Cognitive Learning Environments

"Cognitive learning environments focus on helping students encode information meaningfully to long-term memory so that it can be easily retrieved." There are many times when I ask my students to think back to a topic and they tell me they don't remember anything. In math, everything you learn builds on prior knowledge. If you don't understand something as simple as adding and subtracting you will not be able to move on and fully comprehend what is going on. Students do not easily remember things and need different tools to help them. Whenever I start a new topic I try and give my students a do now that involves them in discovering or recalling something that will be relevant for that lesson. Last week, I did a lesson on the discriminant. I first made them an organizer that would help them have everything in order and easy to understand. They were the asked to find the roots of 4 problems using the quadratic formula. After they finished that, I told them that the discriminant will tell us what type of roots we have. The discriminant is a part of the quadratic formula. As a class, we looked at each problem and decided based on the discriminant what will the roots be and why it worked out that way. There organizer helped them to stay focused and not get confused, they were building on something that they already knew. They were then able to connect this new information to exisiting knowledge. Students sometimes need to have an organizer because they don't know where you are going with your lesson and they may not have written it down in the best possible way to go back and understand it. I remember being in school and your teacher would use the whole chalk board and have everything right next to each other but you didn't have that much space on y0ur paper so you quickly tried to write it underneath and it just didn't do the same thing that it would have if it were right next to it. When you have an organizer set up so that they have to write one thing in one box and another in a different box, at least you know there notes are well structured. The only downfall is that students should be learning how to take good notes. There are certain days although I think a good organizer goes a long way. These are just some of the tools that I have read about and have used in my classroom and notice that they have worked.