Cognitive Development

• Jean Piaget's four stages of cognitive development

  1. sensorimotor
  2. preoperation
  3. concrete operations
  4. formal operations
• four assumptions of Piaget's stages

  1. children are organically inspired to learn, think, and comprehend
  2. children see the world differently than adults
  3. children's knowledge is ordered into mental structures (schemas)
  4. all learning consists of assimilation and accommodation
• animism (Piaget)


  refers to a child's belief that nonliving objects have lifelike qualities (ex: the rain poured on me)

  part of the preoperational stage (ages 2-4)
• causality/ causal reasoning


  children reason by transductive reasoning

  has three levels
• level 1 of transductive reasoning


  (age 3)

  reality is defined by appearance
• level 2 of transductive reasoning


  (age 5)

  child credits all-powerful source
• level 3 of transductive reasoning


  (age 7)

  child appeals to causes of nature
• level 4 of transductive reasoning


  (age 10)

  child approaches an adult explanation for why things occur
• centration


  child focuses only on one piece of information at a time, disregarding all others

  preoperational stage (ages 2-7)
• egocentrism


  until approximately age 5, young children cannot differentiate between their own perspectives and feelings and someone else's

  preoperational stage
• equilibrium


  development is motivated by the search for a stable balance toward effective adaptations

  occurs in three phases
• stages of equilibrium

  1. children begin in a state of balance
  2. thought changes and conflict emerges
  3. through the process of assimilation and accommodation, a more sophisticated mode of thought surfaces
• irreversibility


  children make errors in their thinking because they cannot understand that an operation moves (they cannot understand that the original state can be recovered)

  preoperational stage

  once mastered, children have reversibility
• metacognition


  awareness about one's own knowledge

  concrete operation stage (ages 7-11)
• metamemory


  awareness of memory

  concrete operations (ages 7-11)
• object permanence


  recognition that objects and events continue to exist even when they aren't visible

  begins at about 8 months
• types of reasoning

  • hypothetical-deductive reasoning
  • inductive reasoning
  • transductive reasoning
• hypothetical-deductive reasoning

  • formulating a specific hypothesis from any given general theory
  • done by mentally forming a logical and systematic plan to work out the right solution after considering all the possible consequences
  • concrete operations (age 7-11)
• transductive reasoning


  children mentally connect specific experiences, whether or not there is a logical causal relationship

  preoperational stage (2-7 years)
• schemes/ schemas

  • the way children mentally represent and organize the world
  • children form mental representations of perceptions, ideas, or actions to help them understand experiences
  • can be simple or elaborate
• seriation


  the ability to arrange objects in a logical progression
• symbolic function substage


  the child uses words and images (symbols) to form mental representations to remember objects without the object being present

  (ex: drawing a picture of their grandparents when their grandparents aren't with them)
• transitive inference


  the ability to draw conclusions about a relationship between two objects by knowing the relationships of a third object (ex: knowing if A is taller than C and B is shorter than C, then A must also be taller than B)

  concrete operations (ages 7-11)
• conservation


  conceptual tool that allows a child to recognize that when altering the appearance of an object, the basic properties (number, length, wight, matter, liquid/ volume) don't change
• assimilation


  children fit new knowledge into an existing schema (ex: all four-legged animals are dogs)
• accommodation


  children take existing schemes and adjust them to fit their experiences (ex: adjusting schema of "dog" to only be dogs and creating new schemas for cats)
• sensorimotor period occurs in infancy
• sensorimotor ages

  birth- 2 years
• sensorimotor period characteristics

  • infant's physical response to immediate surroundings
  • infants mentally organize and perceive their world through their sensory systems
• preoperational period occurs in early childhood
• preoperational period ages

  2-7
• preoperational period characteristics

  • children are egocentric
  • focus on symbolic thought and imagination
  • "why" questions (age 5)
  • independent and cooperative play
• concrete operations period occurs in

  middle childhood
• concrete operations ages

  7-11 years
• concrete operations period characteristics

  • children can solve simple problems while thinking about multiple dimensions of information
  • have metacognition
  • understand the world through trial and error
  • can't think abstractly, but they understand appearance vs reality in tangible objects
  • set own values and moral judgement
  • clear sense of seriation, transitivity, reversibility, and conservation
• formal operations period occurs during adolescence
• formal operations ages


  12 years- adulthood
• formal operations period characteristics

  • marked by the adolescent's ability to reason abstractly and solve complex problems
  • ability for hypothetical-deductive reasoning
  • use what they've learned in the past to consider many future possibilities
• Why should teachers understand the cognitive development stages?

  allows teachers to avoid presenting work above the student's cognitive abilties
• children play an active role as they pass through the cognitive stages