Module 7

Lesson: Cognitive Perspective I (Gestalt Psychology, Information Processing)

Lesson Objectives: At the end of the lesson, the students will be able to:

1. Explain the basic principles of cognitivism theories

2. Value the contribution of cognitivist perspective of educational psychology in facilitating learner-

centered teaching

3. Give specific application of each theory in teaching and learning

Content

I. Gestalt Theory

Gestalt come from a German term that means pattern or form. Gestalt psychology was introduced by
Max Wertheimer in 1912. He is a German psychology who believed that a whole is more than just the
totality of its parts.

The primary goal of the Gestalt theory is to encourage the brain to view not just the whole, but also the
parts that make up that whole. For example, when someone is looking at a tree, is he just staring at this
tree, or does he also see the leaves, the branches and the trunk? The whole and the sum of its parts are
two entirely different things, and learning can be achieved if learners are able to cognitively process how
parts can make up this whole.

According to Gestalt theory, which is commonly known as the Law of Simplicity, every stimulus is
perceived by humans in its “most simple form”. The main focus of this theory was on grouping. There
are four laws of grouping, according to this theory.

1. similarity – elements that have the same or nearly similar features are grouped together

2. proximity – elements that are near to each other are grouped together

3. continuity – elements that define smooth lines or even curves are also grouped together

4. closure – elements that fill up missing parts to complete an entity are grouped together

When teachers present information or concepts to their learners, instructional strategies should use
these laws of grouping. The strategies a teacher uses will help the learners to discover if there are
elements hindering them from learning new concepts. Teachers assist learners in removing these
barriers to learning so that new knowledge can be stored ad effectively used in varied situations.

Gestalt theory looks into an individual’s way of problem solving. A person can solve a problem if he has a
good understanding of the overall or general structure of the problem. Understanding a problem means
knowing and seeing the whole and its parts. Gestalt theory also looks into how people organize their
learning by looking at their experiences both inside and outside of the classroom. When the instructions
given are related to their experiences, learning effectively takes place.

A perfect example was provided by Wertheimer himself, when he asked children to find the area of a
parallelogram. He suggested that, as longas parallelograms has a normal shape, the children could apply
the standard procedure in order to determine the area. However, if the parallelogram had an irregular
shape, children could not apply the same logic or principles, but had to solve the problem by
understanding the actual structure of the shape.

Gestalt theory also proposes education to be an integration of affective, psychomotor and cognitive
domains of learning. Teachers should make their lessons holistic.

Major principles of Gestalt theory of learning:

1. The learner should be encouraged to discover the underlying nature of a topic or a problem

2. Gaps, incongruities, disturbances are an essential stimulus for learning

3. Instruction should be based upon the laws of organization: similarity, proximity, continuity, closure

II. Information Processing Theory

Developed by American psychologist George 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.

Key Concepts

1. 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.

2. Information processing is analogous to computer processing. The mind receives and

represents/encodes the stimulus from the environment, process the information, stores it,
locates/retrieves it, and gives response to it. Learning is a change /revision in the knowledge that has
been stored by the memory.

Basic Components of IPT Model

1. 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.

2. Short-term memory serves as a temporary memory while the information is given further processing
before it is transferred to long-term memory. Information in this stage is 15-20 seconds only and can
hold from 5 to 9 bits of information only at a given time. Before the information is transferred to log-
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. Examples are the use of ABC and number songs among children.

Elaborative rehearsal is the process of relating the new information to what is already known and stored
in the long-term memory to make new information more significant. One scheme is organization, the
process of classifying and grouping bits of information into organized chunks. Examples is memorizing
the 11 digit mobile number by grouping them into sets like xxxx-yyy-zzzz. Arranging information into
hierarchies is another scheme. Example, flora and fauna are grouped into phyla/divisions, classes,
orders, families, genera and species.

The use of mnemonic devices is also helpful. They elaborate information in different ways. Example
ROYGBIV.

Imagery is a strategy that involves the memory taking what is to be learned and creating meaningful
visual, auditory or kinesthetic images of the information.

3. 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. Sematic memory is the memory for ideas, words, facts and concepts that are not part of the person’s
experiences. Individuals with good semantic memory include those who know the capital of the
different countries, many words and their meaning, the order of planets, etc.

2. Episodic memory includes the memory of events that happened in the person’s life, connected to a
specific time and place.

3. Procedural memory accounts for the knowledge about how to do things, step by step.

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
lady.

Retrieving Information from the Long-term Memory

This involves locating the information and transferring it to the short term memory to be used for a
purpose. Studies shown that a person remembers a lot less of the information stored in the long term
memory. The quality of how the information was stored influences its access and retrieval.

Retrieving 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 mentioned two ways of
information retrieval. One is recalling, which is either free recall or cued recall. In free recall, one has to
rely on the information previously learned purely by memory. In contrast, cued recall involves cues and
clues to the person to help in the recall of the information.

Recognition is another way to retrieve information. It involves providing the learners 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 is hampered by
the presence of other information. 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 the long term memory. When new information interferes with recalling the
previous information, it is called retroactive interference. If the old information interferes with recalling
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.

Activity

Make an additional online research about the implications and applications of Gestalt Theory and IPT in
teaching and learning experiences. Write your discoveries in an outline form.

Reference

Facilitating Learner-Centered Teaching. Bulusan et al, 2019