Chapter 2 live long learning
Listening 1
The best way to learn
Welcome in first class of Educational psychology
Work Benjamin bloom create a taxonomy on cognitive objective.
Lets understand the terms. The taxonomy is a way to classified and organize characteristic about something In biology for instance taxonomy is group and categorise the plant and animals based on similarities and differences and relationships. In psychology and most especially in educational psychology. Blooms interest is with cognitive and cognition both of it refer how we learn & mental processes how we perceive the word and understanding and remembering it.
In 1950’s Bloom was working at university of Chicago and was involved in evaluating examination. He looks for examines was developed by professors at a time and try to see general pattern in a kind of question students will be asked. He try to organize question In logical way then professor can write better exam with clear objective what is expect from students. What he end up was a 6 levels of questioning. Along with sub questions from he develop the taxonomy of cognitive or learning objectives sense been used internationally to create teaching and learning materials. Now what is interesting for you like as Bloom conjurenced learning is high article in nature. That learning progress form simplest to complex. This idea is useful to understand how you interact with knowledge and if applied practical way how to learn better. Blooms taxonomy has been refined. We know that was adopted by one of his partners David Crowfald and one of his students Loran Anderson.
- The six levels are:
- Remembering
- Understanding
- Applying
- Analysing
- Evaluating
- Creating
We going to spend a little time looking of each of them in term.
I want you to understand that high hierarchy in this terms mean that you have to go to first
level before you go to second level and so on. You have to remember before you can to understand. And you have to understand before you can apply. So the simplest cognitive level is to remember and the most complex cognitive level is to creating as we look on each of this level in term. I try to put them in different real word context. To help you to understand. The first and simplest cognitive level in a taxonomy is active remembering. We have two different types of memory. First type is short term memory such you hear the name or number or statistic or remember it for short period of time. We often use short term memory when throughout the party we was introduce to someone whose name we can not remember half a hour later. We often use short term memory to store information is not usefully. Or we not sure that will be useful. It will be quite different for example if will being introduce to our boss. It is a partly the matter of attending or paying attention and the person name in this last situation is more likely to go into long term memory. Long term memory is a store of information there is more useful for us or it build up because we encounter certain ideas in details over and over again. So the first level of the taxonomy remembering. It is basically retrieving knowledge form long term memory. Recognising and recalling things that we consciously try to remember. Other times the exam simple questions asking you to remember fact or often the most boring questions. In this case you will ask to completely repeat something what you memorised such a list of dates or chemical formula. It is important to remember that it is not particularly high level of cognition. Most people can remember Einstain famous formulas E=mc2 but very few people understand what it means.
The second level of taxonomy is understanding. When we understand something we construct the meaning from something what we learned. The contrast it with first level of remembering. Let me give you an example I can teach you a phrase in Chinese or in another language you do not know. And I can get you to remember it. But you will not have to understand it. So understanding is higher cognitive level and allow us to interpret clarify paraphrase and translate ideas. When we understand something we can find examples and classified new ideas. Understanding helps to make predictions and draw conclusions. In the exam you will ask to show understanding something when you see the word of explain on the start of question. Go back to Einstain. The simple explanation of E=mc2 is that energy and matter are different forms of the same thing. Energy can be turn into matter and matter into energy. One matter travel in extremally high speed. But using Einstain formula E=mc2 times the velocity of light times the veolocity of light the amount of energy can be calculated. When you understand something you can move to third cognitive level applying. Applying quite simply involve executing or carrying out a procedure of something. Again we do it everyday we all spend a lot of time of our computers and we spend a lot of time on procedures like answering emails. Downloading files, Searching internet.
I also know you think this is both natural easy, but these are procedure that with likely miss the fire grandparents perhaps your grandparents. In an exam content is a typical apply question will be used to formula dissolve of math problem like calculating the area of a triangle. The fourth level of the cognitive taxonomy is analysing. Analysing is breaking information in the parts and then deciding how these parts relate to each other as well as overall structure or purpose. Often this process of analysing includes deciding what is important and what is not important. For example, if I ask to analyse the cases of first of 4 considering both are the opposing forces, you might decide that factors included, the invasion of Kuweit (name of city), the protection of oil resources and the punishment of an unfriendly dictator on one side and historical grievances and the desire to expand territory on the other. Among this, you will have to consider which are more or less important in the decision-making processes of those involve the staring the war. Given this process you can see how analysing is a higher-level skill you need to remember, understand and be able to apply what have you learnt. The fifth level of cognitive cognitive taxonomy is evaluating. Like the other cognitive levels this is something we each do every day. When we evaluate we are making judgment of some kind often based on criteria on set of standard apply to particular situation. For example, if you order a meal at the restaurant you might evaluate the meal based on presentation, price, taste, quality and quantity of the ingredients and so on. At the exam situation you will be probably be asked to evaluate product or process or an event and either develop the criteria in yourself or using the Set of criteria you’ve already learnt. The sixth and most complex level of cognitive is creating. When we create, we are using most if not all of the previous levels, remembering, understanding, applying, analysing and evaluating together. We illustrate these other cognitive levels by producing something new and original. In fine arts may be a painting, the sculpture, a dance, a play or a video. Similarly, in an engineering courses you might be asked to create a robot, or a design new car. Let’s take the example of the new car to see how you might to put in place all the cognitive processes. First, you are going to remember what you know about cars, different kinds of cars and machines that move. At the second level you are going to understand what makes cars move. Something that troubles easily over the surface such as wheels and some kind of power sources like an electric or gas engine. You could go on to the fourth level of applying and show what you know by drawing some designs for a new car. Based on your drawings, you might analyse what makes cars work, and go to the fifth stage of evaluating. As you evaluate your ideas and compare them to what was been done in the previous cars. You will have inside and how you can make a better car. All this prepares you to the final stage – creating. Here you bring together everything you know and produce something new. And then you’ve done it. You’ve created a new kind of car. Going back to the example of Einstein E equals mc2. The final cognitive level of creation was the invention of nuclear reactors for power and less fortunately nuclear weapons for war. For everything I’ve said so far, you probably realise that we don’t go through all these cognitive levels with every problem with confronting with. 10.30 We even get to stage of remembering information that is better left in shorter memory. Even it will be overwhelming to try to remember, understand, apply, analyse and evaluate everything what we common to contact with. Later on, go on to create something new. Yeah, recognising and understanding these cognitive levels are important. Each time you learn something new, you should be questioning whether or not you understand it and whether or not it could apply to another concept of situation. So, think about something that you know or think you know, really well, it could be something you were studying, or something you do for fun such is a sport. Consider what level of cognition you are and what you could do to learn about it at the deeper level.
