Epistemology: Cognitivism: Cognitive Apprenticeship

Cognitive Apprenticeship

• Overview:  In ancient times, teaching and learning were accomplished through apprenticeship: We taught our children how to speak, grow crops, craft cabinets, or tailor clothes by showing them how and by helping them do it. Although schools have been relatively successful in organizing and conveying large bodies of conceptual and factual knowledge, standard pedagogical practices render key aspects of expertise invisible to students. The teacher's thinking must be made visible to the the students and the student's thinking must be made visible to the teacher.
  
  Cognitive apprenticeship is a model of instruction that works to make thinking visible. Scardamalia and Bereiter have developed an approach to the teaching of writing that relies on elements of cognitive apprenticeship. Like other exemplars of cognitive apprenticeship, their approach is designed to give students a grasp of the complex activities involved in expertise by explicit modeling of expert processes, gradually reduced support or scaffolding for students attempting to engage in the processes, and opportunities for reflection on their own and others' efforts.

In cognitive apprenticeship, the challenge is to present a wide range of tasks, varying from systematic to diverse, and to encourage students to reflect on and articulate the elements that are common across tasks. As teachers present the targeted skills to students, they can increasingly vary the contexts in which those skills are useful. The goal is to help students generalize the skill, to learn when the skill is or is not applicable, and to transfer the skill independently when faced with novel situations. In order to translate the model of traditional apprenticeship to cognitive apprenticeship, teachers need to:

• Identify the processes of the task and make them visible to students;
• Situate abstract tasks in authentic contexts, so that students understand the relevance of the work; and
• Vary the diversity of situations and articulate the common aspects so that students can transfer what they learn.

More...............................  Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible