Cognitive Principles and Guidelines for Instruction

Vocabulary flashcards covering cognitive memory models, student reasoning structures, educational principles, and instructional methods based on physics education research.

Working Memory

A fast but limited memory component used for problem solving and processing information that can only handle a small number of data blocks with content that fades after a few seconds.

Long-Term Memory

A memory component that holds a huge amount of information—facts, data, and rules—which can be maintained for long periods such as years or decades.

Aplysia

A marine snail with a nervous system of about $20,000$ neurons used as a subject by reductionist neuroscientists to study memory at the level of neuron chemistry.

Chunking

The process of combining knowledge into hierarchies of blocks or units so that complex information can be processed within limited short-term memory capacity.

Compiled Knowledge

Knowledge, whether a fact or process, that is easily available in long-term memory and can easily be used as a single unit in working memory.

Rehearsal

The process of consciously repeating information in working memory to prevent items from fading within a few seconds.

Phonological Loop

The distinct verbal component of working memory.

Visual Sketchpad

The distinct visual component of working memory.

Productive Recall

The active recall process in long-term memory where stored information is brought into working memory to construct a response on the spot rather than matching a pre-existing bit of data.

Schema

A pattern of associated knowledge elements in long-term memory that tends to activate together with a high probability in a variety of contexts.

Mental Model

A term used to describe a schema when it is robust and reasonably coherent.

Physical Model

A mental model organized around the existence, properties, and interactions of physical objects.

Common Naïve Conception

A robust mental model or line of reasoning found in a significant fraction (on the order of $20Memory$ or more) of students, often referred to in literature as a misconception or preconception.

Phenomenological Primitives

Simple, irreducible statements identified by diSessa that describe the basic, ultimate ways people think physical mechanism and real-world systems function.

Facets

Specific reasoning statements (following Minstrell) that result from mapping abstract reasoning primitives into particular variables within a specific physical context.

Piagetian Conservation

The stage of cognitive reasoning where a person recognizes that two opposing effects acting on a variable tend to cancel each other out.

Constructivism Principle

Instructional Principle 1, which states that individuals build their knowledge by making connections to existing knowledge and productively creating responses to received information.

Context Principle

Instructional Principle 2, which states that what people construct depends on the context, including their current mental states.

Change Principle

Instructional Principle 3, which states that learning something matching an existing schema is reasonably easy, but changing a well-established schema substantially is difficult.

Individuality Principle

Instructional Principle 4, which states that because each individual constructs their own mental structures, student populations show significant variation across cognitive variables.

Social Learning Principle

Instructional Principle 5, which states that for most individuals, learning is most effectively carried out via social interactions.

Given-New Principle

A communication principle stating that new information should always be presented within a context that is already familiar to the learner, with that context established first.

Touchstone Problem

A critical problem or example (such as an inclined plane or mass on a spring) that students return to repeatedly to serve as an analog for building complex schemas.

Cognitive Conflict

An instructional strategy using an elicit, confront, resolve, and reflect sequence to help students address and revise robust, inappropriate generalizations.

Bridging

An instructional method proposed by John Clement that connects correct student intuitions to accepted scientific models through a series of intermediate steps.

Anchor

A concrete, familiar situation where students hold strong, correct physical intuitions, serving as the starting point for a bridging lesson.

Cat Television

The process of selecting a limited frame or piece of the real world to view and analyze when solving scientific problems.

Creating the Cartoon

The process of deciding which physical features to pay attention to and which to ignore after restricting a real-world situation to a framed view.