Learning Theory: Cognitive Flexibility

Cognitive Flexibility

• Overview:  Cognitive Flexibility Theory focuses on learning in complex and ill-structured domains and is based on cognitive learning theory. Examples of ill-structured domains include medicine, history, and literary interpretation. By cognitive flexibility, it is meant  the ability to spontaneously restructure one's knowledge...in adaptive response to radically changing situational demands. This is a function of both the way knowledge is represented and the processes that operate on those mental representations.
  
  Some domains which appear to be more defined and structured, such as mathematics, may have characteristics of ill-structuredness at advanced levels of study. When advanced knowledge acquisition occurs, a non-linear approach is mandated to accommodate for the ill-structured domain in which the learning occurs. Thus, even for these, information must be presented from multiple perspectives to simulate diverse examples of the application of fundamental concepts.
  
  Major principles of this theory include:
  • Providing multiple representations of learning content instead of relying on single schemas to describe objects or events.
  • Constructing knowledge instead of transmitting knowledge; therefore, encouraging transfer by allowing learners to develop their own knowledge representations to adapt knowledge for future use in different types of situations.
  • Supporting complexity for comparing and contrasting the similarities and differences of cases in ill-structured learning domains by presenting multiple representations of the same information and different thematic perspectives on the information.

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