Chapter 5: Knowledge and Reasoning

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R55GQtmy-C89dLed-ZXe_PnwmRJO-qan/view                                         

                                     

             

                                                          Chapter 5: Knowledge and Reasoning 

                                                      Building a Knowledge Base 

Knowledge integration is a process through which learners put together information and experiences, identifying and establishing relationships and expanding frameworks for connecting them.  

Recent work in research suggests that the integration of knowledge is a natural byproduct of the formation and consolidation of episodic memories (Bauer, 2009; Bauer et al., 2012). Building a knowledge base requires doing three things: accumulating information; tagging this information as relevant or not; and integrating it across separate episodes. These three activities can happen quickly and automatically or slowly through deliberate reflection. However, these processes are not sufficient for integrating and extending knowledge. 

                     Knowledge and Expertise 

  When people repeatedly engage with similar situations or topics, they develop mental representations that connect disparate facts and actions into effective mental structures for acting in the world. One of the most well-documented benefits of the acquisition of knowledge is an increase in the speed and accuracy with which people can complete recurrent tasks: remembering a solution is faster than problem solving. Another benefit is that people who develop expertise can handle increasingly complex problems. A third benefit is an increase in the ability to extract relevant information from the environment. A fourth benefit of acquiring expert knowledge is that it helps people use their environment as a resource. Using what is known as distributed cognition, people can offload some of the cognitive demands of a task onto their environment or other people.  According to Gura, once students truly understand the problem, they are ready to solve it. This is where the creative community truly comes into play. Through collaboration, more minds are working on prototype solutions. Not only can students tap into their peers’ ideas, the feedback turns the classroom into a thought incubator where ideas are nurtured and grow (3 Steps to Creative Problem Solving in the Classroom, 2024). Finally, acquiring knowledge helps people gain more knowledge by making it easier to learn new and related information.  

Knowledge Integration and Reasoning 

  Learners of all ages know many things that were not explicitly taught or directly experienced, they routinely generate their own novel understanding of the information they are accumulating and productively extend their knowledge. The knowledge learners accumulate through their lifespan is the growing product of the processes of both learning new information from direct experience and generating new information based on reasoning and imagining (Salthouse, 2010). These two cognitive assets together – accumulated knowledge and reasoning ability are particularly relevant to healthy aging.  

   Strategies for Knowledge Retention 

  Researchers have explored a variety of strategies to support learning and memory. Researchers have identified five strategies for learning namely:  

1. retrieval practice; 

2.  spaced practice; 

3.  interleaved and varied practice;  

4.  summarizing and drawing, and; 

5.  explanations: elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, and teaching. 

The first three strategies are ways of structuring practice that are particularly useful for increasing knowledge retention. The other two strategies – summarizing and drawing and developing explanations – draw on inferential processes that research shows to be effective for organizing and integrating information for learning.  

Conclusion 

Learners identify and establish relationships among pieces of information and develop increasingly complex structures for using and categorizing what they learned. Strategies for supporting learning include those that focus on retention and retrieval of knowledge as well as those that support development of deeper understanding of what is learned.  

 

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2018). How people learn II : Learners, contexts, and cultures (pp. 85–106). The National Academies Press 

3 steps to creative problem solving in the classroom. (2024). ISTE. https://iste.org/blog/3-steps-to-creative-problem-solving-in-the-classroom 

‌