COGNITIVE STRATEGY

GROUP 11:
NUR LIRIYANTI INDRA
ANA NOVIYANTI
NAJMAWATI AZIS
ICP C2/III

DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS
FACULTY OF MATHEMATIC AND NATURAL SCIENCE
STATE UNIVERSITY OF MAKASSAR
2015
COGNITIVE STRATEGY

A. INTRODUCTION
The humans learning process is happening wherever they
are, conciously or unconciously. Almost all of the abilities, skills,
knowledges, habits, hobbies, and humans act is formed,
modificated, developed by learning (Suryabrata, 2002). This
mean that the learning process and anything connected with it
are important to the humans life, therefore its really important
for them to understand how the learning process happens and
what is the right concept of learning.
The learning process is influented by many factors. One of
them is human psychology. The psychology factor is hard to
observe while the teacher is encouraged to watch it happens
effectively. Then, a good solution blows up from educational
psychology. The educational psychology gives big constribution
for the teacher, for the education world.
B. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE PROCESS OF LEARNING
Learning is a famous term in education world. Learning
can be defined differently because the learning activity can
become many models. For example, remembering poems,
adding new vocabularies, and etcetera. But generally, learning
is defined as the change of humans behaviour from one level of
development to a bettel level.
Learning is influented by many factors: nonsocial, social,
fisiology, and psychology factor. The fisiology factor is very
influential to support the learning process happens, such as
curiousity, motivation to fix a failure, the want to get secure
when the human (student) can master certain topic and feeling
free from all anxieties, ambition, and etcetera.
In the psychology discipline, there is a term called
educational

psychology/cognitive

psycology.

Educational

psychology is one of the subvision of psychology that learn how

the humans development at their learning process included the

learning processes, motivation, and other things happen in

education world. Psychology and education have tight relation.
Education intend to change the humans behaviour from one
level to the next level, while the psychology serve the way to
make the effort come true.
In the psychology discipline, develop kinds of learning
theory which born from certain psychology paradigm. Those are
behaviouristic, cognitivistic, and constructivistic paradigm. The
behaviouristic paradigm interpret that the learning process is
the change of behaviour relatively permanent rising from
experiences and can be observed. The cognitivistic paradigm
explain that the learning process is the change of mind
influencing the change of habits. Constructivistic paradigm said
that the learning process happens as the impact of a knowledge
construction from someones experience.
Many of psychologists are not satisfied of the explanation
about

learning

processes

by

stimulus,

response,

and

strenghtening (behaviouristic). The basic opinion from these

specialists is that someones behavior is always based on
cognition to an event to know or to think about how the
behavior

is

happening.

The

cognition

they

meant

are

knowledge, believe, skill, hope, ambition, and much thing

inside the mind of the learner. The main focus in cognitive
paradigm is the potency to act, not the action.
The cognitive paradigm give three famous theory of
learning. Those are:
1. Cognitive Field Theory
This theory developed by Kurt Lewin (1892-1947).
According to this theory, learning process happened as
the impact of the change of cognitive structure. That is
the

change

of

cognitive

area

and

the

change

of

someones internal motivation. From this theory, we know

a cognition area where someone act (life space). Example,

the people we meet, objects we face, and the psyche

fucntion we have.
2. Schema Theory
The characteristic of this theory, there is a unique
knowledge

structure

called

schema

or

schemata.

Schemata is builded from the knowledge or experience

abstraction process. Schemata that has been build will
influent what we remember abour any knowledge, assist
us solve a problem better, and very good on helping us to
categorizing something. But, sometime schemata make us
fail to remember anything correctly.
3. Information Processing Theory
Information processing theory describe processing,
saving, and gathering knowledge by mind (Byrnes, 1996).
According to this theory, learning is about how the
information from the outside can be saved in memory. To
understand the processes easily, we use model. The most
famous model is the model from Atkinson and Shiffrin on
1968,

which

have

three

components,

they

are:

information store, cognitive process, and metacognition.

Information Store
Information store is an area to save any data,
information, and etc, analogied as a filling cabinet,
address book, or harddisc storage. For human, the
information store devided to three storages: sensory
memory, short-term memory (STM), and long-term
memory (LTM). These three things is signed by
structural characteristic such as how much and how
long the information is saved.
INFORMATION
(Stimulant from outside)

Sensory Memory

Short-term Memory
(STM)

Cognition Process
Long-term Memory (LTM)
Cognition process is a special ability of someone
in transferring informations from one storage to
another storage. This ability is different for one men
to another and this ability shows the level of
someones

intelligence.

happening

is

The

attention,

cognition

perception,

processes
rehearsal,

encoding, retrieval

Metacognition
Metacognition is a unique and special knowledge
and control of the cognition processes. Metacognition
control and coordinate the cognition process.

C. THE COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT THEORY BY PIAGET

Jean Piaget sure that the physically experiences

and

environment

the

manipulation

are

important

to

support

development. He said that the human thinking process as a step

by step development from a concrete intellectual thinking to an
ordered abstract intellectual thinking by four periods. They are:
1. Censor motor period (0-2 years old).
The characteristic of this period, there is some movements
as a live reaction from an princkling. The princkling occurs
because of the child is touching and watching any objects
around, but he/she does not has any concious yet.
2. Pra-operational period (2-7 years old).
At this period, the child start to make a decision
reflectively. The child start to named anything around using
symbols, but it is still difficult to understand the relation among
the symbols and pick a conclusion for the child.
3. Concrete operation period (7-11/12 years old)

Concrete operation period means the childs reflection is

logic-thinked based on physically manipulation of the objects.
The child does not count all of the possibilities yet, but he/she
still think about what is in his/her mind.
4. Formal operation period (11/12 up).
This is the last period of intellectual thinking development.
The child in this period has the ability to give an argument
using more symbols or ideas in how he/she think about
something. The child can solve problems better then the child
at before period.
D. WHAT IS COGNITIVE STRATEGY?
Specially, the learning process of a student can be very
influent by his/her cognition condition. A student is always
facing many things in the learning process which sometimes
really push down him/her and hard to organizing these things.
This is really happening to the student real life when facing lot
of tasks demanding to finish, and often the student even
doesnt know when that condition over. not all of the student
have same ability to understand a material, solve problems, and
many more. Many of them face a difficulty in those situations
and even they dont know how to fix their problems. So, the
psychologists developed a very good solution for kind students.
The solution is cognitive strategy.
Cognitive strategy can be defined as a tool helping the
students to face problems during the leraning process by using
their own mental control. Cognitive strategy means the use of
mind (cognition) to solve a problem.
Cognitive strategy is a useful formula or tool in assisting
students

with

learning

problems.

The

term

"cognitive

strategies" in its simplest form is the use of the mind (cognition)

to solve a problem or complete a task. In other words, cognitive
strategies enable us to organize and understand information in
different, often powerful, ways. Cognitive strategies may also be

referred to as procedural facilitators (Bereiter & Scardamalia,

1987), procedural

prompts (Rosenshine,

1997)

orscaffolds (Palincsar & Brown, 1984).

Cognitive strategies can be general or specific (Pressley &
Woloshyn, 1995). General cognitive strategies are strategies
that can be applied across many different disciplines and
situations (such as summarization or setting goals for what to
accomplish), whereas specific cognitive strategies tend to be
more narrow strategies that are specified toward a particular
kind of task (such as drawing a picture to help one see how to
tackle a physics problem). Specific strategies tend to be more
powerful but have a more restricted range of use. Effective
learners use both general and specific strategies.
A cognitive strategy serves to support the learner as he or
she develops internal procedures that enable him/her to
perform tasks that are complex (Rosenshine, 1997). Reading
comprehension is an area where cognitive strategies are
important.

self-questioning

strategy

can

help

students

understand what they read.

In a classroom where cognitive strategies are used, the
teacher fulfills a pivotal role, bridging the gap between student
and

content/skill

to

be

learned.

This

role

requires

an

understanding of the task to be completed, as well as

knowledge of an approach (or approaches) to the task that
he/she can communicate to the learner.
E. COGNITIVE AND METACOGNITIVE
People sometimes use another term that similar with
cognitive strategy. That term is metacognitive strategy. Some
people said that cognitive and metacognitive is not different,
just

like

Flavell

said.

Flavell

himself

acknowledges

that

metacognitive knowledge may not be different from cognitive

knowledge (Flavell, 1979). But, others say they are different.

Cognitive strategy is the use of the mind (cognition) to

solve a problem or complete a task. Whereas, metacognitive is
the self-reflection or "thinking about thinking" necessary for
students to learn effectively (Baker, Gersten, & Scanlon, 2002).
Metacognitive and cognitive strategies may overlap in
that the same strategy, such as questioning, could be regarded
as either a cognitive or a metacognitive strategy depending on
what the purpose for using that strategy may be. For example,
you may use a self-questioning strategy while reading as a
means of obtaining knowledge (cognitive), or as a way of
monitoring what you have read (metacognitive). Because
cognitive and metacognitive strategies are closely intertwined
and dependent upon each other, any attempt to examine one
without

acknowledging

the

other

would

not

provide

an

adequate picture.
F. THE IMPORTANCE OF COGNITIVE STRATEGY
There are several lines of research that support the
importance of cognitive strategies in learning and thinking. One
prominent line of research compares experts with novices or
proficient students with less proficient students (e.g., Chan,
Burtis, Scardamalia, & Bereiter, 1992; Chi, Bassok, Lewis,
Reimann, & Glaser, 1989). Researchers using these methods
have found significant differences in strategy use between more
and less proficient learners, reasoners, and problem solvers.
A second line of research experimentally examines the
effects of training students to learn by employing a strategy or
set of strategies (e.g., Graham, MacArthur, & Schwartz, 1995).
Many such studies have demonstrated that students who learn
the new strategies outperform those who did not learn the
strategies.

A third line of research comes from long-term classroom

experiments or quasi-experiments (Brown, Pressley, Van Meter,
& Schuder, 1996; Guthrie et al., 2004). These studies usually
last many months, often a whole school year. They contrast a
traditional school curriculum that does not focus much on
strategy instruction with curricula that teach students many
different cognitive strategies. These studies have shown that
with carefully designed instruction, students' performance on
measures

of

learning,

reasoning,

and/or

problem

solving

improves.
Finally,

researchers

have

compared

high-performing

schools with low-performing schools to see if they differ in their

emphasis on strategy instruction (e.g., Langer, 2001). A number
of studies have found that higher-performing schools do in fact
focus more on helping students learn effective cognitive
strategies than lower-performing schools do.
Much of the research on cognitive strategies has sought to
identify particular strategies that are effective on different kinds
of tasks. The remainder of this entry will examine strategies
that have proven to be effective in comprehension, writing,
problem solving, and reasoning, and discuss several effective
domain-general strategies for general self-regulation

REFERENCES
http://www.specialconnections.ku.edu/?
q=instruction/cognitive_strategies.
http://gse.buffalo.edu/fas/shuell/cep564/metacog.htm
http://www.education.com/reference/article/cognitive-strategies/
Hudojo, Herman. Strategi Mengajar Belajar Matematika. Penerbit: IKIP
Malang. Malang. 1990.