Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
It is useful to consider the development of
cognitive
abilities as largely under
genetic control, if conditional upon suitable triggers from experience. Here we
might consider that life experience has some effect on the rate of development, and
the degree to which potential is met.
However, the specific “conceptual” knowledge an individual develops is primar-
ily the result of particular learning experiences,
albeit
noting that those experiences
are filtered and channelled by the available cognitive apparatus. A new born baby
will not develop abstract knowledge regardless of the richness of the learning
environment, because it has not yet developed the apparatus to do so.
The nature of concepts is—like so many constructs in education and the cognitive
sciences—not universally agreed (Gilbert & Watts, 1983). However, here I would
adopt a common notion that an individual “has” conceptual knowledge
1
if they are
able to make discriminations on the basis of that knowledge. So a young child who
is able to reliably distinguish between cats and dogs, or between the cat that lives
next door, and a stray, is demonstrating conceptual knowledge: that is previously
experienced patterns in the perceptual field have somehow been modelled and then
represented in the brain in a form that guides the individual in responding to current
patterns in the perceptual field that are judged as related.
Of course such a description becomes problematic in practice. In everyday life
we seldom have sufficient data to be quite sure whether others are making reliable
discriminations—and even in clinical studies such judgements rely on agreed pro-
tocols that at best offer statistical likelihood. The absence of such behaviour does
not
imply
absence of the conceptual knowledge that could
potentially
enable the
behaviour. Moreover, evidence of a desired discrimination offers no assurance that
the conceptual knowledge being applied matches anyone else's version of the con-
cept. These are not merely inconveniences in research, but fundamental issues that
teachers have to work with in their professional lives.
So, just to offer one example, consider a learner in an elementary class learning
about the concept “animal”. Imagine that the learner was able to classify living
things as animals or not animals as below:
Animal
Not animal
Cow
Moss
Dog
Maple tree
Hamster
Rose
Horse
Mushroom
Dolphin
Grass
1
The term “knowledge” is not here used in the sense of certain, justified belief (the meaning of the
term preferred by some philosophers) but rather in the sense of what we think we know about the
world. The latter sense better described how the term is widely used in cognitive science and in
education.
