development

• Four stages of human development


  • Pre-natal (time spent in womb)
  • Childhood (time between birth & puberty)
  • Adolescence (transitional period between childhood & adulthood)
  • Adulthood (final stage - reached full maturity)
• Pre-natal stage


  • Brain develops very quickly by the third week
  • Foetus has a forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain
  • Brain connects to all parts of the body during mid pregnancy
  • Rapid brain and head growth happen in the 8th month
• Childhood stage


  • Brains have a big growth spurt
  • By age 6, brains are already 90% of adult size
  • Frontal lobes develop
  • Grey matter in the brain peaks
• Adolescence stage


  • Brain remodelling happens intensively
  • Grey matter is "pruned away"
  • Prefrontal cortex remodelled last and still developing
  • May rely on the limbic system to make decisions and solve problems more than adults do
• Adulthood stage


  • Brain volume decreases and ventricles expand over time
  • Biggest changes happen in the frontal lobes and the temporal lobes
• Schemas


  Mental "pockets" of organised information
• Assimilation


  Attempting to interpret new information within your existing knowledge
• Accommodation


  Creating a new schema when children come across new information that doesn't fit easily with existing schemas
• Piaget's stages of cognitive development


  • Sensori-motor stage (0-2 years old)
  • Pre-operational stage (2-7 years old)
  • Concrete-operational stage (7-11 years old)
  • Formal operational stage (11+ years old)
• Sensori-motor stage


  • Children learn through exploring their environment
  • Lack object permanence (think things will disappear just because they can't see)
• Pre-operational stage


  • Children display animism (give life to inanimate objects)
  • Become very egocentric (can't put themselves in other people's shoes)
• Concrete-operational stage


  • Develop the ability to conserve (understand that properties of objects don't change)
  • Develop decentration (able to deal with two bits of info at the same time)
  • Develop reversibility (can reverse their thinking)
• Formal operational stage


  • Can solve things in their head and think about abstract concepts mentally, such as understanding scientific things in their head
• Piaget's theory is too reductionist - it takes something as complex as cognitive development and reduces it down to stages driven by age
• Piaget's study of conservation

  1. Showed children in the pre-operational stage could not conserve, but children in the concrete-operational stage could conserve

  2. Conclusion: conservation is a skill which develops fully once in the concrete operational stage
• Criticisms of Piaget's conservation study: asked the same question (younger children may have thought this meant their first answer was wrong, so they changed it), culturally biased (only Swiss children used), lacked construct validity (narrow measure of conservation)
• Fixed mindset


  Belief that intelligence is innate and cannot be changed
• Growth mindset


  Belief that intelligence can be developed over time
• Mindsets can differ for different abilities, are not permanent, and teachers should praise hard work and effort to help develop a growth mindset
• Learning styles (visual, auditory, tactile) are ineffective as people may have a preferred learning style for different subjects, and students should understand the meaning of what they are being taught, rather than just the facts
• Blackwell et al. learning research study


  1. Study 1: Aimed to see if growth mindset correlates with academic achievement in maths, found no significant correlation at first but if they kept that belief it showed greater improvement over time

  2. Study 2: Aimed to see whether students taught about mindsets would achieve higher levels of positive motivation in the classroom, found experimental group improved in math scores more
• Criticisms of Blackwell et al. studies: only measured maths (can't generalise), culturally biased, age bias
• Application of Piaget's ideas to education


  • Use of key stages in education ties in with Piaget's stages of cognitive development
  • Active learning is an important part of cognitive development according to Piaget
  • Piaget believed intelligence is innate and therefore fixed
• How learning theories apply to education: Many British schools teach students about the importance of having a growth mindset, the idea that different children have different learning styles is not supported by many schools, teachers are seeing the importance of lessons having meaning for children