Cognitivism

Cognitivism was oriented to the 20th century by Wilhelm Wundt, the first psychologist. Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field involving in psychology, linguistics, computer science physiology, and etc. In contrast to behavioristic focus on behavior investigation, the cognitive school "went inside the head of the learner" to make the exploration of mental processes underlying behaviors. In cognitive theories, cognition is viewed as an internal process of individuals, which constructs and/or reconstructs information abstractly rather than a simple stimulus-response adaptation. The cognitivists discovered and modelled the mental processes on the part of the learner during learning process. From their view, learning is abstract reasoning, creative problem solving, complex information processing and active schema process. Cognitive theories have many implications for instruction, such as teaching learning styles, encouraging discovery, activating prior knowledge and so on.

Other resources:
http://www.uib.no/people/sinia/CSCL/web_struktur-834.htm
http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Explaining.Mind/0222.html

introduction|wundt|bartlett|gestalt|information processing model