Piaget's Theory of Cog Development

• Piaget asserted that children do not just know less than adults, they actually just reason differently
• Maturation is the key to how children's thinking changes - it is not just a matter of learning more
• Piaget also looked at childrens learning

  • the role of motivation in development
  • the question of how knowledge develops
• Schema are units of knowledge
• Maturation causes changes in the way children think
• Our knowledge of the world is represented in the mind and organised in schema
• Cognitive development includes the construction of increasingly detailed schema
• Children are born with a few schema but construct new ones during infancy, including the 'me-schema' in which all the child's knowledge about themselves is stored