Cognitive Views of Learning: Complex Cognitive Processes

Seventh grade students were shown a powerpoint presentation and read a chapter in their grammar text books on how to determine the pattern of a sentence by determining the complement of the verb. This tasks requires a multi-step thought process that many students seem resistant to. They want to be able to look at the sentence and determine the pattern.

Although linked to their understanding of what the sentence means grammar further requires that students understand the function of the individual words in the sentence. Being able to determine sentence patterns requires the understanding of several parts of speech, being able to differentiate between action and linking verbs,determining subjects and predicates, identifying prepositional phrases, and identifying complements.

To solve the problem of sentence patterns requires that these cognitive tasks be completed in a sequential order and involves a divisive choice after determining the verb type: action or linking,which nescessarily changes what processes the learner uses. Despite being able to read and understand the information required for the task as separate concepts, some students have difficulty performing the complex cognitive processes needed to solve the problem of identifying the correct sentence pattern.

I believed that an algorithmic representation of the complex cognitive processes involved in solving the problem of identifying the correct sentence pattern. The flow chart diagrams the complex cognitive processes invoved in solving the problem of identifying sentence patterns. My hope is that students can use this as a guide as they identify sentence patterns in various examples and after a series of repetitions, will begin to commit this thought process to memory.

Sentence patterns algorithm with hyperlinks

I realized after spending quite of bit of time creating this in Inspiration that because of the size of the canvas and the fonts I chose to use, some of the text was not displaying well. I am in the process of editing both the html and jpeg versions of this to correct that problem.