piaget's cognitive development

• piaget's theory of cognitive development

  piaget - one of the most influential developmental psychologists of the 20th century

  • developed his theories of cognitive development through studying his own children
  • was the first to realise that children think in a completely different way rather than just knowing less than adults
  • divided childhood into stages characterised by certain cognitive abilities
  • his theory of cognitive development is concerned with the role of motivation and how knowledge develops
• the role of schema

  schema - a package of beliefs and expectations about a topic based on prior experience and knowledge

  • are useful as they help us make assumptions and take shortcuts when interpreting new information
  • get more complex as we have more experiences
  • born with a simple motor schema for innate survival behaviours
  • me-schema - the knowlegde about oneself that is constructed early in infancy
• building schema

  piaget - learning is the adaption of schema in response to a new situation so we develop an understanding of it

  • assimilation - adding information to our schema that it didn't previously contain by fitting it into the schema
  • accommodation - adapting or changing schema as a result of dramatically new information

  we do this when we are pushed into a state of disequilibrium - our schema being unable to decode an unfamiliar situation

  • by developing our understanding to adapt to new situations we are able to reach equilibration

  
• evaluation

  
+ howe - students asked to investigate movement down a slope had a very different level of understanding and reached different conclusions

  + greatly influenced how children are taught, particularly in primary school through the use of discovery learning - application to pedagogy

  - lazonder + harmsen - discovery learning is only useful with considerable input from teachers

  - underestimates the role that other people play in learning vs vygotsky

  - individual differences

  - narrow sample of middle class children

  - underemphasises role of language in learning