Situated Cognition: New Wave of Education?

Situated cognition used in a classroom setting allows students the chance to discover the “how” when it comes to knowledge and why things are the way they are.  Not just teaching facts, but delving deeper and opening up discussions and hands on learning through activities, and group work, for example.  How can it be implemented into a classroom..

• ·         In math, create a store in the classroom and give students real money to make purchases, keep a budget, practice addition, subtraction, and multiplication while shopping.  Students can see just how math and basic math facts affect their everyday life.  This is a much better representation of how math is related to the world then giving students a worksheet with 3X12 and ask them to solve the answer.  Students don’t even think they are doing math when in the shopping environment, they can figure out how quickly the math is but when asked to fill out a worksheet it becomes more of a struggle.  “By offloading part of the cognitive task on to the environment, the student automatically uses their environment to help solve a problem” (Brown, 1989).

As educators we teach students in order to prepare them for their future and help them become successful members of society.  Why should schools continue to use practices that only give students the knowledge of what something does not the why and the how?  In life there is not always one easy concrete answer and students should be prepared on how to work through and deal with this by collaborating with others, thinking outside of the box or through a different perspective, investigating a topic further, etc.  So when planning lessons teachers need to think outside the box, make learning fun and relatable.  Yes it may take more time and effort to create a lesson that correlates to a student’s life but they will gain so much more from it then just being handed a worksheet. 

While in school getting my degree, I think I can honestly say I believe I learned the most when I started my internships and was thrown into the school setting.  The hands on experience speaks much highly then sitting in a classroom. You can relate what you learned to your personal experiences and it is all connected but it did not fully sink in until I was in the field myself, practicing what I had been taught and collaborating with other professionals.  The same needs to be done with our students today, provide them with introductory knowledge and then let them explore, interact and apply the topic to their world first hand and in turn find the connection.

Brown,J .  (1989). “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning”.  Educational Researcher, Vol. 18,              No.1. (Jan. - Feb., 1989), pp. 32-42.

Omrod, J.E.  (2012). Human Learning (6^th ed.).  Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.