Jean Piaget and Cognitive Development

Question 1

What is Cognitive Development

Answer 1

These are all the mental abilities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.

Question 2

Who is Jean Piaget

Answer 2

She is a developmental psychologist who made a children’s intelligence test to focus on the difference in thinking between adults and children.

Question 3

Note

Answer 3

Before Piaget’s work, it was assumed in psychology that children were less thinkers than adults. But now we know they think in different ways than adults.

Question 4

What is a Schema

Answer 4

This is the concept or framework that organizes and interprets information. children form schemas as they experience new events and situations.

Question 5

What is Assimilation

Answer 5

This is when we interpret our new experience in terms of our existing schemas.

Question 6

What is Accommodation

Answer 6

This is when we adapt our current understandings (schemas) to incorporate new information.

Question 7

What are the Jean Piaget Stages

Answer 7

1. Sensory-motor stage
2. Preoperational Stage
3. Concrete operational stage
4. Formal operational stage

Question 8

What is the Sensory-motor stage

Answer 8

This is from birth-2yrs, infants use their senses and motors abilities to learn about the world around them (looking, hearing, touching, mouthing and grasping)

Question 9

What is the Preoperational Stage

Answer 9

From 2-6 or 7yrs, this is when the child learns how to use language. They can’t comprehend the mental operations of concrete logic

Question 10

What is the Concrete operational stage

Answer 10

This is from 6 or 7-11, this is when they gain the mental operators that enable them to think logically about concrete events

Question 11

What is the Formal operational stage

Answer 11

This begins by age 12, this is when you begin to think logically about abstract concepts.

Question 12

What is Object Permanence

Answer 12

This is when a child has the ability to understand that objects still exist after they are no longer insight.

Question 13

What is Egocentrism

Answer 13

The inability of a child to see any point of view aside from theirs (this is when they are in the preoperational stage)

Question 14

What is Conservation

Answer 14

The idea that things such as mass, volume, and number remain the same despite changes in the forms of objects

Question 15

What is Centration

Answer 15

This is the tendency to focus on only one aspect of a situation, problem, or object

Question 16

What is Animism

Answer 16

The belief that inanimate objects have feelings, thought, and have characteristics of living things.

Question 17

Who is Lev Vygotsky

Answer 17

A Russian developmental psychologist, his theory says that a child’s mind grows through interaction with the social environment.
children learn best by interacting with others. Alternative to Jean Piaget

Question 18

What is Scaffolding

Answer 18

This is when a more skilled person helps a less skilled person, and reduces the help given, helping the less skilled person become more capable.

Question 19

What is Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

Answer 19

This is the distance between what the child can do unassisted and what they are able to do assisted.