Development

• Brain stem:

  • Connects to the spinal cord
  • Carries motor and sensory nerves from the brain to the rest of the body and vice versa via the spinal cord
  • Responsible for autonomic functions such as breathing and heart rate
  • Most developed part of the brain at birth
• Cerebellum:

  • Located near the top of the spinal cord
  • Plays a very important role in the co-ordination of movement, e.g. balance
  • Sensorimotor function: Co-ordinates sensory information with motor activity
  • Has some input on language and emotion
  • One of the last parts of the brain to reach maturity
• Thalamus:

  • Located deep inside the brain
  • Two of them, one for the left and the right
  • Size and shape of a walnut
  • Receives sensory signals from the retina in the eye and sends the signals to the visual area where they are processed
  • Co-ordinates motor signals
• Cortex:

  • Divided into two halves
  • Only 3mm thick and is only found in mammals
  • Thinking, or cognition, happens in the frontal cortex
  • Sensory processing takes place in various places such as the visual area and the auditory area
  • Motor processing is controlled by the motor area (at the sides of the brain, near the top), which directs movement
  • Begins to function in the womb but continues to develop throughout our lives
• Piaget’s theory:

  • Suggested that young children are not able to think logically, but as they get older, their brains develop and they are able to access different types of thinking
  • Children are born with only a small number of schemas
  • Schemas become more complex through assimilation and accommodation
  • Assimilation: Understanding a new experience and adding that new information to existing schema
  • Accommodation: Developing the detail of each existing schema and creating new ones
  • High testability and real-world application
  • Conservation: Difficulty in understanding quantity
• Egocentricity:

  • Seeing the world from only one’s point of view
  • Piaget’s three mountains experiment showed children under 7 can only think from their own perspective
• Stages of cognitive development:

  • Sensorimotor stage (0-2 years old): Focus on physical sensations and basic physical co-ordination, object permanence develops around 8 months
  • Pre-operational stage (2-7 years old): Lack of conservation, egocentricity, and operational thinking
  • Concrete operational stage (7-11 years old): Can conserve and view the world from multiple perspectives, better reasoning abilities
  • Formal operational stage: Capable of formal reasoning and scientific reasoning
• Hughes’ policeman doll study:

  • Showed that children could understand tasks that made social sense for them
  • Young children could cope better with egocentrism tasks than Piaget predicted
  • Still age differences in children’s thinking
• Application to education:

  • Readiness: Children must be biologically ready for learning
  • Learning by discovery: Children must discover concepts themselves for true understanding
  • Individual learning: Children go through stages of cognitive development at different rates, teachers must arrange activities accordingly
• Application to education (to stages):

  • Sensorimotor stage: Provide a rich, stimulating environment with opportunities to experiment
  • Pre-operational stage: Games involving role play and hands-on activities to reduce egocentricity
  • Concrete operational stage: Use concrete materials for manipulation and practical activities like cooking
  • Formal operational stage: Focus on formal reasoning and scientific thinking
• Cooking is a useful activity because it involves practical work and following a logical sequence of tasks
• Formal operational stage
• Scientific activity helps develop an understanding of logic
• Discussions in groups enable young people to do idealistic thinking, such as imagining their ideal world
• The Plowden Report was published in 1967 to review primary school education in the UK and make recommendations for changes, drawing extensively from Piaget’s theory
• Peter Bryant and Tom Trabasso (1971) showed that pre-operational children could improve logical tasks with practice, challenging the idea that education should be centered around Piaget’s stages of development
• Neville Bennett (1976) found that traditional formal teaching methods were more effective than Piaget’s active approach in tasks like reading, maths, and English
• Carol Dweck's theory explains the difference between growth mindset and fixed mindset
• Growth mindset:

  • Believe they can improve at any time
  • Value effort and enjoy challenges
  • Focus on learning goals and feel good when working hard
• Fixed mindset:

  • Believe intelligence and abilities are fixed
  • Rely on winning prizes or test results as evidence of abilities
  • Don't believe hard work can improve skills
• Key issue with success is how individuals deal with failure:

  • Fixed mindset individuals see failure as a sign of lack of talent and give up
  • Growth mindset individuals see failure as an opportunity to learn and improve
• Dweck's theory can be taught and applied in various settings like schools, sports, relationships, and business
• Praise is a reward that makes individuals feel good and encourages them to repeat behaviors
• Praise must be honest, sincere, deserved, and in proportion to performance quality
• Praising effort rather than performance gives students a variable they can control
• Self-efficacy is the belief in one's competence and affects motivation and effort
• People have different learning styles:

  • Verbalisers prefer words and auditory processing
  • Visualisers prefer pictures and visual processing
  • Kinaesthetic learners prefer hands-on experiences
• Low self-efficacy leads to lower performance, known as stereotype threat
• Criticism for not trying harder can improve performance more than praise
• Traditional teaching focused too much on verbal methods alone
• Harold Pashler (2008) found no experimental evidence supporting the idea that matching instruction to learning styles improves performance
• Frank Coffield (2004) identified 71 learning styles, making the concept unworkable
• Willingham's learning theory focuses on improving teaching and learning through cognitive psychology research
• Praise should be unexpected to maintain natural motivation
• Memory and forgetting: focus on retrieving information from memory rather than memorizing
• Self-regulation involves controlling behavior and cognitive processes
• Neuroscience can help understand learning disorders by studying brain functioning
• Specific brain patterns in dyslexia could lead to early interventions for better progress