Generic Cognitive Skills Research Articles

Cognitive load theory and educational technology

Cognitive load theory provides instructional recommendations based on our knowledge of human cognition. Evolutionary psychology is used to assume that knowledge should be divided into biologically primary information that we have specifically evolved to acquire and biologically secondary information that we have not specifically evolved to acquire. Primary knowledge frequently consists of generic-cognitive skills that are important to human survival and cannot be taught because they are acquired unconsciously while secondary knowledge is usually domain-specific in nature and requires explicit instruction in education and training contexts. Secondary knowledge is first processed by a limited capacity, limited duration working memory before being permanently stored in long-term memory from where unlimited amounts of information can be transferred back to working memory to govern action appropriate for the environment. The theory uses this cognitive architecture to design instructional procedures largely relevant to complex information that requires a reduction in working memory load. Many of those instructional procedures can be most readily used with the assistance of educational technology.

Relation Between Interactive Learning and Prior Knowledge: Insights from a General Education Program of Science and Humanities

Abstract Possession of prior knowledge has been shown to critically influence students' learning in major courses. Yet the topic remains unexplored in the realm of general education in higher education. The study aims at investigating whether students lacking relevant high school knowledge background could benefit in the two courses, one inclined to science and one inclined to the humanities, in a general education program at a university in Hong Kong. Interactive learning has been intensively practiced in the program to minimize the unfavorable impact brought up by a lack of prior knowledge among students. Data from an entry-exit survey show that a lack of prior knowledge does not limit students' learning in outcomes related to generic cognitive skills and subject matter content in both courses. An interactive learning approach is suggested to have mediated the problem of the lack of prior knowledge in students' subsequent learning in the two general education courses.

Supporting the Development of Engineers' Interdisciplinary Competence

Background Although interdisciplinarity has been a subject of interest and debate for decades, few investigations of interdisciplinary education exist. Existing studies examine the effects of interdisciplinary experiences on students' development of generic cognitive skills but not the development of interdisciplinary competencies. Purpose/Hypothesis This study sought to explore how engineering students' characteristics, college experiences, and engineering faculty beliefs relate to students' reports of interdisciplinary competence. Design/Method The study used a nationally representative survey sample of 5,018 undergraduate students and 1,119 faculty members in 120 U.S. engineering programs at 31 institutions. Using hierarchical linear modeling, we investigated the relationships among students' curricular and co-curricular experiences and faculty beliefs regarding interdisciplinarity in engineering education on students' reports of interdisciplinary competence. Results This study found that a curricular emphasis on interdisciplinary topics and skills, as well as co-curricular activities, specifically, participating in nonengineering clubs and organizations, study abroad, and humanitarian engineering projects, significantly and positively relate to engineering students' reports of interdisciplinary skills. Faculty members' beliefs regarding interdisciplinarity in engineering education moderated the relationships between particular co-curricular experiences and students' interdisciplinary skills, as well as between curricular emphasis and students' interdisciplinary skills. Conclusions This study identified a small set of experiences that are related to students' reported development of interdisciplinary competence. The study points to the critical role of the curriculum in promoting interdisciplinary thinking and habits of mind, as well as the potential of co-curricular opportunities that bring engineering students together with nonmajors to build interdisciplinary competence.

Story of a Research Program

Lessons LearnedThere are several general lessons (not generic cognitive skills!) that I have learned over an almost half century of research. The main one is that age-old lesson that applies to many facets of life: if you are confident of your ideas, persist. [Download the PDF and read more . . .]

Financial literacy and subjective expectations questions: A validation exercise

I use subjective expectations data on future asset returns from the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth to validate widely used financial literacy questions. I argue that financial literacy and the willingness to answer these expectations questions are conceptually related constructs. In fact, both build on financial knowledge and skills and on confidence to use that knowledge. From the estimation of simple probit models, I find evidence of positive correlation between responding expectations questions and answering correctly the questions used to appraise individual financial literacy. If these latter questions captured just numeracy or generic cognitive skills, the size and significance of their coefficients would go to zero when one controls for formal education. This is not the case, which suggests that they capture knowledge and skills that may indeed be at the basis of financial competence. Besides this, the likelihood of answering correctly these questions does not seem to depend on individual information on the state of the economy and finance. Furthermore, based on decomposition analysis, I find that the questions with the largest information content are those eliciting knowledge and skills which are at the basis of day-to-day financial decision making. Implications are finally drawn for the literature.

An Alternative Approach for Designing and Teaching Communication Skills to University of Technology Students

This article examines the contents and teaching strategies of communication skills courses at a South African higher institution: Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT). It seeks to understand why the courses have not been very responsive to increasing academic and professional challenges undergraduate students’ experience at this university. Also, it proposes alternative contents and methods of teaching that can ensure that these courses remain relevant to the diversity of vocational diploma programmes offered by the university. The article is written against the backdrop of conceptions of ‘unpreparedness’ and ‘disadvantage’ repeatedly used by academics of this institution to justify the poor academic performance of students. The article draws on data gleaned from sustained one-on-one interviews with fifteen students and four communication skills lecturers as well as on course reflections with 1 st year students collected during one academic year. This empirical data revealed that Communication courses provide a unique space for the development of generic cognitive skills which are critical for academic development and which can put graduates at a competitive advantage in the workplace. However it argues that for these courses to provide students with lifelong academic and professional skills, existing curricula and teaching approaches should be revised. This is because the current delivery methods are seemingly very pedantic, less stimulating and do not promote higher-order thinking in students. This piece therefore recommends a model, which focuses on the development of metacognitive skills such as critical thinking, creative and innovative thinking as well as problem solving.

EpiList II: Closing the Loop in the Development of Generic Cognitive Skills

The importance of cognitive skills in human learning and reasoning has become well established in recent years. This motivates the search for a knowledge representation that supports the development of a computational algorithm that performs, as well as instructs such cognitive skills. Cognitive skills can be broadly divided into two types: specific and generic cognitive skills. Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) that develop generic cognitive skills are essential for developing classification, generalization, and comparison processes. However, these current systems are inherently open loop and do not utilize feedback, based on the student's competence level, to adapt the learning process. This is a major drawback when attempting to provide a dynamic learner-focused approach for effective instruction. In this paper, we present EpiList II, an ITS that closes the loop and is hence able to monitor and dynamically assess the student's cognitive-skill competence. The results show a significant improvement in positive- and negative-reasoning skills, with 51% of students (up from an average of 8% of students when using an open-loop ITS) acquiring/developing these skills.

EpiList: An Intelligent Tutoring System Shell for Implicit Development of Generic Cognitive Skills That Support Bottom-Up Knowledge Construction

Current research efforts have shifted from the development of intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) that focus on the teaching of "content" knowledge to those that focus on teaching cognitive skills. This shift is seen as necessary because cognitive skills are increasingly recognized by educational establishments as the foundation for knowledge acquisition, comprehension, and application. Knowledge construction is a cognitive skill and can be broadly divided into "top-down" and "bottom-up" approaches. The former splits a concept to form subordinate concepts, while the latter one groups concepts together to form a superordinate concept. Both approaches require the skill of classification and form different semantic networks or classification schemes with different levels of significance and suitability. List-making games operate within a bottom-up environment, where one has to arrange a list of items according to their respective categories. EpiList is developed along the line of a list-making game. It requires the student to suitably arrange items into categories that they have selected from a given list of categories. EpiList has employed both inductive and deductive teaching strategies to tutor the students and implicitly teach them the skills of generalization and comparison. This is achieved through the use of rules and algorithms. The rules and algorithms focus not only on the incorrect categorization of items but also on the migration of one classification scheme to another scheme that is more significant and suitable under the current teaching context. This paper computationally translates the teaching of cognitive skills into simple sets and represents the instructional process in terms of rules and algorithms operating on these sets. The field evaluations of EpiList demonstrated its capability to develop generic cognitive skills