I am delighted and honored to be here. Unfortunately, you gave me an almost impossible assignment in about five minutes, I am supposed to provide a useful summary of what we know about human learning and cognition with suggestions for future research. In the short time allocated, I plan to share some of my excitement about advancements in the learning sciences with you and suggest some ways to translate our knowledge of human cognition into meaningful school reform with the hope that you will continue to explore the findings and ideas at some later time. My academic area is cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology is the empirical branch of psychology that deals with questions about how people think, learn, and remember.
Cognitive psychologists study how people acquire, utilize, organize, and retrieve information.
We study topics like memory, decision making, problem identification and solving, critical thinking, and reasoning. It is clear that a successful pedagogy that can serve as a basis for the enhancement of learning will have to incorporate ideas about the way in which learners organize knowledge and internally represent it, and the way these representations change and resist change when new information is encountered. It seems that even cognitive psychologists apply very little of what they know about their academic discipline to their teaching. The gap between empirically validated theory and practice is wide. This idea first came to me as I sat through a deadly dull three-hour lecture on the shortness of the human attention span.