Psychologist

• Psychological Bases

  • Piaget’s Cognitive Development
  • Lev Vygotsky’s Scaffolding
  • Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory
  • Jean Lave’s Situated Learning
• Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development


  Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was one of the 20th century’s most influential researchers in the area of developmental psychology. He believes that the child’s cognitive structure increases with development. Piaget wanted to know how children learned through their development in the study of knowledge.
• Cognition


  The term cognition is derived from the Latin word “cognoscere” which means “to know” or “to recognize” or “to conceptualize”. Cognition is “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experiences, and the senses.
• Cognitive Development


  The emergence of the ability to think and understand. The acquisition of the ability to think, reason, and problem solve. It is the process by which people’s thinking changes across the lifespan.
• Piaget studied Cognitive Development by observing children to examine how their thought processes changed with age in the growing apprehension and adaptation to the physical and social environment.
• Cognitive Development is gradual and orderly changes by which mental processes become more complex and sophisticated. The essential development of cognition is the establishment of new schemes. Assimilation and Accommodation are both processes of Cognitive Development. Equilibration is the symbol of a new stage of Cognitive Development.
• Equilibration


  Piaget believed that cognitive development did not process at a steady rate, but rather in leaps and bounds. Equilibration occurs when a child’s schema can deal with most new information through assimilation. As a child progresses through the stages of cognitive development, it is important to maintain a balance.
• Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

  • The Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to 2 years)
  • Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)
• Period of developing language and concepts

  The child is capable of more complex mental representations
• Developing language and concepts stage

  • Egocentrism: the child’s thoughts and communications are typically egocentric
  • Animism: treating inanimate objects as living ones
  • Concentration: the process of concentrating on a limited aspect of a stimulus and ignoring other aspects
• Concrete Operational Stage

  1. Seriation: ability to sort objects in an order according to size, shape, or any other characteristics

  2. Transitivity: ability to recognize logical relationships among elements in a serial order

  3. Classification: ability to group objects together on the basis of common features

  4. Decentering: ability to take multiple aspects of a situation into account

  5. Reversibility: the child understands that numbers or objects can be changed, then returned to their original state

  6. Conservation: understanding that the quantity, length, or number of items is unrelated to the arrangement or appearance of the object or item

  7. Elimination of Egocentrism: the ability to view things from another’s perspectives

  8. Performs Operations: combining, separating, multiplying, repeating, dividing, etc.
• Formal Operational Stage


  1. The thought becomes increasingly flexible and abstract

  2. The ability to systematically solve a problem in a logical and methodological way

  3. Develop skills such as logical thought, deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, and systematic planning

  4. Understands that the rules of any game or social system are developed by mutual agreement and could be changed or modified
• Social Learning Theory

  • Emphasis on discovery approach in learning
  • Curriculum should provide specific educational experiences based on children’s developmental level
  • Arrange classroom activities to assist and encourage self-learning
  • Instruction should be geared to the level of the child, changing as the child progresses through stages
• Social Learning Theory


  • Theory that emphasizes learning through observation of others
  • We learn not only how to perform a behavior but also what will happen to us in a specific situation if we do perform it
• Disinhibitation


  To learn to exhibit a behavior that is usually disapproved of by most people because a model does the same without being punished
• Inhibitation


  To learn not to do something that we already know how to do because a model being observed refrains from behaving in that way or does something different from what is intended to be done
• Types of Observational Learning Effects

  • Observational Learning: to learn a new behavior pattern by watching and imitating the performance of someone else
  • Facilitation: to be promoted to do something that is not ordinarily done because of insufficient motivation
• Mental focus or concentration

  • Willingness of the child to observe and mimic the behavior of a model
  • Attention: to actually perform the behavior observed
  • Motor Reproduction: ability to perform the behavior observed
  • Retention: ability to store information in memory
  • Motivation/Reinforcement: force that drives one to act
• Types of Reinforcement

  • Direct Reinforcement: occurs when an individual watches a model perform, imitates that behavior, and is reinforced or punished by some individual
  • Vicarious Reinforcement: the observer anticipates receiving a reward for behaving in a given way because someone else has been so rewarded
  • Self-Reinforcement: the individual strives to meet personal standards and does not depend on or care about the reaction of others
• Grammar involves understanding the rules that govern the formation of sentences and phrases in a particular language.