Cognitive Development
Cognition: mental activity and acquiring knowledge, helps understand and adapt to
environment
Cognitive development: changes in mental activities (perceiving, learning, remembering.
PIAGET’S COGNITIVE-DEVELOPMENT THEORY
Constructive approach:
- He viewed children as discovering and constructing virtually all knowledge about
their world through their own activity
- Constructions of reality depend on knowledge available
o more immature children cognitive system- more limited interpretation of event
- in education:
o discovery learning = promotes independent exploration
o sensitiveness to learning = build on/ challenges current knowledge
o acceptance
Basic Characteristics of Piaget’s Stages
- Sensorimotor
- Preoperational
- Concrete operational
- Formal operational
Provide general theory of development
Invariant- occur in a fixed order and no stages can be skipped
Universal- assumed to characterize children everywhere
Schemes:
mental structures and representations of reality, enduring knowledge used as base to interpret
the world
o Changes with age
- Mental representations: internal depictions of information that the mind can
manipulate
Adaptation
o Involves building schemes through direct interaction with environment
o Assimilation- we use our current schemes to interpret the external world
o Accommodation- we create new schemes or adjust old ones after noticing that
our current way of thinking does not capture the environment completely.
o balance between assimilation and accommodation varies over time - when
children are not changing much, they assimilate more than they accommodate
o Equilibrium: comfortable state
o Disequilibrium: times of rapid cognitive change
o Equilibration: back and forth movement from equilibrium to disequilibrium
Organization
o A process that occurs internally apart from direct contact with the environment