Abstracts - Earli

Models of the cognitive process and educationAndreas Demetriou, University of Cyprus, CyprusThis paper will first present an outline of information processing models of developing mind.These models presume that the mind involves general-purpose processes defining and constrainingprocessing potentials, such as meaning making efficiency, executive control, and representationalcapacity, domain-general processes underlying self-monitoring and self-regulation, and domainspecificthought systems underlying representation and processing of different types ofinformation, such as categorical, quantitative, causal, verbal, spatial, and social thought. Learningat each phase of life depends on the condition and dynamic relations between all of theseprocesses. The presentation will show how school performance in subjects such as science,mathematics, and language, depends on each of these processes. Specifically, we will show that upto 70% of the total variance of school performance in these subjects can be predicted from thecombination of these processes. Moreover, we will also describe experiments showing how theprofile of different persons in concern to these processes shapes what can be learned and howlearning can be efficient. For instance, we will show that persons who are high in processingefficiency and representational capacity need less direction in teaching than persons who are weakin these dimensions. The implications of these models and findings for the education of teachers,educational planning and practice will be discussed.Assessing reason and intellect, school achievement and learning-to-learn: complex cross-sectionaland developmental relations of heterogeneous measuresJarkko Hautamäki, University of Helsinki, FinlandThe new concept of learning to learn has been adopted in response to modern de-mands ofcompetencies pertaining to lifelong learning. It refers to the cognitive and affective fac-tors centralto the application of existing skills to no-vel tasks and to new learning. The L2L frameworkembraces this idea of general tools formed through good teaching but acknowledges the manystructural constraints imbedded in learning and development. The indicators for learning to learnare based on a modified version of Snow’s model for educational assessment. Learning to learn isseen to comprise and adhere to several theoretical traditions within the educational sciences. Theindicators then combine the theoretical background with a practical solution to the problem ofassessing a multi-dimensional phenomenon in school setting. Learning to learn is not seen as alatent feature that can be covered by a singular one-dimensional measurement model, but more toresemble the nomological network, and to take advantage of Gustafsson’s ideas of the role ofheterogeneous tests for understanding a construct. In the presentation we use several crosssectional, repeated and longitudinal data, collected in Finland, with Finnish Learning-to-LeanScales, FILLS (www.helsinki.fi/CEA), using representative 5 % samples of Finnish schools andpupils, ages 12, 15 and 17, to describe the relations between constructs. It is possible to show thatthe relations, say correlations and correlated vectors, remain for cognitive skills essentially thesame, and that the beliefs and attitudes are changing following different courses, and, lastly, thatthe relationships between cognition and attitudes are also changing when the students step in theireducational path from a very homogenous primary schools, to homogenous lower secondary intoheterogeneous upper secondary schools.– 792 –