Old traditional educational systems were a heavy burden on human absorption and limited their creativity and innovation in various fields, relying mostly on patriarchal indoctrination, which tended to be well understood, creating a significant gap between absorption and production, so that translations of knowledge were always faced with the problem of cognitive loads, as cognitive deficiencies often allowed no more than the transmission of linguistically translated text, i.e., without its cognitive load.
With the emergence of the knowledge economy, it became necessary to design educational curricula that stimulated creativity, stimulated thinking, stimulated research, analysis, and conclusion, encouraged innovation, and required a scientific approach to the design of those curricula or educational materials, and that is why the theory of cognitive pregnancy has emerged.
Cognitive Pregnancy Theory is based on the widely accepted human information processing model, published by Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin in 1968, which describes the process as containing three main parts: sensory memory, working memory and long-term memory.
Later, perhaps the most important scientific theories and forms that emerged to promote and empower the theory of cognitive load, the theory of “mental maps” by the memory scientist Tony Buzan, entered the Guinness Book of Records, where he prepared his heiress in this science, so she taught 1,300 students to draw mental maps effectively and managed that in one session.
Cognitive load theory says that when a human brain processes information, it classifies that information and transmits it to long-term memory, where it is stored in a knowledge structure called “charts.”
These schemes regulate information according to how it is used, and this theory does not differ in famous measurement systems, such as large data, and other tools and means of the knowledge economy, for example we have sales plans in a large store familiarly and daily, or behavioral actions to take certain actions, the more we become more used to and knowledgeable about these schemes, these procedures and behaviors become easier.
This is called “automation”.
Later, Cognitive Pregnancy Theory was developed by John Sweiler, who published a paper on it in cognitive science in 1988, in which he said that “cognitive pregnancy” is related to the amount of information that working memory can retain simultaneously, and also said, since work memory has limited capacity, educational methods should be avoided by increasing pregnancy with additional activities that do not directly contribute to learning.
It is believed that the factors that make learning unnecessarily complex, or our disposition for the information that we try to care about, all increase a person’s cognitive load during education, and, due to increased cognitive pregnancy, stimulation makes it more difficult to pay attention, repeat and remember, making learning less effective.
John Sweiler and other researchers have also identified ways in which the cognitive burden, in an educational environment, can be reduced using more effective teaching methods, encouraging more effective scientific engagements in working memory, including Cognitive Pregnancy Theory, helping us design training that reduces the working memory requirements of learners, so that they learn more effectively.
We can apply the concept of cognitive load to learning, training and research, by measuring experience and adaptation, meaning that the more experience we develop in a particular region, the more information is available in our charts.
No matter how complex the scheme is, it is one element of working memory.
Another way is to reduce the area of the problem, which is the gap between the current situation and the goal. Focusing on the goal also draws attention to the information learned, making learning less effective, so the best approach is to divide the problem into parts, reducing the area of the problem, and reducing cognitive pregnancy, which in turn makes learning more effective.
The third is to reduce the impact of split division, so when you have multiple sources of visual information, such as charts, labels, and illustrations, our attention is divided between them.
This adds to cognitive pregnancy, making it more difficult to create new schemes.
The fourth method is to take advantage of audio-visual channels in working memory, which reduce the cognitive burden on working memory.
In short, Cognitive Pregnancy Theory is an educational design theory that reflects “cognitive engineering”, or the way we process information, and is associated in its emergence with the knowledge economy, intentionally or unintentionally, because it serves the requirements very effectively.
During learning, information must be kept in working memory to be adequately processed, to pass it on to long-term memory, i.e., human working memory capacity is limited, and when a lot of information is provided at once, it becomes difficult, and a large part of this information is lost.
Therefore, Cognitive Pregnancy Theory, learning and research are more efficient, using training methods that reflect this, which in turn leads to the development of the cognitive economy, through an increase in intellectual and scientific research output.
These methods, as I have said, include measuring experience and creating the instructions accordingly, reducing the area of the problem by dividing it into parts, using partially completed and practical examples, as well as merging multiple sources of visual information together, whenever possible, and expanding the capacity of working memory using both visual and audio channels. And to talk the rest.
Author : Manahel Thabet
Published May 07, 2018
Al Bayan Newspaper
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