Cognitive development

• What is cognitive development?

  • The way children become more skillful thinkers and learners
• Name Piaget’s stages of cognitive development and what happens in each

  • Invariant and universal

  Sensori motor - 0-2 years:

  • Object permanence - objects exist even if can‘t see

  Preoperational - 2-7 years:

  • Egocentric - world in own POV
  • Animism - inanimate objects have feelings

  Concrete operational - 7-11 years:

  • Conservation - objects same even if look different

  Formal operational - 11 years + :

  • Hypothetical thinking - imagining what something is like
• How do children move through Piaget’s stages of moral development?

  Through simple schemas present at birth becoming more complex via:

  • Assimilation - add new experiences to existing schemas or new ones created if info is too different
  • Accommodation - create new schemas to hold new info that is combined
  • Child is in equilibrium and when they experience something new they are in disequilibrium and get back to equilibrium when the new thing is assimilated and accommodated and the child moves to the next stage
• Outline Piaget’s study

  • Swiss children and Piaget’s own children (researcher bias)
  • 10 counters in 2 parallel lines of 5, top row counters more spread out
  • IV - preoperational and concrete operational
  • DV - ability to conserve number
  • Concrete operational able to conserve as understood and explained why same number of counters in each row
• Describe Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development

  Vygotsky - sociocultural context:

  • More knowledgeable others (MKOs) help intellectual development of younger people by interacting with them passing on knowledge, skills & cultural values
  • Language is a cultural tool necessary for thought from age 2 and partly drives cognitive development
  • Greatest thinking development in zone of proximal development when child collaborates with MKO and existing cognitive structures reorganised intramentally at a higher development level so acquire more advanced reasoning skills
• Describe Bruner's theory

  Bruner:

  • Learning - understanding concepts or problem solving & ability to be autonomous and "invent" new thoughts
  • Agreed with Vygotsky that language is a key tool enabling child to develop
  • Enactive (0-1) - actual objects need to be touched and played with as child has no internal schema
  • Iconic (1-6) - objects represented by pictures or icons
  • Symbolic (7+) - words or formulae can represent the object
• Describe Perry's theory

  Perry:

  • College students go through predictable sequences of stages - data gathered in Harvard interviews
  • Dualist - right wrong approach
  • Relativist - understanding multiple points
  • 9 point scheme of intellectual development operates in a cyclic way:
  • Students move from position 1 to position 9 but at any point may encounter new areas where start again at position 1
  • 1 & 2 = dualism - memorising
  • 3 & 4 = multiplicity - examining
  • 5 & 6 = relativism - interpreting
  • 7, 8 & 9 = commitment - assessing