Thread by @EfratFurst

Yesterday at @researchEDWarr I tried to make the point that the “love story" between cognitive science and education is exciting because it has reached the point where it’s not just about isolated “quality ingredients”, but about the entire “dish” and even a whole “meal”.

I’ve put 4 things on the table, 4 points that I find central and essential for making cog sci useful in education

1.
It’s essential to acknowledge the limitations of the cognitive systems:
📌Attention and WM are limited in capacity, the bottleneck of processing.
📌LTM is “Blackboxy” – we don’t really know how it works, parts of it are unconscious and we are biased as a result

2.
I still think that it’s important to take into consideration and plan according to these four stages of the learning process, making sure we choose an effective sequence of strategies for everyone.

3.
But no matter how effective these strategies are, they are not intuitively chosen by either learners or teachers. The main reason is our cognitive biases that intervene in every step of the way:

The Bjorks coined the term Desirable Difficulties, we can also call it the Ice Cream- Broccoli dilemma: what would you choose?
And how can we prepare a secret sauce that will help learners choose more broccoli over time, and adopt healthier eating (or learning) habits?

4.
We should consider the entire meal (not just the broccoli), and plan sequences that take into consideration students’ motivation, meta-cognition, and habits, aligning them along the cognitive axis at the right points, and "cooking" it adjust our teaching context.