Cognitive apprenticeship is a model of the process whereby a skilled person or specifically master passes as a skill to an apprentice. The apprentice is the trainee who is getting the lesson on the skilled master. Constructive models to human learning have amounted to the development of this theory of cognitive apprenticeship. The theory indicates that masters of skill most frequently ignore the implied and understood processes that should be followed when implementing complex skills when the trainees are being taught (Brown & Stefaniak, 2016). To deal with these trends, cognitive apprenticeships are created such that the intended implicit processes can be seen and not ignored, as well as the students can perceive, design, and implement them as the teacher helps them.
Albert Bandura’s (1997) theory of modeling supports this theory, suggesting that for modeling to be fruitful, the learner must pay a lot of attention, access and recollect information taught, must be driven in learning new skills, and should have the potential to precisely repeat or produce the expected skill. Through incorporating processes like modeling and coaching, cognitive apprenticeships also inspire the three levels of skill acquisition namely the cognitive level, the associative level, and the autonomous stage (Brown & Stefaniak, 2016). The cognitive stage advocates that trainees have a declarative comprehension of the skill. In the associative level, errors and inaccuracies gained during the cognitive level of learning are identified and removed while relationships between the critical components that are part of the skill are supported. In the autonomous level, the learner’s skills become enhanced and refined until the learner reaches to an expert stage.
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The research by Hoover (2008) indicates that part of the success of the cognitive apprenticeship concept comes from learning in context. It is easy to gain skills more easily if I had a background of driving through learning articles on the skill. Brown and Stefaniak, (2016) further emphasize that the context in which the process of gaining skills occurs is crucial. Cognitive apprenticeships are not as effective when skills and models are expressed by not considering the real-world situation or circumstances (Hoover, 2008). As the researchers indicate, circumstances might be said to help create knowledge through activities. Thus, both learning and cognition are possibly essentially blended. In cognitive apprenticeships, the activities being portrayed are demonstrated in real-world circumstances.
The concept has been applied in very many settings, including educational facilities and organizations. There are workshops organized for impoverished people in a society to acquire some skills and be able to sustain themselves. The apprentice is able to learn a trade like tailoring, wiring, woodworking, artwork, and among others in such workshops. The apprentice learns these by working under a master teacher who has the skills that he or she intends to learn. Cognitive apprenticeships help the master to be able to have a program of model behaviors in a real-world situation with cognitive modeling (Brown & Stefaniak, 2016). Through being attentive to the master when he/she is explaining what he/she is doing and thinking as he/she plans the skill, the learner can recognize pertinent behaviors and come up with a conceptual framework of processes that are incorporated. The trainee then endeavors to reproduce those behaviors through him with the master monitoring and showing guidance.
A real-world situation occurred when I was learning how to drive. First, I had observed when my cousin was driving the vehicle in the middle of a busy highway. At one point, I thought that it was easy even though I was worried about how the other people were driving the cars so fast. I even started learning it by observing how he was engaging the gears. I sought his indulgence, and after showing me how to switch the gears and pressing the clutch before holding on the accelerator, I tried it and could not go further. It took me three months to have the confidence in driving on the road. In fact, at one point, I decided to join a driving school with the perception that it would make me more confident to even drive on a highway. I must admit that the one-month training at the driving school helped me gain the skills to be confident on the road. However, I have a feeling that if I could have applied the cognitive apprenticeship when I was with my cousin, I might have learned the skill immediately and in a faster way.
A cognitive apprenticeship would have helped my quick learning of the most critical things in driving. That is, it could help as the apprentice gain driving skills just beyond what I could have accomplished by learning the driving myself through observing my cousin. Hoover (2008) described this as the Zone of Proximal Development and he reiterated that encouraging development within this level yields greater results for the learner. Could I have indulged the concept of cognitive apprenticeship at the driving school, the coaching process would entail extra modeling, corrective responses, and prompts, all geared towards bringing my performance not far from my master’s. I also understood that practice or repetition of this process would make me have more skills about driving. I also realized that the driving instructor had fewer comments and instructions as I gained the skills overtime almost to an expert level. Therefore, the concept of cognitive apprenticeship would have quickly helped me in my acquisition of driving skills.
References
Brown, J. A. S., & Stefaniak, J. E. (2016). The design of a cognitive apprenticeship to facilitate story time programming for librarians. Contemporary Educational Technology,.
Hoover, A. L. (2008). Educational learning theories : Informing the fundamentals of instruction . International Journal of Applied Aviation Studies, 8(2), 363–370.7(4), 331–351.
