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ABSTRACT
The process of designing effective and efficient instruction for learners is a challenge to all educators. The ability to integrate predictable and justifiable learning within an organized framework or system that is relevant to the learner should be the educators most compelling goal. Cognitive science, the science of the mind, explores the mechanisms by which people acquire, process, and use knowledge (McGilly, 1994). The writer's intent is to show the relevance of this theory to the design of effective learning.
Cognitive scientists distinguish between two major types of knowledge, declarative and procedural. Declarative knowledge is knowledge about the world and its properties. Procedural knowledge is knowledge about how to do things. Cognitive scientists also refer to metacognitive knowledge, which is knowledge about one's own knowledge, skills, and abilities (McGilly, 1994; Kintsch, Tennyson, Gagne, Muraida, 1991).
ORGANIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE/SYSTEMS APPROACH
Knowledge can be stored in memory in a variety of forms. One way is in isolated and disconnected pieces of information, often the result of learning by rote. Much of the knowledge that students acquire in school seems to be in this form. In contrast, knowledge can be organized into large, interconnected bodies, where pieces of knowledge are conceptually linked to other pieces. This network of interconnections can extend and link to other information to broaden the range of cognitive activities, including answering a wide variety of domain-specific questions, drawing analogies, making inferences, and generalizing to new content areas (McGilly, 1994).
Although commonalities exist to some extent, students use their own modes of cognitive processing to acquire, retain, and retrieve information. This implies that acquisition and performance depend upon how the learner manipulates subject matter/content. The ways that a student selects, encodes, organizes, stores, retrieves, decodes, and generates information are called "cognitive styles" when they affect learning and performance (Dillon & Pellegrino, 1991). The dilemma arises whether to design instruction to capitalize upon cognitive processing strengths or to design instruction to strengthen cognitive processing weaknesses. Educators may agree that learning occurs most efficiently when strategies are designed to suit the learner's needs (Ledford, 1996). The chief task here perhaps is ascertaining the specific needs of the learner and then designing instruction to accommodate not only that learner's needs but the needs of those...