EDUC 311: FACILITATING LEARNER-

CENTERED TEACHING

MODULE 3

COGNITIVE LEARNING THEORIES

Lesson 3

CONTENT
INFORMATION PROCESSING THEORY

Nature of Information Processing

Developed by American psychologist George A. Miller, the information processing theory (IPT) of
cognitive development pertains to the study and analysis of what occurs in a person’s mind as he or she receives
a bit of information (Miller, 1956). Other theorists enhanced Miller’s theory, although the different theories that
followed share common assumptions (Schunk, 2012). First, information processing occurs in stages that
intervene between receiving a stimulus and producing a response. The form of information, or how it is
represented mentally, differs depending on the stage. The stages are qualitatively different from one another.
Second, information processing is analogous to computer processing. The mind receives and represents/encodes
the stimulus from the environment, processes the information, stores it, locates/retrieves it, and gives a response
to it. Learning is a change/revision in the knowledge that has been stored by the memory.
Analyzing the way persons learn something new is important as there is a fixed pattern of events that
take place in learning something new (Miller, 1956). In explaining the concept of chunking, Miller argued that a
person could only store five to nine meaningful units in the short-term memory.

Basic Components of the IPT Model

The information processing theory model has three major components, namely: sensory memory, short-
term memory, and long-term memory (see Figure 9). As seen in the figure, each has a particular function (Schunk,
2012; Woolfolk, 2016).

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 Figure 9. The Information Processing Model (lifted from tcd.ie)
Sensory memory is the state in which the stimuli sensed (heard, seen, touched, smelled, tasted) are
temporarily held in mere seconds for the information to be processed further. As a person is presented a lot of
stimuli at a given time, the sensory memory serves as a filter on what to focus on. When viewing a basketball
game, you can see one person focused on the one in possession of the ball, while another one’s attention is
centered on the guard’s action. Selective attention is the individual’s ability to choose and process information
while disregarding the other stimuli or information. Schunk (2012) cited several factors that influence attention:
1. The meaning is given by the individual to the task or information.
2. The similarity between competing tasks or source of information.
3. The difficulty or complexity of the task as influenced by prior knowledge.
4. The ability to control and sustain attention.
As the information held in the sensory memory is for about three seconds only, unattended stimuli are
forgotten. The information the person gave attention to is transferred to the short-term memory.
Short-term memory serves as a temporary memory while the information is given further processing
before it transferred to long-term memory. Information in this stage is 15-20 seconds only and can hold from 5-9
bits of information only at a given time. Before the information is transferred to long-term memory, there are two
strategies involved: rehearsal and encoding or elaboration.
Maintenance rehearsal involves repetition of the information to sustain its maintenance in the short-term
memory. The use of ABC songs and number songs serve as rehearsal strategies among children. Meanwhile,
elaborative rehearsal is the process of relating the new information to what is already known and stored in the
long-term memory to make the new information more significant. One scheme is organization, the process of
classifying and grouping bits of information into organized chunks. For instance, memorizing the mobile numbers
involves grouping the 11 numbers into sets of numbers, like XXXX – YYY – ZZZZ. Arranging information into
hierarchies is another scheme. For instance, flora and fauna are grouped into phyla/divisions, classes, orders,
families, genera, and species.
The use of mnemonic devices is also helpful. Mnemonic devices elaborate information in different ways.
For instance, learners are taught the acronym “ROYGBIV” to recall that red, orange, yellow, green, green, blue,
indigo, and violet are the rainbow colors. To differentiate stalactite and stalagmite found in caves, learners are
taught that the “g” in stalagmite tells that the calcium carbonate deposit is located on the floor (ground), whereas
the letter “c” in stalactite gives away its location (ceiling).
Imagery is a strategy that involves the memory taking what is to be learned and creating meaningful
visual, auditory, or kinesthetic imagery is associating that the left hand on the waist illustrates a less than value;
the right hand on the waist indicates a greater than value.
Information that is not rehearsed and maintained in the short-term memory is forgotten. It also involves
the relationship between the new information and what is already known.
The long-term memory is the storehouse of information transferred from short-term memory. It has
unlimited space. Varied contents of information are stored, namely:
1. Semantic memory is the memory for ideas, words, facts, and concepts that are not part of the person’s
own experiences. Individuals with good semantic memory include those who know the capital of
countries in the world, many words and their meanings, the order of planets, and other facts.

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 2. Episodic memory includes the memory of events that happened in a person’s life, connected to a specific
time and place. An example is a student who can explain the details of his or her most embarrassing
moment (who were involved, when, where, why, and how it happened).
3. Procedural memory accounts for the knowledge about how to do things. A student teacher who recalls
the step-by-step process of presenting the lesson to the class procedural memory.
4. Imagery refers to mental images of what is known. For instance, beginning readers use configuration
clues, shape, and appearance of words to help in word recognition. Associating a familiar image to the
name of a newly introduced person, like giraffe, guides one to recall the name of Gigi, a long-necked
beautiful lady.

Retrieving Information from the Long-term Memory

Retrieving information from long-term memory involves locating the information and transferring it to the
short-term memory to be used for a purpose. Studies (e.g., Bransford & Johnson, 1972), have shown that a
person remembers a lot less of the information stored in long-term memory. The quality of how the information
stored influences its access and retrieval.
Retrieval of information from the long-term memory entails bringing to mind the previously acquired
information to understand some new input or to make a response. Schunk (2012) mentioned two ways of
information retrieval. One is recalling, which is either free recall or cued recall. In free recall, the person has to
rely on the information previously learned purely by memory. In contrast, the cued recall involves the provision of
cues and clues to the person to help in the recall of the information. It is observed that whatever hints the person
used to encode the information, the same would likewise facilitate is retrieval. Elementary learners can recall the
letter in the alphabet if its image is accompanied by a picture of an object whose name begins with that letter.
Recognition is another way to retrieve information. It involves providing the letter’s with stimuli as choices
to make a decision or judgment. In a multiple-choice test item, the difficulty of retrieving the correct answer is
reduced because the examinees have options to choose from. Guided by their long-term memory, they would
eliminate those options that are not plausible, to eventually arrive at the correct answer.
Based on the primacy and recency effect principle, the information presented close to the start of the
experience, and those that are close to the end are most remembered by learners.

Forgetting
Forgetting is the loss of information, either in the sensory memory, short-term memory, or long-term
memory. Interference is the process that occurs when remembering certain information hampered by the
presence of other information (Woolfolk, 2016). At the sensory memory, there are other stimuli that bombard the
person. As one stimulus is just the focus at a time, others are forgotten. In the short-term memory, as rehearsal
and maintenance activities are made, incoming new information interferes. The same phenomenon happens in
long-term memory. When new information interferes with recalling the previous information, it is called retroactive
interference. If the old information interferes with recalling the new information, it is referred to as proactive
interference.
In addition to interference, time decay is another factor for the loss of stored information from long-term
memory. Unused information decays and is forgotten. However, some theorists argue that stored information in
the long-term memory is never lost. To illustrate, a learner who had a traumatic experience in learning a
Mathematics skill may deliberately want to forget the previous learning concepts. After several years, when those
skills are required to learn another subject, those concepts surface again if there is conscious effort to review
them.
This situation is also related to the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. It involves the failure to retrieve the
information, but the person is sure the information is known. The person feels that retrieval is imminent, but there
is difficulty to directly identify it at the moment.

Teaching Implications of the IPT

Following the concepts and principles associated with the IPT, Woolfolk (2016), Slavin (2018), and
Schunk (2012) recommend the following to be used in helping learners to understand and recall what they have
learned:

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1. Make sure you have the students’ attention. Develop a signal that tells students to stop what they are
doing and focus on you. Make sure that students respond to the signal. Practice using the signal.
2. Move around the room, use gestures, and avoid speaking in a monotone.
3. Begin a lesson by asking a question that stimulates interest in the topic.
4. Regain the attention of individual students by walking closer to them, using their names, or asking them
a question.
5. Help students to separate essential from nonessential details and focus on the most important
information. Summarize instructional objectives to indicate what students should be learning. Relate the
material you are presenting to the objectives as you teach.
6. When you make an important point, pause, repeat, ask a student to paraphrase, note the information on
the board in colored chalk, or tell students highlight the point in their notes or readings. The use of
mnemonic devices could assist learners’ retention of the information learned.
7. Help students to make connections between new information and what they already know. Review
prerequisites to help students bring to mind the information they will need to understand new material.
8. Provide for repetition and review of information. Using graphic organizers for rehearsals can help.
9. Present material in a clear and organized way. Make the purpose of the lesson very clear. Advance
organizers can help.
10. Focus on meaning, not on memorization. For instance, in teaching new words, help students to associate
the new word to a related word they already understand.