Perspectives on information processing systems and their application to educational theories and practices

Abstract

Education plays a major role in human cultural accumulation in modern industrialised societies, but, until recently, educational theories and practices were reliant on studies of learning and memory based in the social and behavioural sciences and historical practice. Education, however, has been influenced increasingly by studies in modern cognitive psychology, in particular those studies with a focus on learning and memory considered in terms of human environmental interaction and information processing. In contrast, studies based in the scientific empiricism of integrative biology, some of which have had a similar focus, appear to have had less influence. This thesis examines the focus on studies of learning and memory in both modern cognitive psychology and integrative biology and, in order to place such studies in a broad context, examines learning and memory processes in terms of environmental interactions and information processing in a range of organisms and non-organismal structures. On the basis of commonalities in such interactions and processes, novel conceptualisations of information and information processing systems are developed and used to construct an overarching framework that may be applied to the examination of learning and memory processes, in a broad sense, in all organisms and structures. Within this framework, memory is described in terms of the range of possibilities or potentialities of any entity of matter and energy, in a given time interval, and learning as any environmental information input or output that results in a change in that memory. This framework accommodates conventional views of human learning and memory and this thesis, therefore, outlines the potential application of the framework in human education. In particular, the framework is used to examine how educational theories and practices may be scientifically integrated, with the examination of the educational principles of cognitive load theory used as an illustrative example. The thesis examines also how both derived and novel generalised educational principles may be developed within this framework and applied in human education. Additionally, this thesis examines how the framework may be used in the development of generalised cognitive models that may be applied to the examination of educational theories and practices, in particular those that are based in the consideration of environmental interactions through examination of network theory and complexity theory.