Cognition and Action (201-0-20)

Instructors

Brian J Reiser

Meeting Info

Annenberg Hall 303: Tues, Thurs 11:00AM - 12:20PM

Overview of class

Our concern, in the Learning Sciences, is with helping individuals to learn; we want to help them learn to engage in new tasks, and to understand things that they didn't understand before. It is the assumption of this course that we will be in a better position to achieve these goals if we can somehow characterize the knowledge that individuals possess at any given time, and how this knowledge changes as they learn. In short, this is a course about individual cognition and learning.

However, there are important respects in which the aims of this course differ from a cognition course outside of the Learning Sciences. In LS, we are less concerned with general mechanisms that underlie cognition across domains, and more concerned with issues of knowledge and learning that are specific to individual subject-matter domains. We want to understand, for example, what is challenging about coming to understand Darwin's theory of natural selection. We are also interested in phenomena of learning on a very particular timescale (weeks to months) and knowledge-scale (systems of knowledge).

A key goal of this course is for you to develop an LS-style sensibility for seeing and understanding learning. Thus, a major focus of this course will be to practice observing and analyzing learning phenomena.

Class Materials (Required)

TBA

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Pre-Registration -- Reserved for SESP Students until the end of preregistration, after which time enrollment will be open to everyone who has taken the prerequisites, if applicable.