Abstract:

Cognitive pedagogics is an important application of cognitive science, which also represents a new trend of pedagogics. It is obvious by now, that without deep understanding of the mechanisms of gathering and processing the information by a human, no great result will be achieved just by the development of outer forms of organization of an educational environment and communication, like new multimedia environments, etc. One of the most important aspects of cognitive pedagogics is the processes of formation of the structures of knowledge, also as the processes of gathering new knowledge out of already available information. We can understand them only relying on cognitive psychology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence researches.

The main phenomenon of pedagogics in theory and practice is comprehention. This phenomenon is not only difficult to determine theoretically, but also to give an empirical definition and hereby introduce its quantitive assessment. Our present educational system gives just an illusion of full understanding of its subjects and laws. According to these facts, it seems important for us to trace the connection of some theories of cognitive psychology with the phenomenon of comprehention.

First of these theories is introduced by Craik and Lockhart, and it depicts an original concept of memory, using “levels of processing”. If we take the depth or levels of comprehention the educational material as a basis, we get a useful theoretical conception, which may be applied in solving important problems of pedagogics, connected with comprehention. These can include the reliability of memorizing, the impact of difficulty of the educational material on the process of its assimilation, etc.

The second one is a dual coding theory by Paivio. The variant of this theory may be seen in our hypothesis that the information is stored in memory in a verbal-propositional form, and the representation of this information as an image, feeling, is created as a result of decoding the information from verbal propositions, to a form of space-object representation structures and is depicted on an “inner display”. Of the essence for pedagogics is the fact, that understanding may be interpreted as a result of dual decoding.

The problem of the estimation of results of comprehention is still insufficiently explored by the present day. We still cannot see the scientifically approved criteria of evaluation the subject’s knowledge and skills in various disciplines, including both humanitarian and technical. In these circumstances, this practical instrument of the evaluation of comprehention may be found in CI model of comprehention in its late variant, formed by Kintsch in 1998. An important practical drawback of this model is the ignorance of the problem of parsing of the linguistic representations into propositional microstructures. Hereby, the practical application of this model by now is found mostly in research projects. The author of this report had applied CI model in estimation of perception and understanding of the synthetized speech.

An attempt to overcome the main drawback of CI model has resulted in development of latent semantic analysis (LSA). LSA is a fully automated computational method of designing the representation of knowledge in a form of a semantic space with high dimensionality. In the presented report the results of experiments with LSA, held by the author of this report, are shown.

Keywords:

Cognitive science, cognitive pedagogics, levels of processing, CI model, LSA.