Piaget's theory of cognitive development

• Cognitive development

  = Describes the development of all mental processes. In particular thinking, reasoning and our understanding of the world. It continues throughout the lifespan.

  • The ways in which all these processes change and develop throughout a lifespan.
  • Piaget looked at children's learning- motivation and how knowledge develops.
• Schema

  = Mental framework of beliefs and explanations that influence cognitive processing. Developed from experience.

  • As children develop they construct more detailed and complex mental representations of the world.
  • Piaget- children are born with a small number of schema, just enough to allow them to interact. Right from the begining we construct new schema.
  • Cognitive development involves the construction of progressively more detailed schema for people, objects, physical actions and the abstract of justice and morality.
• Motivation to learn

  • Piaget- we are pushed to learn when our existing schema do not allow us to make sense of something new.= Disequibilrium
  • We have to adapt to new situations by exploring and developing our understanding to achieve equilibration.
  • Equilibration= when we have encountered new information and built it into our understanding of a topic, either by assimilation or accomodation.
• How learning takes place

  Assimilation= when we understand a new experience and equilibrate by adding new information to our existing schema.

  Accomodation= takes place in response to dramatically new experiences. The child has to adjust to these by either radically changing current schema or forming new ones.
• Evaluation- research support

  • Strength of Piaget's theory is evidence for the individual formation of mental representations.
  • Piaget's theory suggests children will form individual representations of the world, even in similar learning experiences.
  • Howe, children discussed the movement of objects. All children were found to have increased their understanding but their understanding hadn't become similar. Each child picked up different facts and reached different conclusions.
  • Each child formed an individual mental representation of how objects moved as Piaget would have predicted.
• Evaluation- real world application

  • Piaget's theory has been applied to teaching.
  • Piaget's idea that children learn by actively exploring their environment and forming their own mental representation of the world has changed classroom teaching. Old teaching style was replaced by actively orientated classrooms in which children actively engage in tasks that allow them to construct their own understanding.
  • Shows how Piaget inspired approaches that facilitate the development of individual mental representation of the world.
• Evaluation- counterpoint

  • No firm evidence showing that children learn better using discovery learning.
  • Reviews concluded that discovery learning with considerable input from teachers was the most effective way to learn, it seems input from others is the crucial element of this effectiveness.
  • Means that discovery learning is less effective than we would expect using Piaget's theory.
• Evaluation- underestimated the role of others in learning

  • Piaget saw other people as useful to learning in the sense that they are potential sources of information and learning experiences. He saw learning itself as an individual process.
  • Other theories see learning as a more social process- see knowledge as existing first between the learner and the more experienced other and only then in the mind of the learner. There is strong evidence to support the idea that learning is enhanced by interaction with others. So Piaget's theory is incomplete.