The conceptualisation of cognitive tools in learning and teachnology: A review <s> Knowledge representation, interactivity, and distributed cognition <s> This game has an adjustable support to be worn around the torso of a player. A resilient ball is tethered to the support with a flexible cord. The length of the flexible cord is adjustable to a suitable length for allowing the ball to be hit in a forward stroke by a person wearing the adjustable support, passed partially around the torso of the wearer and be hit in a reverse stroke. The adjustable support and the tether may be formed from a single, flexible cord with one loop for adjustment around the torso and a second loop for adjustment of the length of the tether. This game allows a single player to maintain a volley with alternate forehand and backhand strokes. <s> BIB001 </s> The conceptualisation of cognitive tools in learning and teachnology: A review <s> Knowledge representation, interactivity, and distributed cognition <s> We examine how technologies, particularly computer technologies that aid in cognitive processing, can support intellectual performance and enrich individuals’ minds. We distinguish between effects with and of a technology: Effects with occur when people work in partnership with machines, whereas effects of occur when such partnerships have subsequent cognitive spin-off effects for learners working away from machines. It is argued that effects both with and of depend on the individual's mindful engagement in the partnership. Such mind-machine collaborations also invite reexamination of prevailing conceptions of intelligence and ability: Are they properties of the individual or of the joint system? We respond to these dilemmas by offering two views, one emphasizing mainly the upgraded performance in a person-machine system of partnership, the other emphasizing more the educationally valued cognitive residue that can result. The use of computer tools to extend the reach of minds is briefly discussed within w... <s> BIB002 </s> The conceptualisation of cognitive tools in learning and teachnology: A review <s> Knowledge representation, interactivity, and distributed cognition <s> Tools are extensions of human beings that partially differentiate humans from lower order species of animals. Other species of animals have discovered tools, but have been unable to conceive needs to construct tools or incorporate tools into their cultures. Throughout history, humans have developed mechanical tools to facilitate physical work. The wheel and lever provided humans with an enormous mechanical advantage. The industrial revolution added artificial sources of power to extend that advantage. The electronic or information revolution has further extended that advantage by extending the functionality and speed of tools. Computers now perform tasks at speeds which are orders of magnitude greater than humans with or without more primitive tools were capable of. <s> BIB003 </s> The conceptualisation of cognitive tools in learning and teachnology: A review <s> Knowledge representation, interactivity, and distributed cognition <s> Introduction Traditionally, instructional technologies have been used as media for delivering instruction, that is, as conveyors of information and tutors of students. Whn used in this way, information is "stored" in the technology. During the "instructional" process, learners perceive and try to understand the messages stored in the technology as they "interact" it. Interaction is often limited to pressing a key to continue the information presentation or responding to queries posed by the stored program. The technology program judges the learner's response and provides feedback, most often about the "correctness" of the learners response. Technologies that have been developed by instructional designers are often marketed to educators as "validated" and "teacher proof," removing any meaningful control of the learning process by the learners or the teachers. In this paper, we argue that technologies should not support learning by attempting to instruct the learners, but rather should be used as knowledge construction tools that students learn with, not from . In this way, learners function as designers, and the computers function as Mindtools for interpreting and organizing their personal knowledge. Mindtools are computer applications that, when used by learners to represent what they know, necessarily engage them in critical thinking about the content they are studying (Jonassen, 1996). Mindtools scaffold different forms of reasoning about conent. That is, they require students to think about what they know in different, meaningful ways. For instance, using databases to organize students’ understanding of content organization necessarily engages them in analytical reasoning, where creating an expert system rule base requires them to think about the causal relationships between ideas. Students cannot use Mindtools as learning strategies without thinking deeply about what they are studying. <s> BIB004 </s> The conceptualisation of cognitive tools in learning and teachnology: A review <s> Knowledge representation, interactivity, and distributed cognition <s> I. WHAT ARE MINDTOOLS? WHAT DO THEY DO? 1. What Are Mindtools? 2. Critical Thinking: The Goal of Mindtools. II. SEMANTIC ORGANIZATION TOOLS. 3. Databases as Mindtools. 4. Semantic Networks (Concept Maps) as Mindtools. III. DYNAMIC MODELING TOOLS. 5. Spreadsheets as Mindtools. 6. Expert Systems as Mindtools. 7. Systems Modeling as Mindtools. 8. Microworlds as Mindtools. IV. INTERPRETATION TOOLS. 9. Intentional Information Search Tools as Mindtools. 10. Visualization Tools as Mindtools. V. KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION TOOLS. 11. Hypermedia as Mindtools. VI. CONVERSATION TOOLS. 12. Synchronous Conferencing as Mindtools. 13. Asynchronous Conferencing as Mindtools. VII. IMPLEMENTING MINDTOOLS. 14. Entailments of Mindtools. 15. Assessing Learning with Mindtools. <s> BIB005 </s> The conceptualisation of cognitive tools in learning and teachnology: A review <s> Knowledge representation, interactivity, and distributed cognition <s> Contrary to system-controlled multimedia learning environments, hypermedia systems are characterized by a high level of interactivity. This interactivity is referred to as learner control in the respective literature. For several reasons this learner control is seen as a major advantage of hypermedia for learning and instruction. For instance, learner control might increase students’ interest and motivation, facilitate adaptive instruction, or provide affordances for active and constructive information processing. In this paper we analyze the instructional potentials of learner-controlled hypermedia environments as well as possible reasons for the ambiguous results of studies that have aimed at determining the effectiveness of hypermedia learning. According to our analysis, the potential effectiveness of self-controlled learning with hypermedia might be difficult to demonstrate due to (1) usability problems (i.e., disorientation, distraction, cognitive overload), (2) moderating learner characteristics (i.e., prior knowledge, self-regulatory skills, cognitive styles, and attitudes towards learning), (3) a lack of conceptual foundations, and (4) methodological shortcomings of many hypermedia studies. The findings reviewed in this paper and the corresponding claim that hypermedia may be effective only if used in a sensible way are used to derive a couple of guidelines for further research on hypermedia learning. <s> BIB006 </s> The conceptualisation of cognitive tools in learning and teachnology: A review <s> Knowledge representation, interactivity, and distributed cognition <s> This study examined a new prewriting tool, argumentation vee diagrams (AVDs), which are used to write reflective opinion essays. AVDs are based on the theoretical concept of argument-counterargument integration, which involves evaluating and integrating both sides of an issue before developing a final conclusion on a controversial question. In a test of the effectiveness of AVDs, 45 undergraduates at a large, southwestern university were randomly assigned to an experimental or control group. Both groups wrote 4 opinion essays over a 4-week period. The experimental group also received training on using the AVDs, including instruction on criteria for weighing arguments. Results indicated that AVD training was effective in enhancing argument-counterargument integration. Furthermore, examination of integration strategies used by participants revealed a new strategy, minimization, which was not previously part of E. M. Nussbaum and G. Schraw's (2007) argument-counterargument integration framework. Minimization involves curtailing the importance or extensiveness of a problem or advantage as a heuristic shortcut for weighing advantages and disadvantages. The role of critical questions and argumentation schemata in argument-counterargument integration is discussed. <s> BIB007 </s> The conceptualisation of cognitive tools in learning and teachnology: A review <s> Knowledge representation, interactivity, and distributed cognition <s> Dynamic visualisations capture aspects of scientific phenomena that are difficult to communicate in static materials and benefit from well-designed scaffolds to succeed in classrooms. We review research to clarify the impacts of dynamic visualisations and to identify instructional scaffolds that mediate their success. We use meta-analysis to synthesise 47 independent comparisons between dynamic and static materials and 76 comparisons that test the effect of specific instructional scaffolds. These studies show that dynamic visualisations are better than static visuals at promoting conceptual inferences about science, consistent with the success of inquiry instruction in science. To realise this potential of dynamic visualisations, instruction needs to help students use the dynamic visualisation to make sense of their own ideas. Scaffolds that are most successful include prompts for reflection, prompts to distinguish among parts of the visualisation, visual cues that identify salient features, multiple visu... <s> BIB008
Over time, the conceptualisation of cognitive tools has taken on multiple new meanings and shifted markedly from its roots in Soviet psychology. BIB001 conceived of cognitive tools as constituents of culture that mediate instructional interactions and are internalised to become integral to learners' psychology and behaviour. Later, educational technology theorists such as Jonassen invoked different and sometimes conflicting conceptualisations to identify several types of software programs as cognitive tools and described how using them reorganises the cognitive structures of learners. Our systematic review showed how the term has gained significant currency in peer-reviewed research -most prominently in the field of educational technology but also educational psychology and other areas of educational research. We found authors often claimed that the learning technologies they wrote about were cognitive tools without defining the term and without describing which features qualify the technology as a cognitive tool. Given the varying meanings and interpretations encountered in this review, we recommend that authors explain how they interpret the term cognitive tool, and -if they are referring to a particular diagram, idea, interface, or software application -explain why their purported instance should be considered a cognitive tool. The lack of definitional consensus also implies that, rather than review research on the broad concept of cognitive tools, meta-analyses should focus on specific features or categories of cognitive tools such as learner control in hypermedia environments BIB006 or the instructional effectiveness of visualisation tools BIB008 . Although we found disagreement about the definition of cognitive tools, we believe a core conceptualisation consisting of three attributes has emerged from BIB001 ,  ,  , BIB003 , Lajoie (1992) , and several other theorists reviewed in the initial section of this article. Two of the attributes are alluded to by Preiss and Sternberg (2006, p. 15) when they explain that technologies designed as cognitive tools: predominantly afford transformations on the symbolic aspects of cultural life and, eventually, transformations of the users of those technologies. In so doing, cognitive tools, as systems of representation, play a central role in both cultural evolution and cognitive development. First, a cognitive tool is a system of concepts, and sometimes operations, represented to a learner in a form or technology that supports goal-oriented cognitive processing. The idea of a cognitive tool as knowledge representation runs through the work of almost all the theorists we have discussed. As a current example, the Dialectical Map (DM) is a type of interactive visualisation software that individual undergraduate students at Simon Fraser University use to construct arguments   . Featuring a structure similar to an argumentation Vee diagram BIB007 , it provides text boxes for claims, reasons, warrants, and evidence that learners fill in and manipulate to show the pro and con sides of an argument. As a cognitive tool, it represents the culturally evolved constituents of argumentation and the relationships among them. Second, as a result of extended interactivity with a cognitive tool, students internalise its related concepts and operations and may eventually be able to perform tasks that require those components without an external representation or device. As students use the DM to construct arguments over multiple occasions, they gradually reorganise their argumentation schema and eventually no longer need the software to construct arguments with warrants, rebuttals, and other advanced features. The idea that using knowledge representation tools reorganises or shapes learners' cognition was discussed by  and later others BIB005 BIB002 . The third attribute of a cognitive tool lies in its capacity for sustaining distributed cognition (Dror & Harnad, 2008) . While they are searching for and generating ideas to enter into the DM, students refer to it to keep track of which parts of a good argument have been assembled and which remain to be done. Their memory for key aspects of the task is partially outsourced to the tool. Many software tools perform computational operations more efficiently than is possible by a human, thereby enabling distributed cognitive processing BIB004 . There is often no intention to internalise the operations performed by this type of tool, but instead to continue relying on the device indefinitely. We can identify such devices as cognitive tools and tools with which we work BIB002 if in using them students learn how to invoke specific outsourced operations and the conditions under which to do so. University students who learn applied statistics by working with specialised statistical packages (e.g., SPSS) or languages such as or R usually continue to rely on the tools in more advanced courses or in any subsequent work as researchers. Nevertheless, working with such tools teaches them a great deal about the situations in which each statistical function should be used and the inputs and output for each function. What implications does our definition have within the field of educational technology and learning design? Theorists have debated whether ITSs can be regarded as cognitive tools, with some arguing for   and others against . The interface for one version of the Algebra Cognitive Tutor ITS (Brunstein, Betts, & Anderson, 2009, p. 792) provides a "transformation" menu from which students can choose one of four algebraic operations (e.g., "add to both sides"). At first, the ITS performs the selected operation, and at a later stage the student is expected to perform the operation. The list of available algebraic transformation operations provided by the menu qualifies as a simple cognitive tool because it represents task-relevant knowledge that can be internalised through repeated use of the tool. Also, the operations performed by the transformation menu afford distribution of cognitive operations to an external tool. The interface of the Algebra Cognitive Tutor has other features (e.g., the simplification menu) that can be regarded as cognitive tools for similar reasons. From our definition, then, the student interface of an ITS, or a component of the interface, can potentially be a cognitive tool. What about more open learning environments like those discussed by within which learners are able to imagine and then construct objects? Scratch is a programming environment designed to foster computational thinking (Resnick et al., 2009 ). Instead of keying in syntax-conforming code, students snap together virtual blocks shaped in ways that reflect their functionality. For example, the Repeat operation is represented by a C-shaped block into which the learner can snap the blocks to be iterated. Scratch has several key characteristics that qualify it as a cognitive tool. It represents key concepts and relationships of computational thinking, allows for cognitive processes to be distributed externally, and demands repeated meaningful interaction. Like the Algebra Cognitive Tutor that makes visible all available algebraic operations, the Scratch interface lowers the barrier to computational expression by displaying all the pluggable blocks from which programs can be constructed.