cognitive development Flashcards
Jean Piaget
Believed in a constructivist approach- child constructs knowledge by engaging with the world and generating and testing of theories.
- Maturation: unfolding of biological changes that are genetically programmed.
- During activities, child should be an active learner and exploring the environment.
- Social transmission: learn from others
- Discovery learning, education should help teach children to learn to learn
- Differentiation should be applied due to individual difference
- Equilibration, when pre-existing schemes or ways of thinking about an object do not fit without experiences, we adjust to re-establish balance, this is how our thinking moves forward
○ Assimilation is the adding of information to existing structure
○ Accommodation is reorganising the structure to take account of new information
Piaget stages of development
At any given point in development, children reason similarly on many different domains such as maths, language and social cognition.
And a new stage means a major shift in underlying structure
This is universal and the order of stages is invariant, but the rate of development varies.
Sensorimotor stage
- Building schemes through sensory and motor exploration
- Child building on basic reflexes and development of object permanence
- Also developed the A not B task where an object is repeatedly hidden in spot A and the child finds it. Then moving it to spot B in front of them. 10 month old child will continue to look at the initial location
preoperational
- Use of symbols to represent the world (play and imitation)
- Ego-centric
- Cannot systematically transform representations or ideas
- Conservation tasks used at this stage
○ Lack of understanding of reversibility
○ Centration: focusing on one dimension of an object or situation
Concrete operational
- Operation: emergence of ability to transform objects in mind
- Logical thinking
- Reversibility
Decentration
Formal operational
- Hypothetico-deductive reasoning
○ Deducting hypotheses from a general theory
○ Systematically test predictions.- Pendulum problem: what determines the speed of the pendulum?
○ Concrete operation child will vary factors (length of string, weight, force) randomly
Formal will do this systematically, one factor at a time
- Pendulum problem: what determines the speed of the pendulum?
Piaget critical evaluation
- Is development really stage like (Siegler and Aliabli 2005)
- Do all children pass through the stages at the same time?
- Development doesn’t end at 11 years. And do all adults apply formal operations
- Underestimates competence.
○ Task index more than just development in logical thinking (language, memory and attention?)
○ Social and cultural influences not considered
Performance on Piagetian tasks can be trained (Gelman and Baillargeon 1983)
Vygotsky
Socio-cultural theory of cognitive development.
- Social interaction with more experienced others
- Mediators are psychological tools generated by the developmental context (language, counting, art and writing)
- Elementary mental functions are biological and emerge spontaneously (attention, perception and memory)
- Higher mental function use mediators (voluntary attention and remembering, abstract thinking and problem solving)
No rigid stages, but certain ages typically have certain forms of thinking.
Importance of affiliation, play, peers, work, theorising in lifetime
Vygotsky’s inner speech/ egocentric speech
Then becomes inner speech as thought processes are internalised (Bivens and Berk 1990).
More private speech leads to better performance on complex tasks
Children with learning and behavioural problems use private speech for longer (Ostad and Sorensen 2007)
ZPD
Explains mechanism by which children can perform tasks they cannot do alone when they have support from the expert and therefore teacher have a crucial role.
- Describes how social interactions facilitate cognitive development
- Highlights children’s potential under optimal conditions
- Wertsch et al 1980
○ Problem solving with mother, completing a puzzle
○ DV: gaze to model IV: age of participant
○ Mother directed gazes decrease with age
○ Roles within this learning situation change with age
- Rogoff et al 1984:
○ Mothers pay more attention to structuring conceptually difficult task in comparison to easier ones
- Cho and Compton 2015:
○ Dynamic assessment draws on the principles of ZPD to look at potential to learn rather than existing knowledge or skills
Vygoysky importance of social interactions
Intersubjectivity:
- Process by which 2 participants start with task with different levels of understanding but finish with the same level
Scaffolding:
- Process by which teachers adjust level of instruction to suit child’s current level of understanding
Guided participation:
- In less formal teaching situation than those where scaffolding occur
- More knowledgeable can guide behaviour through joint participation in a task or play
Make believe play:
crucial to cognitive and social development and provides children with ZPD to try out different approaches and complex problems.
Vygotsky critical evaluation
Focus on language de-emphasises other key factors such as observation and other learning methods
Underestimates role of nature (and Piaget?)
Vygotsky was interested in instruction but implications of his work have been surmised
Information processing theories
input - processing (coding, transforming, organising) - output
- Focus on role of attention, memory, self-control as mechanisms of change - Development involves overcoming processing limitations Not a unified theory, more of an approach
