Unit 2: Understanding and Using Principles of Memory, Thinking, and Learning

Please take a few minutes to list all of the skills that are necessary to succeed in school. Try to organize the list into categories. What skills and categories did you come up with?

Although there are many “right answers” to this question, one could make a strong argument that there are three main types of skills that lead to success in school:

• Mental activity that many people would judge as the basis for academic thought, things like memory, reasoning, problem solving, and critical thinking
• Interpersonal skills, such as getting along with instructors and classmates and being able to work in groups—in short, the ability to “work and play well with others”
• Intrapersonal skills, which involve understanding and managing yourself—including being aware of your strengths and weaknesses and being able to maintain focus and motivation

This unit is primarily devoted somewhat to the first category, the classic academic skills. The five modules in this unit describe the basic processes of memory, learning, reasoning, problem solving, and critical thinking. All are major concerns of the sub-field of psychology known as cognitive psychology, the study of cognition. Cognition is the mental activity that deals with perception and with knowledge: what it is, and how people understand, communicate, and use it. Cognition is essentially “everyday thinking.” (Note, the perception part of cognition will be covered in Unit 3)

This unit has two goals. The first is to show you how knowledge of the psychological principles of cognition can benefit you. The second goal is to show you how psychologists think about cognition.

By the way, although we will be talking a lot about using cognitive principles to succeed in school, these—and for that matter nearly all—psychological principles are relevant to life beyond school as well.

This unit is divided into five modules:

• Module 5. Memory, describes many of the important discoveries about memory and shows how to use the knowledge to improve your own memory.
• Module 6. Learning and Conditioning, introduces you to classical and operant conditioning, two of the most important types of learning. As you will see, however, they are not exactly what first comes to mind when you consider the concept learning.
• Module 7. Thinking, Reasoning, and Problem-Solving, details the discoveries that psychologists have made about many of the thinking skills beyond memory that you use in school and throughout your life.
• Module 8. Tests and Intelligence, places the common experience of tests into the contexts of the psychology of intelligence and the principles of test construction.
• Module 9. Cognitive Psychology: The Revolution Goes Mainstream, describes the ups and downs of interest in cognition throughout the history of psychology and, more generally, illustrates how research helps psychologists gradually develop a better understanding of human beings.