Unfortunately, many times this inattention involves challenging behavior, which interferes with teaching and learning.

 

However, when teachers, parents and administrators identify a student's cognitive problem the corresponding statements frequently lack the specificity that's needed to address them - "He never pays attention!" "He doesn't remember anything he's taught." These are only a couple of the observations, which reflect on a student's cognitive difficulties that require further analysis to adequately address identified learning problems. As the following graphic indicates, learning requires students to attend to relevant stimuli, perceive it accurately, store it in their short term memory, move it to their long-term memory,  retrieve it and express this knowledge when needed. Therefore, when a student experiences difficulty in learning a particular subject &/or skill in that subject, we need to identify where in this process the problem occurs. Subsequent interventions need to capitalize on cognitive strengths and address cognitive weaknesses.

 

A suspected memory, or learning problem may be attributable to the presentation of the stimuli (subject matter), sensory/perceptual difficulties, deficits in attention, verbal processing, storing &/or retrieving information, expressing retrieved information, etc. In the hyperlinked sections of the following cognitive processing and learning graphic representation, we provide guidance in identifying a student's cognitive strengths &/or weaknesses, which facilitate &/or impede teaching and learning, as well as recommendations that can be integrated into lesson plans, parental activities and/or PRC/504 interventions:

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

References

1. Marzano, R. J. (2003)  What Works in Schools – Translating Research into Action Alexandria, Virginia, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development