The Virtual Environment

The optimization of such learning factors in an educational program with technological bases facilitates a better exploitation of the student’s cognitive capabilities. For this to occur, it would be necessary to build a virtual environment where the pupil was motivated to join; where he could show initiatives and feel good about it; where he would interact, through his senses, with the object of study; and where he would be allowed to guess the object’s rules, patterns of behavior, and its relations with his reality. Also it would be important to let him make mistakes, and to construct his own "base of knowledge" on the subject.

Schank suggests several learning environments that make use of various cognitive strategies striving to construct these ideal conditions for learning. His architecture uses features that: a) explore the perceptive realm; b) work with emotions, trying to motivate the student; c) let the student himself determine his own rhythm of learning; d) lead the pupil to thinking and to making up rules about the situations just experienced; e) bring the object of study closer to the pupil’s own reality through simulations; and f) guide the student into exploring diverse possibilities, so he may build different perspectives on what is being studied.

For an effective use of all the cognitive learning strategies, it is necessary to develop an environment that permits interactions between factors as described in fig. 3. Such environment needs to take in consideration not only the factors themselves, but also their interactions, and to allow emotional, sensorial feedback or both, giving motivational continuity to the learning process. It is important to remember that, as Piaget defends, change is the natural state of the human being - we are in constant balancing process, perceiving it as "a succession of the subject’s active compensations in response to exterior disturbances and to certain regulating factors, at the same time, of retroactive (ring systems or feedback) and anticipatory nature, constituting a permanent system of such compensations" (Piaget, 1966).

An environment of such nature can also be constructed in the Internet, using technologies of artificial intelligence and of broadband data communication. Today’s Internet’s interactive nature allows the environment to supply the student with real feedback, creating challenges, stimulating curiosity and offering perspective (motivational factors). It also enables the creation of complex problems pertinent or adjacent to the student’s object of study, leading him to use his logical-mathematical faculties and to establish relations between premises (intellectual factors). The possibilities of contacting other people, or intelligent tutors themselves - something a virtual environment necessarily would have - gives the pupil the option of relaxation, of focusing on other areas, exchanging experiences, and relief of any emotional tension inherent to the solution of particularly difficult problems (emotional factors). Finally, the ample scope of available multimedia features makes the exchange of information possible between the environment and the pupil using different senses, complementing and strengthening all important content, calling for the use of several mental abilities (sensorial factors). The creation of a complete environment is already possible with the tools currently available by simply forming a multidisciplinary team and having appropriate financial support for the project.

Conclusions

Cognitive learning strategies can be understood as a conjunction of factors that define a variety of interactive ways responsible for the amplitude of an individual’s knowledge. The knowledge of such factors (emotional, motivational, sensorial and intellectual) allows the educator to prepare all pedagogical content more efficiently and to offer his students, effectively, a much better learning process. These factors are also important in the creation of virtual environments. The experiences of Schank demonstrate the potential of a natural educational approach, but maintain the existence of these factors implicit. The realization of their existence could define a new methodology of work in the construction of such environments, focused not only on natural learning, but also in the interaction between emotional, sensorial, motivational and intellectual factors in the formation of a permanent learning cycle, where the individual would be continuously motivated, moved, challenged, and sensorially interpellated, in a learning space full of stimuli and feedback.

Research in this area could find support in the theories of LeDoux, Goleman and Greenspan, regarding the emotional and motivational factors; in the Gestalt theories and in the biological foundations of the senses, for a more profound approach on sensorial aspects; in the studies of the cognitivists, like Piaget, Pinker and Pozo, about the intellectual aspects; and in the works of scientists on artificial intelligence, like Dennet, Schank and Minsky, among many others.

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