Cognitivism

Examples of Cognitive-Inspired Instructional Theories

Learning Scenario

Observation Checklist

Reflection

When I first entered instructional design, I treated learning a bit too mechanically. I broke down steps, highlighted key points, and checked whether learners could perform the “correct” behavior. This approach worked well in the technical training projects I managed in the past, yet something always felt incomplete. After studying Cognitivism, I finally understood what was missing—the mind behind the behavior, the active process of thinking, filtering, connecting, and reorganizing information.

Cognitivism reminds me that learners never walk into a classroom with an empty mind. They bring years of experiences, memories, assumptions, and personal logic, and all of these shape how they make sense of new information. As an international student and a mother of three, I experience this every day in graduate school. I find myself linking new theories to my previous training projects in China, or to the way my daughters learn new words at home. Some ideas fit into my existing understanding easily, while others require me to adjust my own framework before new knowledge can settle in. Looking back, this is exactly what Piaget describes as accommodation, even though I never named it that before.

It also struck me that I had been using “cognitive strategies” long before I learned the term. In many of my past projects, I would naturally create XMind or MindManager diagrams—flowcharts, timelines, tables, and concept maps—to help colleagues understand complex ideas. At the time, I simply thought they made communication easier. Now I realize they were advance organizers that reduced cognitive load and allowed people to see the structure before diving into details. Cognitivism helped me understand why these instinctive design choices worked so well.

My children also helped me see Cognitivism more clearly. My older daughter constantly asks “why”—why a math rule works, why plants grow toward the light, why English spelling and pronunciation don’t always match. My younger daughter needs examples, pictures, gestures, and small steps. I used to think this was simply personality. Now I understand it as differences in working memory, prior knowledge, and how each child processes information. Cognitivism gave me a way to explain these everyday observations, instead of relying only on intuition.

Piaget and Vygotsky’s ideas also stayed with me. At first, I thought they contradicted each other: one emphasizing that learners must be ready before learning, the other emphasizing that learning itself creates readiness. Now I see that the two perspectives can coexist. In both my earlier health-training work and my recent IDE 761 teacher PD project, I constantly navigate this balance—keeping tasks within learners’ cognitive capacity while offering just enough scaffolding to stretch them. This tension between “not overwhelming” and “not over-helping” is something I want to be more intentional about.

One insight from this chapter that truly challenged me is that scaffolding is not always better when there is more of it. Too much support can fill up a learner’s working memory and pull their attention away from the core task. When Ormrod described how elementary students gradually move from wide writing spaces to a single line, I immediately thought about my own teaching habits. I often tried to make learning easier by breaking tasks into very small steps and giving many hints. Now I wonder whether, in trying to help, I sometimes took away the productive struggle learners needed to truly understand.

Overall, Cognitivism and its related instructional theories feel very natural to me. They help me explain the learning challenges I see in real projects and guide me in designing materials more systematically—whether for teacher PD programs or for my micro-learning module on time management this semester. Cognitivism reshaped my understanding of the difference between “being able to perform” and “truly remembering and understanding.” It also gave me a clearer and kinder way to look at myself—as a learner, a mother, and a designer.

I expect Cognitivism will appear again in my final reflection paper. Not because it is flawless, but because it helps me see learners, including myself, with more clarity and honesty.