Pedagogical Techniques: Cognitive Disequilibrium an Goldilocks Principle
Cognitive Disequilibrium
There will always be different kinds of intellects at classrooms. What are considered the worst students do not like to think through a problem or find out how a mechanism works, while some of the better students may understand the same concepts but do not think further about them once they are done learning what they had to learn. This is when the presence of a teacher asking them questions comes into play. A technique used to make students think further is called the cognitive disequilibrium.
Cognitive disequilibrium is in charge of daring students to think of better ways why something works the way it does. The name itself points at imbalanced knowledge towards a certain topic. Let’s take for example a group of students leading an experiment where they are mostly sure of what the outcome will be. Their desire to find results that matches their theory will be biased, and if something in the experiment indicates their theory is not completely true there will be a moment of conflicting cognitions; this is what researchers call cognitive disequilibrium. Starting as early as the 1950’s, social psychologist Leon Festinger coined the term “cognitive dissonance” in his book When Prophecy Fails. At the same time, developmental psychologist Jean Piaget realized his work in cognitive developmental theory, including a close approach to cognitive dissonance. He conceptualized that as a child grows up, he will constantly be finding new information that will challenge the former beliefs he had, thus making an imbalance in cognition and making the child adapt to a new set of ideas (Colombo, 2002). This kind of conflict affects learning the same way it can affect the process of gathering information. Much like in research, theories can change drastically based on how big the changes are when finding new data. According to Chin and Brewer (1993) there are seven different forms of response to inconsistent information, the unpredicted information that
There will always be different kinds of intellects at classrooms. What are considered the worst students do not like to think through a problem or find out how a mechanism works, while some of the better students may understand the same concepts but do not think further about them once they are done learning what they had to learn. This is when the presence of a teacher asking them questions comes into play. A technique used to make students think further is called the cognitive disequilibrium.
Cognitive disequilibrium is in charge of daring students to think of better ways why something works the way it does. The name itself points at imbalanced knowledge towards a certain topic. Let’s take for example a group of students leading an experiment where they are mostly sure of what the outcome will be. Their desire to find results that matches their theory will be biased, and if something in the experiment indicates their theory is not completely true there will be a moment of conflicting cognitions; this is what researchers call cognitive disequilibrium. Starting as early as the 1950’s, social psychologist Leon Festinger coined the term “cognitive dissonance” in his book When Prophecy Fails. At the same time, developmental psychologist Jean Piaget realized his work in cognitive developmental theory, including a close approach to cognitive dissonance. He conceptualized that as a child grows up, he will constantly be finding new information that will challenge the former beliefs he had, thus making an imbalance in cognition and making the child adapt to a new set of ideas (Colombo, 2002). This kind of conflict affects learning the same way it can affect the process of gathering information. Much like in research, theories can change drastically based on how big the changes are when finding new data. According to Chin and Brewer (1993) there are seven different forms of response to inconsistent information, the unpredicted information that
References: Colombo, J. (2002) Infant Attention Grows up: The Emergence of a Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective. Current Directions in Psychological Science , Vol. 11, No. 6 (Dec., 2002), pp Wolfe, M.W., Schreiner, M.E., Rehder, B., Lahman, D., Folts, P.W., Kintsch, W., & Landaure, T.K. (1998). Graesser (2008). 25 Learning Principles to Guide Pedagogy and the Design of Learning Environments. Life Long Learning at Work and at Home O’Donnell, A., Reeve, J., Smith, F. (2008) Educational Psychology: Reflection for Action. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Chinn, C. A., & Brewer, W. F. (1993). The role of anomalous data in knowledge acquisition: A theoretical Framework and implications for.