Cognitive psychology developed in a large part because of a growing dissatisfaction with behaviorism’s inability to adequately explain complex behaviors such as language acquisition. Concurrently, rapid technological advances led to the development of the high-speed computer as a mechanism for swiftly manipulating large amounts of information. As these two trends came together, one result was the development of the information processing view of human cognition, using the computer as a model for the way humans think.

The Information processing perspective has an internal focus towards learning (as opposed to behaviorism’s external focus). Learning is defined as a change in knowledge stored in memory. The central principle is that most behavior, including learning, is governed by internal memory processes rather than external circumstances. Understanding behavior therefore requires understanding how memory works. Cognitive theory views learning as an active mental process of acquiring, remembering, and using knowledge.

The primary responsibility of the teacher is to arrange external conditions that will help students to attend to, encode and retrieve information. In order to carry out this responsibility, the information processing perspective suggests that the teacher do the following:

• Organize new information
• Carefully link new information to existing knowledge
• Use techniques to guide and support student’s attention, encoding and retrieval
  

Wihelm Wundt
Frederic Bartlett
Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Kohler

Teachers who draw from cognitive theory pay careful attention to the organization, structure, and presentation of their instruction, attempt to help learners incorporate new learning with prior knowledge, vary their approaches to appeal to different learning styles, and prefer to provide learners with a meaningful way to measure their own success .
Examples of cognitive theory put into practice might include the following:

• A sociology professor has students reflect on personal experiences and observations that demonstrate sociological theories in an online discussion to help them connect abstract theories to real experiences.
• An ethics professor encourages students to apply their personal ethics to moral dilemmas in case studies to help them consider the potential consequences of ethical principles.
• Students in a marketing class get experiential learning experiences by using multimedia-authoring software to construct demo presentations for local businesses and non-profits.
  

Sources
1.Newby, Theory into Application, 1996
2. Digital Media Center, University of minnesota, http://dmc.umn.edu/tenets/theories.shtml