COGNITIVE APPRENTICESHIP

COGNITIVE APPRENTICESHIP
Presentation

Reference:- Educational Psychology- John W Santole

edute

Developmental psychologist Barabara Rogofff (1990) first explained the term Cognitive Apprenticeship. This model is supported by Albert Bandura's (1997) theory of modeling, which posits that in order for modeling to be successful, the learner must be attentive, must have access to and retain the information presented, must be motivated to learn, and must be able to accurately reproduce the desired skill. In cognitive apprenticeships, the activity being taught is modeled in real-world situations.

Definition:- An expert stretches and supports a novice’s understanding of and use of culture’s skill

All apprenticeship mainly focus on 2 aspects

1)      Activity in Learning

2)      Situational learning

Example:- Traditional apprenticeships, in which the apprentice learns a trade such as tailoring or woodworking by working under a master teacher

Similarly cognitive apprenticeships allow the master to model behaviors in a real-world context with cognitive modeling

Features of Cognitive apprenticeship:

·         Teachers acts as Model for students

·         Teachers (or skilled peers) support students effort as doing the task

·         Encourage students to continue their work independently

A study conducted in America (Heath 1989) stressed the importance of cognitive apprenticeship. Rich or Middle class parents engage their children in cognitive apprenticeship by reading picture books etc with their children before Kinder Garten but poor parents not do so. This strategy enhances learning ability of the former children to a great extent.

Key Aspects of Cognitive Apprenticeship:

Experts evaluate when the learner is ready to take a new step. This timing help  both the expert and the learner.

·         For the Expert it helps to stop the making direction to students

·         For learner it helps to guess when expert stop thinking and when the learner has to take the responsibility  to continue the task

Experts give the students appropriate opportunities to respond.

·         At moments when students passed up opportunities to respond the expert noticed what the student were doing.

·         When student passed 2 or 3 opportunities expert would continue with further explanations.

·         If no evidence of understanding appeared deny that further explanations, experts repeated or reformulated what they were saying

·         Expert uses collaborative completion of statements as a way to find out what the student understood.

·         A common strategy employed by the expert was to use a hint question to get  the student  unstuck

·         Thus, experts often attempts to evaluate students level of understanding by observing the looks  on their faces and how they respond to questions

·          This strategy is important  in class room

·          Student learning benefited by this

·         scaffolding and guided participation is used to help the student learn

·         There are six teaching methods rooted in cognitive apprenticeship theory

·         The first three (modeling, coaching, scaffolding) are at the core of cognitive apprenticeship and help with cognitive and metacognitive development. The next two (articulation and reflection) are designed to help novices with awareness of problem-solving strategies and execution similar to that of an expert. The final step (exploration) intends to guide the novice towards independence and the ability to solve and identify problems within the domain on their own.

·         Modelling is when an expert, usually a teacher, within the cognitive domain or subject area demonstrates a task explicitly so that novices, usually a student, can experience and build a conceptual model of the task at hand. For example, a math teacher might write out explicit steps and work through a problem aloud, demonstrating her heuristics and procedural knowledge.

·         Coaching involves observing novice task performance and offering feedback and hints to sculpt the novice's performance to that of an expert's. The expert oversees the novice's tasks and may structure the task accordingly to assist in the novice's development.

·         Instructional scaffolding is the act of putting into place strategies and methods to support the student's learning. These supports can be teaching manipulatives, activities, and group work. The teacher may have to execute parts of the task that the student is not yet able to do. This requires the teacher to have the skill to analyze and assess student abilities in the moment.

·         Articulation includes "any method of getting students to articulate their knowledge, reasoning, or problem-solving process in a domain" Three types of articulation are inquiry teaching, thinking aloud, and critical student role. Through inquiry teaching teachers ask students a series of questions that allows them to refine and restate their learned knowledge and to form explicit conceptual models. Thinking aloud requires students to articulate their thoughts while solving problems. Students assuming a critical role monitor others in cooperative activities and draw conclusions based on the problem-solving activities. Articulation is described as consisting of two aspects: separating component knowledge and skills to learn them more effectively and, more common verbalizing or demonstrating knowledge and thinking processes in order to expose and clarify them.

·         Reflection allows students to compare their own problem-solving processes with those of an expert, another student, and ultimately, an internal cognitive model of expertise A technique for reflection could be to examine the past performances of both expert and novice and to highlight similarities and differences. The goal of reflection is for students to look back and analyze their performances with a desire for understanding and improvement towards the behavior of an expert.

·         Exploration involves giving students room to problem solve on their own and teaching student’s exploration strategies. The former requires the teacher to slowly withdraw the use of supports and scaffolds not only in problem solving methods, but problem setting methods as well. The latter requires the teacher to show students how to explore, research, and develop hypotheses. Exploration allows the student to frame interesting problems within the domain for themselves and then take the initiative to solve these problems.