1. Supporting the Development of the Cognitive Self
Chapter 14

2. Approaches to supporting the Development of the Cognitive Self
The information approach: children learn from teacher-directed activities and then are tested for mastering (lecturing)
The conventional approach: teacher purposely sets up activities for the children to acquire concepts

3. Basic Concepts of the Piagetian Approach
Piagetian Categories of Knowledge:
Social-Conventional Knowledge: information learned through direct social transmission (word table stands for a flat object supported by four legs)
Physical Knowledge: information children gain by acting on objects and finding how they work
Logicomathematical knowledge: grouping objects into categories and name them (fruits, vegetables, clothes)

4. How Children Construct Knowledge:
Interaction with the environment
Use language and play to represent reality
Actual children’s involvement with the materials
Teachers can generate a curriculum for stimulating the growth of certain cognitive abilities, rather than lecturing

5. Four Factors That Promote Cognitive Growth
Maturation: physical growth causes cognitive growth
Experience: real experience with the physical world
Socialization: exchange of ideas with others
Equilibration: mechanism that brings maturation, experience, socialization into balance

6. The beginning levels of these skills are:
Specific Mental Operations or Mid-Level Skills the Preoperational Child is Working on
The beginning levels of these skills are:
Matching – identify which things are the same
Grouping – separate common properties
Cause and effect relationships
Seriation – ordering materials from smallest to largest or fr. largest to smallest
Conservation

7. Practical Suggestions About Presenting Mid-Level Thinking and Reasoning Skills in the Curriculum
Matching:
provide materials: bingo and lotto games, picture dominoes, matching buttons, during clean up match material with the pictures
provide a variety experiences: tasting, feeling, sounds
Ask questions: “show me the one that match” or “find another red”
Increase difficulty: as they become more skilled, challenge them

8. Grouping/classification:
Provide materials that are meaningful (kitchen equipment in the kitchen area)
Present a variety of grouping experiences
Perceiving common relations:
Pairing and find opposites
Ask questions
Increase difficulties

9. Ordering:
Spatial seriated ordering – using blocks, nuts and bolts… to order from biggest to smallest
Conservation:
Provide materials and experience: pouring water back and forth into containers of various shapes; blocks, clay and playdogh

10. Use Questions that “Provoke” the Children into Thinking
Fact questions: “What happened when you went to the pet store”
Figuring-out questions/convergent(right answer)
Open-ended questions: more than one respond
Asking-for-reason questions: “why do you think the hose is better to use than the bucket?”

11. Wait for answers and ask only a few questions at a time
Resist the impulse to always answer the children’s questions yourself
Encourage the children to produce more than one answer