Sem perturbação

Without confusion.

It occurred to me earlier this month that I needed to figure out how to explain what I study/do to a person who knows pretty much nothing. This became apparent when I thought I’d explained what I do to someone, and the next thing I knew they were talking about personality tests, which, in case you were wondering, is not what I do.

I am also not studying to be a principal or an administrator. As I explained to my principal once, I’m not that crazy. He laughed at that.

I am in the Educational Psychology department. And I study learning theory. I like learning about what processes happen in our brain when we learn, how do we gain new knowledge, and how does our mind organize and retrieve the knowledge we do gain. We all know we learn things, but how does that happen? And how can we maximize our learning? What are the mechanisms by which we learn?

I have a bit of a reputation in the department for being on the cognitive side of things (cognition is one of several general groups of learning theories). My main interests are metacognition and social cognition.

I think a few definitions might be helful.

Cognitive (adj): of or pertaining to the mental processes of perception, memory, judgment, and reasoning, as contrasted with emotional and volitional processes.

Cognition (n): the mental process of knowing, including aspects such as awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment.

Metacognition (n): awareness and understanding one’s thinking and cognitive processes; thinking about thinking.

And then social cognition is the mental process of knowing through the people and tools around you.

So that’s what I study.

And now you know!

Did that make sense? You’d tell me if that didn’t make sense, right? Because if that doesn’t make sense then it means I’m still not explaining it well enough and I still need to work on it. Oh I hope that made sense.