Bio Information
John R.
Anderson was born in Vancouver, British
Columbia in 1947.
He achieved a BA from the University
of British Columbia in 1968 and
received his PHD four years later from Stanford
University. When he first went to college he had dreams
of being a writer, but by the time he left he was dreaming of practicing
psychology. While at Stanford John
realized that his ultimate dream, and goal to this day, is to develop a theory
of human cognition sufficiently well specified that it could be simulated on a
computer. Basically his theories are
trying to create a computer which can think and make decision like a human
brain.
Anderson
has spent time at Yale and at the University
of Michigan as a professor since
his graduation from Stanford and has since moved on to Carnegie
Mellon University
where he is a professor along with his wife in the Department of
Psychology.
Contributions to Education
When John
Anderson went to Stanford for his graduate work he met Gordon Bower and
together they were able to develop the HAM theory of memory. HAM stands for Human Associative Memory and
basically is a theory for how the brain works.
In his theory, Anderson says
that memory is built on stored units of information and that there are pathways
which connect these units to learn, or memorize, procedures. So, as the pathways become more in number and
are refined, the memory recall and the amount of time it takes to solve a
problem are cut down. In the end they
wanted to be able to have a computer which could simulate the effect of a
brain.
By using
the HAM theory, Anderson was able
to create another acronym: ACT. ACT
stands for Advanced Computer Tutor and it is a theory of cognitive
development. This theory is very similar
to HAM in that it
(continued on back)
is mainly about how
the brain is able to retain knowledge and get faster at doing repetitive
tasks. The overall goal was to actually
create a computer tutor and have it be able to teach a student how to do
problems using the information the student already had obtained. The ACT distinguishes between three types of
memory: declarative, procedural, and working memory.
It distinguishes between these to show the correct
information on the screen of a computer.
Anderson is hoping that with
the continued use of his program by schools that math scores could drastically
increase. As technology continues to
increase, John Anderson has staked his claim as a very important member of the
technological age, even if he is Psychology Professor.
Quotes
“Students should gradually acquire the skills required to
deal with this complexity rather than to acquire them all at once.”
“All that there is to intelligence is the simple accrual and
turning of many small units of knowledge that in total produce complex
cognition. The whole is no more than the
sum of it’s parts, but it has a lot of parts.”
“The goal of my research is to understand how people organize
knowledge that they acquire from their diverse experiences to produce
intelligent behavior. The concern is very much with how it is all put together
and this has led to the focus on what are called ‘unified theories of
cognition.’”
References
Anderson, J.R.
(ED.) (1981). Cognitive skills and their
acquisition. Hillsdale,
NJ Erlbaum
Anderson, J. R. (1983). The
Architecture of Cognition. Cambridge,
MA Harvard
University Press
Anderson J. R.
(1990). The Adaptive Character of
Thought. Hillsdale, NJ
Erlbaum
Anderson J. R.
(2000). Learning and Memory: Second
Edition. New York Wiley
