Shifting to Online Learning Through Cognitive Flexibility

The chapter presents a review of the approaches to cognitive flexibility as an ability, behaviour, and executive function in psychology and neuroscience. In education, it was used to develop cognitive flexibility theory, which is treated as a pedagogical tool to enhance learners' information processing skills. The chapter also stresses the importance of cognitive flexibility in the context of transformation to distance learning in two universities of Russia and one in Turkey during the coronavirus pandemic in Spring-Fall 2020 when faculty members were forced to use flexible and creative solutions and approaches to resume the discontinued in-person learning online and maintain it.

Cognitive Flexibility Theory and the Accelerated Development of Adaptive Readiness and Adaptive Response to Novelty

This chapter examines expertise in complex and ill-structured domains from the perspective of cognitive flexibility theory (CFT). The emphasis is on adaptation under conditions of “ordinary novelty.” An approach to situational novelty via meta-features of an adaptive mindset that generalizes across cases in ways that content does not, and that fosters the skill of novel rearrangement of previously encountered case features in ways that are adaptive to new situations, is presented. The chapter describes CFT’s theoretical and empirical approach to combating rigidity and oversimplification, and to accelerating expertise in assembling “schemas of the moment” with learning based on the principled development and application of computer-supported case-based environments. Receiving special emphasis are many new modes of deliberate practice of adaptive flexibility. The chapter concludes with societal implications for today’s rapidly changing and increasingly complex world.

Flipped Classroom, Cognitive Flexibility Theory, and Cognitive Operators of Complexity

Researchers have presented several training models for teachers with the goal of developing TPACK. However, it is necessary to investigate how learning theories can help in the elaboration of these models. It is also essential to use a theoretical framework that provides guidance on how to deal with this complexity involved in TPACK and teacher training. This problem motivated the investigation of how a course based on a model that uses the cognitive flexibility theory (CFT), the cognitive operators of complexity and implemented in the flipped classroom can help in the development of the TPACK. The investigation was carried out through a case study. Participants were pre-service teachers at a Brazilian university. Data analysis allowed to identify that the course helped in the development of the TPACK by the teachers and to determine the positive aspects and the difficulties faced in the implementation of the proposed model.

Task Variation and Mental Models Divergence Influencing the Transfer of Team Learning

We investigate how teams develop and transfer general problem-solving skills across two ill-structured problems. We draw on cognitive flexibility theory in the instructional literature and propose that teams will achieve a higher performance on a novel task or transfer when they receive an external task intervention (i.e., task variation) and when the internal mechanisms (i.e., divergent mental models) are developed to make sense of the external intervention. To test these predictions, we designed a longitudinal experiment with 17 student teams that encountered task variation during their work on an initial task. Consistent with our predictions, we found that teams that experienced variations and whose mental models diverged during their work on an initial task achieved higher performance on a novel task than teams that experienced variation and whose mental models converged. Implications for the transfer of learning in teams on ill-structured problems are discussed.

Teachers’ Cognitive Flexibility on Engagement and Their Ability to Engage Students: A Theoretical and Empirical Exploration

Background Student engagement is a cognitively complex domain that is often oversimplified in theory and practice. Reliance on a single model overlooks the sophisticated nature of student engagement and can lead to misconceptions and limited understandings that hinder teachers’ ability to engage all of their students. Assessing varied models simultaneously frames student engagement as a dynamic process contingent upon interactions among many contextual variables. Purpose We explore the relationship between how high school teachers understand student engagement and their ability to consistently engage students in their classes. We present cognitive flexibility theory and its seven reductive biases to illustrate the complexity of engaging students across contexts and subjects. This theory makes a compelling a priori case that teachers who more consistently and effectively engage students in their classes are likely to be those who possess higher levels of cognitive flexibility in the domain of student engagement. To test this hypothesis empirically, we asked: Do teachers who are more effective at engaging students reveal more cognitive flexibility when discussing student engagement, as compared with teachers who are less effective at engaging students? Research Design We present a mixed-methods case study conducted over three years at one high school. We utilize annual student survey data to identify teachers with whom students reported relatively more and less classroom engagement. Then, we examine the comments of 18 teachers who participated in annual focus groups about student engagement across those three years to identify differences in how more and less engaging teachers express cognitive flexibility in their understanding of student engagement. Findings We find that teachers whom students found more engaging tended to illustrate more cognitive flexibility in how they thought and spoke about engagement. By contrast, teachers whom students rated as less engaging tended to see engagement in more simplistic and compartmentalized ways. Within these trends, the data provide evidence that individual teachers fall along the seven theorized continuums regarding the extent to which they demonstrated cognitive flexibility on engagement. Conclusions By bringing cognitive flexibility theory to the domain of student engagement, we call for a new research agenda focused on understanding the development of teachers’ knowledge of student engagement and, in turn, engaging instruction. In place of receiving a new model, tool, or checklist, teachers need opportunities to grapple with the complexity of engagement, to see and analyze various cases, and to build schema in relation to their classroom practice.