Why Don’t Students Like School?

Or an introduction to how thinking works and how that influences attention and motivation

EDUC 173 / PSCI 192T

Shayan Doroudi

University of California, Irvine

Behaviorism

1890s-1960s

The Mind as a Black Box

Stimulus

Response

Cognitivism

1960s-present

Stimulus

Response

The Mind as a Computer

Working Memory

site of awareness and thinking

Long-Term Memory

factual knowledge and procedural knowledge

Environment

The Mind as a Computer

Cognitivism

SOAR

1950s-present

AKA Information-Processing Psychology

ACT-R

ACT-R Research Group
http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/about/

Laird, J.E. (2008). Extending the Soar Cognitive Architecture. In Goertzel, B., Wang, P., & Franklin, S. (Eds.), Artificial General Intelligence 2008: Proceedings of the first conference.

Cognitivism

1950s-present

AKA Information-Processing Psychology

Herbert Simon

Early Pioneers in Artificial Intelligence

Allen Newell

Founded Information-Processing Psychology

Carnegie Mellon University

1916-2001

1927-1992

Cognitivism

1950s-present

AKA Information-Processing Psychology

In 1975, Simon and Newell won the Turing Award (equivalent to Nobel Prize in computer science).

In 1978, Simon won the Nobel Prize in economics.

"I like to think that since I was about 19 I have studied human decision making and problem solving. Bounded rationality was the economics part of that. When computers came along, I felt for the first time that I had the proper tools for the kind of theoretical work I wanted to do. So I moved over to that and that got me into psychology."

- Herbert Simon, 2000

Herbert Simon

Allen Newell

1916-2001

1927-1992

Working Memory

site of awareness and thinking

Long-Term Memory

factual knowledge and procedural knowledge

Environment

Tower of Hanoi

Why did Willingham pick Tower of Hanoi?

It's a classical cognitive psychology task.

Tea Ceremony Problem

Could you tell it was the same as Tower of Hanoi?

People are naturally curious, but we are not naturally good thinkers; unless the cognitive conditions are right, we will avoid thinking.

People Are Not Naturally Good Thinkers?

Depends on what we mean by thinking!

Hoffman, R. R., Feltovich, P. J., Ford, K. M., & Woods, D. D. (2002). A rose by any other name... would probably be given an acronym [cognitive systems engineering]. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 17(4), 72-80.

Fitt’s List (1951)

People Are Not Naturally Good Thinkers?

“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. On the other hand, a well trained operator as compared with a computer is incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant.”

- Anonymous

People are Naturally Curious!

Problems have to be the right level of difficulty:

Not too hard (too much demand on working memory)
Not too easy (no thinking needed)

Course Structure

For each week, I have singled out some of the key cognitive processes/principles as well as types of content that the chapter is about.

But cognition is complex and processes are intertwined so each chapter is about a lot of things.

Chapter 1 is about attention and motivation

and how that intersects with thinking and memory.

In fact, two aspects of cognition pervade this book:

Working Memory

Cognitive Load

Cognitive Load 😵‍💫

Cognitive load is the amount of demand placed on our working memory in a task.

Cognitive load is much greater 😵‍💫 for the tea ceremony problem than Tower of Hanoi.

This suggests we can use strategies to reduce cognitive load for students! 😌

Even though Willingham doesn’t use the term, cognitive load will come up again and again in this course!

Working memory capacity is limited.