ElmCore Journal of Educational Psychology October, 2014 | Page 48

Science-Fellows®
A series of studies by Bauer, Mandler and
associates (as cited in Flavell et al., 2002)
demonstrates a child’s increasing ability to perform
simple multiple-act sequences. By age 13 months
infants can reproduce three-act sequences; by age 24
months this has increased to five-act sequences; and
by age 30 months to eight separate actions. As
children gain language skills, their ability to store and
recall more complex events increases. This is shown
first in autobiographical accounts of daily activities
and then to events they may have witnessed or heard
about.
Flavell et al. (2002) make four observations
about strategy development:
(1) Strategy development is not linear.
When developing any particular
strategy, development will often stall or
even regress before it becomes
systematically and correctly used.
(2) A strategy will continue to develop
after it is first demonstrated in its
mature form. This continued
development may take months or even
years.
(3) Children show considerable variability
in their use of strategies. Children often
go back and forth in their use of
strategies, changing strategies even
after they have been found to work
well.
(4) Children differ in their abilities to
integrate different strategies into a
coherent pattern for successful
learning. Children must be given amble
opportunity to create successful
learning programs that work for them.

Designing Instruction that Incorporates Best
Practices for Information Processing

The understanding of how the mind
processes and stores information is invaluable to
educators as they plan for instruction. If there is little
to no understanding of the information processing
skills of the students with whom one is working, it
would be almost impossible to design instruction that
contributes to high levels of learning and achievement.

ElmCore® Journal of Educational Psychology

However, attempting to understand the
myriad theories of information processing and
cognitive development can be overwhelming and
contradictory. There are means of structuring
instruction, though, that can incorporate the best of all
of these ideas, and in order to help students reach
higher-level thinking and learning skills, educators
must draw from all of these theories.
Information Processing and Memory

If learning is to occur, educators must ensure
that new information is processed in such a way that it
can be retained in long-term memory. As previously
discussed, in order to achieve this, elaboration and
connection must occur between previously learned
memory and new information. It has been established
that the more deeply information is processed and the
more connections that can be made between new
information and existing memory structures, the more
information will be retained in long-term memory.
Therefore, in order to make new material meaningful,
instruction must be presented in such a way that
students can easily access and connect previous
learning and experiences with the new material.
One of the most often cited references to
levels of elaboration for instructional purposes is the
Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain developed by
Bloom and his colleagues (Bloom, Englehart, Furst,
Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956) and recently revised by
Anderson and Krathwohl (2000).
Bloom et al. (1965) proposed that
educational objectives can be classified in six levels,
each more complex than the previous (See Table 1).
The first level is labeled knowing and simply requires
a learner to repeat back what was heard or seen. This
involves very little elaboration. The second level is
labeled comprehension and requires some rudimentary
levels of understanding that might involve having the
student summarize or paraphrase some information.
Again, this requires only modest levels of elaboration.
The next two levels, application and analysis, involved
more elaboration and show a significant impact on
long-term learning when they are used during the
learning process. Application involves using the
concepts or principles to solve a problem, while

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