Cognitive Flexibility Theory

Cognitive flexibility theory (CFT) is a theory of learning and instruction for advanced knowledge acquisition and application in complex and ill-structured knowledge domains. Its emphasis on nonlinear and highly interconnected structures has made it a natural theoretical framework for the principled design of hypertext and hypermedia learning environments beginning in the mid-1980s. Hypertext or hypermedia differs from multimedia. The key feature of the latter is simply the presence of text with other media such as video or audio. The former have as their main feature that they are built to be restructured, either by following different hot links or through various programmed structures that do not utilize overt links. Thus the same content can take on a different compositional form (what is included and in what sequence) as a function of user choice or contextual specifications, while they may (hypermedia) or may not (hypertext) incorporate multiple media. Hypertext or hypermedia thus has nonlinearity, interconnectedness, and multiplicity of content presentation as essential characteristics. A hallmark of CFT is that its systems make principled use of those features to promote advanced learning, including the use of programmed structures rather than hot links to allow for more adaptive context sensitivity in which paths are followed and to minimize the risk of “getting lost in hyperspace.” This entry first discusses the development of CFT, features of learning and instruction with CFT, and digital media used in CFT instruction. It then discusses extensions of CFT: the concepts of the New Gutenberg Revolution and the post-Gutenberg Mind.

CFT originated with the work of Rand Spiro and various colleagues (especially Paul Feltovich and, in the biomedical area, Richard Coulson) as a response to patterns of oversimplification (reductive biases) in learning complex material and limitations of schema theories for producing transfer. The latter theories are reliant on the retrieval from long-term memory of intact knowledge structures corresponding to newly encountered situations that needed to be understood or reacted to. In orderly, predictable knowledge domains the efficacy of such schemas is definitive. CFT, on the other hand, was developed for ill-structured domains, whose case-to-case irregularity of concept application makes it impossible to have a prepackaged “prescription” for thought and action that would entail wide-scope generalization across cases, examples, and events in the domain.

Rather than retrieval and instantiation of “templates,” the emphasis in CFT is on the situation-sensitive assembly of prior knowledge and experience acquired at different times, integrated with details of the present case, to build a specialized schema of the moment.