Conference Proceedings - School of Nursing & Midwifery - Trinity ...

School of Nursing & Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin: 8 th Annual Interdisciplinary Research Conference
Transforming Healthcare Through Research, Education & Technology: 7 th – 9 th November 2007
Conference Proceedings
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Cognitive Information Processing: its influence on the
teaching and learning that is employed in both the classroom
and clinical area.
Name: Madeline Gleeson
Address: St. Patrick’s Hospital,
James St.
Dublin 8.
Qualifications: RPN, RGN, BNS (Hons), MSc. RNT
Philosophical and psychological underpinnings adopted by the
teacher influence the teaching and learning that is employed in the
allocated setting. Nurse educators must become familiar these
underpinnings to facilitate student learning, which has mammoth
implications in the provision of quality nursing care.
According to contemporary psychologists and educators, learning is
viewed as a constructivist process in which the learner actively
seeks and constructs information on the basis of past experience
and knowledge. Therefore, teachers with this philosophy would not
have students memorise by rote learning but would give them
opportunities to meaningfully construct the knowledge and
understanding themselves. This philosophy suggests that human
beings act upon the environment rather than simply responding to
it, as the behaviourists would have it. Cognitive psychologists
acknowledge the role of the stimulus response theory in relation to
simple forms of learning however, the complexity of the learning
process is emphasised within the domains of memory, perception
and thinking. In nurse education these are of fundamental
importance, given that the learning process involves all three
domains.
Research on memory has received enormous attention in
experimental psychology, however in contrast to research on
learning; memory research has had little impact on education. This
is unfortunate since the value of education depends largely upon the
life span of what has been learned. Therefore, many cognitive
psychologists adopt an information –processing framework which is
based on the computer as a metaphor for the mind, to understand
how people acquire new information, how they store information
and recall it from memory and how what they already know guides
and determines what and how they will learn.
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