Cognitive sciences perspective on learning - analyzing tasks, behavior and representations

Bruer, J. T. (2000) Schools for thought, Chapter 2: The science of mind: Analyzing tasks, behavior and representations (pp. 19-50). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

p. 21: Cognitive scientists claim that human minds can be described as a computing device that builds and executes production-system programs. Children learn by adding better rules to their production systems.

p. 25: Declarative memory - episodic and semantic memory - are things we can recall, express, or describe.
Non-declarative memory is memory for motor, perceptual, non-conscious, and hard to describe or be aware of.

p. 26: Schemas are network structures that store our general knowledge about objects, events or situations; they influence what we notice, how we interpret information, and how we remember it

p. 28: Prior knowledge influence what we notice and how we interpret new information

p. 46: When a learner is told explicitly what to encode and how to encode, they will sometimes improve performance on problem tasks. The instructor told them what was important and taught them a strategy for remembering it.

p. 47: Existing rules and initial representations affect one another. Effective instruction must break into and change this interaction.

p. 49: "acquisition of new knowledge depends in predictable ways upon the interaction of existing knowledge, encoding processes, and the instructional environment." We learn by modifying existing memory structures, such as production systems. In some cases, we can learn from new experiences only if we receive explicit instructions about how to represent, or interpret, those experiences.