Cognitive Flexibility Theory

Cognitive Flexibility Theory focuses on the nature of learning in complex and ill structure domain. It emphasizes the advanced knowledge acquisition, which allows "flexible reassembly of preexisting knowledge to adaptively fit the needs of a new situation." (Sprio, Feltovich, Jacobson & Coulson, 1991). The cognitive flexibility theory intends to foster the learners' ability to spontaneously reconstruct their knowledge to adopt different situational demands (Spiro & Jehng, 1990).

Spiro and Jehng (1990) used Wittgnestein's (1953) " criss-crossed landscape" as an analogy to explain the complexity of the advanced knowledge acquisition.

"…because the complexity of a single region (issues, example, case) in a landscape would not be fully graspable in any single context, its full multifacetedness would be brought out by rearranging the sequence of sketch presentations in the album so that the region would be revisited from a variety of vantage points, each perspective highlighting aspects of the region inn a somewhat different way than the other perspectives." (p. 170)

The means to achieve the cognitive flexibility of the learner is to manipulate the way that knowledge is represented and the process that operate those mental representations. The major principles of doing these are:

• Reflecting the knowledge complexity to provide learners opportunities to establish the interconnections of the concepts and principles. The instruction should avoid presenting the problems as simple, linear sequences of decision-making process.
• Providing multiple representations of content: students should have access to the content in different times, in different contexts, for different purposes, and from different perspectives. (Sprio, Feltovich, Jacobson & Coulson, 1991). Multiple thematic organization of the content, multiple perspectives of the content can help learners to construct multiple representations of the content. Also, a variety of cases can be used to illustrate different themes and perspectives as well as to support a variety of contexts for knowledge applications.
• Supporting context-dependent knowledge: Knowledge cannot be oversimplified. The oversimplification isolates the knowledge from its context of use, segments the knowledge into discrete components, and represents the interrelationship of those components in a single unifying dimension. It is essential to provide contextual variability for different multiple knowledge representations and multiple interconnectedness of knowledge components (Sprio, Feltovich, Jacobson & Coulson, 1991).

References:
Spiro, R. J., Jehng, J. C. (1990). Cognitive flexibility and hypertext: Theory and technology for the non-linear and mulit-dimensional traversal of complex subject matter. In D. Nix and R. J. Spiro (Eds.), Cognition, education, and multimedia: Exploration in high technology. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Sprio, R. J., Feltovich, P. J., Jacobson, M. J., & Coulson, R. L. (1991). Cognitive flexibility, constructivism and hypertext: Random access instruction for advanced knowledge acquisition in ill-structured domains. Educational Technology, May, 24-33.