Concept of procedural knowledge,

Concept of procedural knowledge,

I. Overview of procedural knowledge

(1) concepts of procedural knowledge

Procedural Knowledge is related to "what to do" and mainly involves the application of concepts and rules. This kind of knowledge is basically consistent with the popular "skill" concept in China in terms of connotation and extension. Based on this, peilisheng (1996) defines skills as the ability to successfully complete a smart task or physical coordination task based on certain rules or procedures formed based on exercises. In terms of individual procedural knowledge, there are two manifestations. One is the procedural knowledge that an individual must move his or her body or organ in time and space to complete the task. For example, if someone wants to watch the sunrise at the top of the hill, he must climb the mountain to perform and complete the task. The complete presentation of such procedural knowledge requires two elements: one is to form the body's athletic ability, and the other is the displacement of the body or organ. It is similar to the concept of "Action skill", which is commonly used in the education field in China. The other is the procedural knowledge that can complete tasks without moving positions in an individual's time and space. For example, to prove whether two triangles are full, an individual can perform invisible operations by using the rules of the two triangles in the brain. This kind of procedural knowledge represents the same meaning as the commonly used "smart skills" concept. Cognitive Psychology is based on the cognitive learning results of garee, that is, cognitive learning results include verbal information, smart skills, and cognitive strategies, the procedural knowledge is divided into the smart skills used for external affairs and the cognitive strategies used for internal control.

(2) classification of procedural knowledge

The classification of everything is based on a certain classification principle, that is, the classification standard. You can also classify procedural knowledge from different dimensions.

E. His father made a distinction on smart skills--Smart skills are divided into two skills: external services and internal control--Two classification dimensions are proposed, namely general and special dimensions and automatic and controlled dimensions. In general and special dimensions, procedural knowledge can be divided into procedural knowledge in specialized fields and procedural knowledge in non-specialized fields. Procedural Knowledge in specialized fields is knowledge that can only be used for generative systems in special fields, such as the "four-Rule mixed operation rules" in mathematics and the various "syntax rules" in linguistics ". Procedural Knowledge in non-specialized fields refers to the knowledge that can span the general methods and steps of different learning fields, such as "know yourself and know what you want" and "learn what you want.

In terms of automation and control, procedural knowledge can be divided into automated procedural knowledge and controlled procedural knowledge. Automated procedural knowledge is composed of production systems that can be automatically activated after full exercise. For example, in foreign language learning, a proficient learner can directly and quickly express the meaning of the materials presented in front of himself in Chinese, in this process, he has been proficient in the use of grammar rules for foreign languages and Chinese languages and the conversion rules between the two languages. These rules are automated procedural knowledge for him. The Procedural Knowledge Controlled by consciousness refers to the knowledge of a production system that is not proficient and cannot be automatically activated, such as the knowledge of writing rules that a student has just learned.

Figure 6-4 level of complexity in smart skills

(E. Gagne, 1992)

After Dividing knowledge and skills and conducting systematic research, Garea divides them into five levels (namely, five levels) from low to high based on the complexity of smart skills ): identification, specific concepts, definitions, rules, and advanced rules. These five types of smart skills form a relationship between 6 and 4: Identification refers to distinguishing the similarities and differences between things, when we require students to distinguish two new or objects with their own characteristics in any discipline, this is just the simplest smart skill that requires identification, its acquisition can be explained by forming a series of stimulus-response links. The concept is to identify similar things with common characteristics. When we ask students to master a specific concept, this is a slightly more complex capability than discrimination, because it is obtained based on discrimination to extract the common features of such objects; the definition concept is to define things by defining features of concepts. When we require students to obtain a certain definition or rule, definition concepts or rules are generally defined by several concepts, or represent the relationship between several concepts. Therefore, they are slightly more complex than specific concepts, they must be obtained on the premise that students have obtained the concept of each part of the definition. Rules refer to the ability to use a single rule to handle affairs. When we ask students to solve the new problems they encounter for the first time, students must recall and use the rules they have obtained before they can solve the problem. A student will obtain an advanced rule, and the advanced rule specifically uses several rules at the same time to deal with the problem. In short, these five types of smart skills are not only a sequence from low level to advanced level, but also the acquisition of any advanced smart skills is based on the acquisition of lower level smart skills, it is developed based on the acquisition of lower-level smart skills.

Ii. Learning Process of procedural knowledge

(1) identifying learning

In his smart skill classification system, Gana places identification at the lowest layer, identification is the ability to make different responses to stimuli in a physical or physical dimension (Wu Qinglin: Educational Psychology, 48 pages, beijing, People's Education Press, 1999 .). As a result, the identification requires a corresponding reference object, and there is no way to produce the identification without the corresponding reference object. Based on the different nature of the object, smart skills include two subtypes: one is to identify a single thing or object in the objective real world, and the other is to identify two or more things or objects. The fundamental purpose of this type of identification is to "identify differences", that is, to identify the differences between the two things or objects acting on the sensory organs of the individual. This type of discrimination is extremely common in daily life. For this reason, garee sometimes calls this smart skill multi-discrimination (multiple discrimination ).

The process of identifying ability consists of two layers: one is the process of model acquisition, namely the process of "stimulus-response" chain learning, and the other is the process of pattern recognition.

Gane believes that the internal condition that affects the learning of discrimination is: "One of the conditions that an individual must have inside is, ability to recall and recover the different stimuli that must be present for such identification-response chains ...... When learning to respond to multiple stimuli, students must be able to behave as differently as these stimuli-a chain of responses ." (Wu Qinglin: Educational Psychology, 48 pp., Beijing, People's Education Press, 1999 .) "Some external conditions of learning are represented by some of the most basic learning principles. First, the principle of closeness must be in place, that is, the stimulus must immediately respond to it. Second, the reinforcement principle plays a particularly important role in identifying and learning, and should make reinforcement appear differently with correct and wrong responses. Third, repetition also plays an important role. The situations to be identified may need to be repeated multiple times in order to select the correct stimulus differences. For Learning multi-discrimination, More repetition is required ." (R. Gagne (1985), The Conditions of Learning and Theory of Instruction. Harcourt Brace College Publishers, p.51 .)

(2) Concept Learning

The psychological meaning of concepts refers to a kind of things or properties represented by symbols. It is a collection of essential attributes that are different between a kind of things and other things. Most concepts are composed of four components: Concept name, concept definition, concept example, and concept attribute. The introduction name is a collection of sound and form-in-One symbols. For example, "person" is the name of the class that "creates and uses tools" in the world. A conceptual definition is a sentence used to describe the essential characteristics of things. For example, "psychology is the subjective dynamic reflection of the brain on objective things ". A conceptual example is a special individual. The conceptual attribute is the characteristics of such things to distinguish other things.

Conceptual learning can summarize the Common Essential Features of similar things. Gagne divides concepts into two categories: concrete concept and defined concept ). A specific concept is represented by a specific object and can be observed directly, such as cups, books, trees, and lights. Definition concepts can be identified by a few integrations. They all contain abstract relationships. Therefore, they must be learned, such as psychology, consciousness, philosophy, and humanism.

Conceptual learning requires that students have the ability to distinguish, because conceptual learning usually involves the identification of basic concepts. As an external condition, examples that fall within the scope of this concept and examples that do not fall outside the scope of this concept need to be presented at the same time, requiring students to identify the characteristics of this concept. In addition, necessary reinforcement and exercises are required.

Defining concepts requires students to master the definition components in advance, such as the subject, object, and predicate. You also need to understand the syntax. The instructor needs to present the definition of the concept either orally or in writing so that the components of the definition can be entered into the student's working memory in an appropriate order. Similarly, to define a concept, you also need to give students various examples, including examples that do not fall into the scope of this concept, for students to recognize the characteristics of this concept.

(3) rule learning

Rules have two functions: one is to use them as the criteria for classifying things. In essence, such rules are a definition concept, and the other is to guide people to do things. "Rules govern the actions of people and enable people to prove the inner state of a certain relationship," Gagne concluded. A rule is not just a verbal statement that expresses a rule, for example, a proposition like 'The perimeter of a square is four times the length of its border, the rule must be related to the reasons why people always show regularity when there are countless changes to special stimuli. Therefore, rules are the ability to deduce actions that adapt to one type of operations in a type of stimulus situation. Based on this, we predict that the stimulation of the same type of specific relationship is linked." (R. Gagne (1985), The Conditions of Learning and Theory of Instruction. Harcourt Brace College Publishers, p.118, p.120.) rules here are essentially a capability.

Rule learning aims to acquire and master rules. Then, determine whether a rule is an individual's standard? For example, an elementary school student has already memorized the multiplication table in multiplication learning, but is actually facing "23 × 45 = ?" When the formula is reached, does this elementary school student have mastered the multiplication rule? The answer is no. The student only obtains verbal information. For this reason, gane has repeatedly stressed that the term "rule" cannot be the same as the verbal proposition that represents it. "When people can elaborate a proposition that represents a rule, people generally do not think that this rule has actually been obtained. To confirm that obtaining is only a verbal expression that has obtained rules, people must understand: (1) Can students identify the concepts contained in it; (2) can students reveal the relationships between these concepts. There are various ways to make this understanding, but in the final analysis, it is to see whether students can prove this relationship ." (R. Gagne (1985), The Conditions of Learning and Theory of Instruction. Harcourt Brace College Publishers, p.118, p.120.

Wu Qinglin summarized gine's discussions on the rules learning conditions and held that the internal conditions for rule learning are: understanding these sub-concepts that constitute the rules, this understanding means that students can identify each Member of an object, an event, or a relationship. If these premise concepts are ungrasped, rules cannot be properly mastered. If some concepts are obtained only as verbal information, they cannot fully grasp their meanings. There are five external conditions for rule-based Learning: first, the verbal guidance that affects rule-based learning should first state the behavior and operations that the teacher expects to display on the students after the completion of the learning. Second, speech guidance should then remind students of the sub-concepts that will appear in the rules to be learned. Third, the language prompts of the entire rule will be displayed. Fourth, the students are required to prove the verbal guidance of the relationship contained in the Rules. Fifth, pay attention to the use of reinforcement principles in rule learning. After the students fully prove the rules, teachers should praise and praise them. (Wu Qinglin: Educational Psychology, 66 ~ 67 pages, Beijing, People's Education Press, 1999 .)

Rule learning is generally manifested in two basic forms. The first is the learning from examples to rules. It is a form of upper-level learning involved in the osouber assimilation theory, which is what we usually call discovery learning. The second is learning from rules to examples, that is, a form of lower-level learning, which is commonly used in teaching practice.

Iii. Teaching Strategies of procedural knowledge

Modern Cognitive psychologists divide the acquisition of procedural knowledge into three stages. (1) Cognitive stage. At this stage, students will use their existing effective methods to achieve a certain purpose and make a declarative explanation of a certain skill, and the encoding of initial declarative features for the conditions and actions of this skill. (2) contact phase. At this stage, the knowledge of the original guiding behavior will undergo two transformations: first, the initial characterization of skills will gradually become procedural knowledge in special fields; second, the association between production patterns that make up each part of the program will be enhanced. (3) Automation stage. At this stage, the entire program itself will be further refined and coordinated. Based on the three-stage theory obtained by procedural knowledge, the teaching of procedural knowledge can be carried out from three aspects in the process of education and teaching: to help students automate sub-skills or prerequisite skills; helps students merge small programs into large ones; helps students program these skills so that students do not have to consider the program itself, you can use the program's target and child target structure.

(1) Sub-skills or prerequisite skills

When a person is preparing to execute a complex cognitive skill, it is obviously impossible to successfully and smoothly execute the whole skill if he or she is not sure about some of the skills or has reached the degree of automation. As a matter of fact, this idea has been infiltrated both in the study hierarchy theory of Gana and in the grasp and learning to adapt to individual differences. Anderson once pointed out that Gagne had resolved its sub-skills from many of the skills that need to be taught, and from these sub-skills again broke down their sub-skills. For example, we can think of algebra as a sub-skill of calculus, while arithmetic is a sub-skill of algebra, and basic computing skill is a sub-skill of arithmetic. In his view, the key to a successful instructional design is to determine the level of such correct sub-skills. The course aims to teach each sub-skill at this level separately. Similarly, in learning to adapt to individual differences, students are allowed to advance at their respective learning speeds and to provide a test on students' mastery of various teaching objectives. If you have not achieved the goal after teaching, you need to provide additional teaching time until the goal is mastered. This teaching is also designed to ensure that each student learns the necessary prerequisite knowledge, and provide the required sub-skills to master new complex skills. If the instructors can make appropriate designs for the Goals and tests they have mastered, this kind of teaching is actually to master the sub-skills as they must achieve Automated Teaching Procedures.

(2) Promote combination

Teachers should give students the opportunity to combine small programs into large ones. In the view of cognitive psychologists, in the second stage of procedural skills, only a few small production patterns were initially formed. Once some small production patterns were formed, the combination between them may occur. In order to promote the generation of such combinations, two small production patterns must be continuously active in the working memory, so that the human information processing system may notice that, the previous generative action creates conditions for the launch of the latter generative action. The resulting new generative action contains both the conditions of the previous generative action, it also contains two generative actions, and the latter generative condition is deleted as redundant information.

Exercise and feedback are two important factors in helping students combine basic skills, because each exercise gives two associated production patterns the opportunity to activate them simultaneously in the working memory, it also gives them the opportunity to synthesize them. How much feedback should be provided in the exercise and when feedback should be provided appear to be a controversial question. On the one hand, research reveals that timely feedback is very important because it enables students to correct errors in time and avoid making mistakes an automated component of basic skills. However, some research also pointed out that timely feedback or excessive feedback may be harmful. In this case, students may become overly dependent on feedback, which often interferes with task learning. Bloom once compared individual mentoring systems with formal classroom teaching systems. He found that average students with Individual tutors are superior to excellent students in formal classrooms because, the guidance of Individual tutors may provide timely feedback based on the needs of students. However, individual mentoring systems are costly, so it is impossible to assign a full-time instructor to every student. In this regard, computer-assisted teaching seems a hope, it provides feedback based on the needs of students. Of course, sufficient understanding is required to provide such feedback. It was once a major obstacle for computers to have such ability to judge and understand, but successful reports have been reported in recent years.

(3) Promote procedural

Once students have achieved automation in some small production patterns and begin to combine these small production patterns into large production patterns, what teachers need to do to automate the entire skill for students is to ensure that the students practice a series of production steps included in the entire program, instead of the production steps of individual exercises. With the successful execution of this action sequence again and again, the association of each step in the entire program will replace the previous and later steps to replace the conscious thinking or search process.

One of the obstacles to programming is that students may be tired of doing so many exercises. Schneider (1985) once suggested using standard feedback to provide external reinforcement for completing a set of exercises. This is a reference, however, the other major difficulty encountered in implementing the Program is that students often learn the synthesis of different part of the skills, however, I do not know the relationship between these skills and when to use them properly. For example, after some exercises, when students are explicitly required to perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, and Division operations, the students can quickly and accurately recognize them, however, once a specific application scenario is encountered, you do not know the operation to be used, or you do not know how to use addition for testing. It seems that, while realizing the procedural nature of a combination of skills, teachers still need to consider how to make students learn to identify the conditional schemas associated with specific actions, understand the relationship between each sub-skill and the relationships between the combined skills and the overall goal. A variant strategy is usually used to solve this problem. For example, when teaching various computations, students should be provided with actual application situations containing mixed operations to help students recognize the conditions appropriate to these methods when using them. Because the situation of mixed exercises helps students understand that the calculation method should be associated with a specific goal. If the calculation method is not associated with the goal in the exercise, students may just learn to execute a program correctly, but do not learn how to use them properly, because they do not know that a specific program is only applicable to a specific situation.

In recent years, although people have been emphasizing learning objectives and basic competence in curriculum planning, some cognitive psychologists, including Anderson, believe that, although this method has produced some beneficial learning results, it does not seem sufficient to expect students to integrate their sub-skills into a compound program. To enable students to fully understand when to use these sub-skills (not only how to execute these sub-skills), students must also practice in certain situations, in order to have a clearer understanding of the relationship between sub-skills. Only by making extensive exercises on subprograms that contain combinations can students combine small Generative Patterns into large generative collections, and understand and explore the inherent relationship between the generative set.

Summary

Procedural Knowledge is an individual's "what to do" knowledge, mainly involving the application of concepts and rules. After Dividing knowledge and skills and conducting systematic research, Gana divides them into five levels (namely, five levels) from low to high based on the complexity of smart skills ): identification, specific concepts, definitions, rules, and advanced rules. Different levels of procedural knowledge have different learning rules. An effective strategy to promote procedural knowledge is to master sub-skills or prerequisite skills, promote combination and promote procedural knowledge.