Information Processing And Its Implication To Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Abstract Learning depends on thinking. The more we can understand what happens when we think, the more we can help other people to think “better�, differently or in new ways and the more chance we have of being able to help people to learn more efficiently. In the past there has been a growing acceptance that we cannot just ignore thinking simply because we cannot see it happening. Rather, we need to understand what happens when people think and, in the context of educational psychology, try to find ways of helping them to think in ways which will help them to learn more efficiently and easily. Benjamin Bloom (1956) attempt to categorise the different sorts of intellectual knowledge that teachers wanted their students to learn. Bloom’s “taxonomy� as it became known, is still the most useful framework for teachers to use in deciding what it is they are trying to teach their students. Bloom classified knowledge into six categories, ranging from the type of task which demanded the lowest level of thinking (memorization), to the highest level of intellectual ability (evaluation).Cognitive psychologists have tried to understand what happens when we think and learn. They have constructed models to represent what occurs during the process of thinking. In some cases they have carried out computer simulations of what happens when people attend to new information, incorporate it into what they already know, make sense of the totality of the information which they now possess, memorize this new understanding, and retrieve and use the information some time later.