Cognitive science is the study of the human mind. It is difficult to study and teach, and because it doesn’t have fixed laws like Newton’s Laws of Motion, is open to interpretation. But there are principles that can be utilised to design more rewarding educational experiences for young people in schools (Bermúdez, 2010).
To utilise our understanding of cognitive science to inform our teaching, we have to have an understanding of the following concepts (Caviglioli, 2019):
1. Perception
2. Attention
3. Working Memory (WM)
4. Long Term Memory (LTM)
5. Schema.
This article provides a very brief overview of each of these.
Perception — We interpret stimuli in different ways often based upon our prior experiences. This sometimes means that the message sent is not always the message received, which is why checking understanding is such an important tool of the teacher.
Attention — This has been described as the ‘Holy Grail for teachers’ (Beard, 2017). It is a limit
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