1. Cognitive Development: Piaget’s Theory and Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Viewpoint
Cognition- the activity of knowing and the mental processes by which human beings acquire and use knowledge to solve problems.
Cognitive development- the changes that occur in children’s mental abilities over the course of their lives

2. PIAGET’S THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Genetic epistemology is the experimental study of the development of knowledge, developed by Piaget
What is Intelligence?
According to Piaget, it is a basic life function that enables an organism to adapt to its environment.
All intellectual activity is undertaken with one goal in mind-cognitive equilibrium
Piaget described children as constructivist
*An example of intelligence, as Piaget sees it, could be a toddler trying to figure out how to turn on the T.V.
Cognitive Equilibrium is Piaget’s term for the state of affairs in which there is a balanced, or harmonious, relationship between one’s thought processes and the environment.
Constructivist one who gains knowledge by acting or otherwise operating on objects and events to discover their properties.
Piaget asserts that if children are to know something they must construct that knowledge themselves.

3. Cognitive Schemes: the structure of intelligence
Scheme is a term used by Piaget to describe the models, or mental structures, that we create to represent ,organize, and interpret our experiences.
There are 3 kinds of intellectual structures:
1.Behavioral schemes
First intellectual structures to emerge
2.Symbolic schemes
Appears ~2 year of life
3.Operational schemes
7 years+
Behavioral (or Sensorimotor) Scheme is an organized pattern of behavior that the child uses to represent and respond to an object or experience.
Symbolic Schemes are internal mental symbols (such as images or verbal codes) that one uses to represent aspects of experience.
Operational Schemes: Cognitive operation is an internal mental activity that one performs on objects of thought.

4. How we gain knowledge: Piaget’s Cognitive Processes
Organization is the process by which children combine existing schemes into new and more complex intellectual structures.
Adaptation is an inborn tendency to adjust to the demands of the environment.
The goal of adaptation is to adjust to the environment; this occurs through assimilation and accommodation.
Assimilation is the process of interpreting new experiences by incorporating them into existing schemes.
Accommodation is the process of modifying existing schemes in order to incorporate or adapt to new experiences.
How do children construct and modify their cognitive schemes? Piaget believed that all schemes, all forms of understanding, are created through the workings of two inborn intellectual processes: organization and adaptation.

5. Piagetian Concept Example Equilibrium Assimilation Start Accommodation
Toddler who has never seen anything fly but birds thinks that all flying objects are birds
Assimilation
Start
Seeing an airplane flying prompts the child to call it a birdie
Accommodation
Child experiences conflict upon realizing that the new birdie has no feathers. Concludes it is not a bird and asks for the proper term or invents a name. Equilibrium restored
Organization
Finish
Forms hierarchal scheme consisting of a superordinate class (flying objects) and two subordinate classes (birdies and airplanes).
As shown, Piaget asserts that the two inborn processes, adaptation and organization, make it possible for children to construct progressively greater understandings of the world in which they live.

6. Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
According to Piaget, a child’s development progresses through 4 qualitative stages and an invariant developmental sequence or universal pattern of development, which are:
The Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to 2 Years)
The Preoperational Stage (2 to 7 Years)
The Concrete-Operational Stage (7 to 11 Years)
The Formal-Operational Stage (11-12 Years and Beyond)
Invariant developmental sequence is a series of developments that occur in one particular order because each development in the sequence is a prerequisite for those appearing later.

7. The sensorimotor stage (Birth-2 years)
The 6 Developmental stages of Problem- Solving abilities:
1. Reflex activity (0-1mon.) exercising and accommodation of inborn reflexes
2. Primary circular reactions (1-4 mon.) repeating acts centered on ones own body
3. Secondary circular reactions (4-8 mon.) repeating acts toward external objects
1. Reflex Activity is a period when an infant’s actions are pretty much confined to exercising innate reflexes, assimilating new objects into these reflexive schemes (i.e., sucking on blankets and toys as well as on nipples), and accommodating their reflexes to these novel objects.
2. The first nonreflexive schemes emerge at 1 to 4 months of age as infants discover by chance that various responses that they can emit and control (i.e., sucking their thumbs, making cooing sounds) are satisfying and thus, worthy of repetition. These simple repetitive acts, called primary circular reaction, are always centered on the infant’s own body.
3. Secondary circular reactions have a pleasurable response, centered on an external object, that is discovered by chance and performed over and over.

8. Sensorimotor stage cont’d
4. Coordination of secondary schemes (8-12 mon.) combining acts to solve simple problems. 5. Tertiary circular reactions (12-18 mon.) experimenting to find new ways of to solve problems 6. Symbolic problem solving (18-24 mon.) inner experimentation without relaying on trial-and-error experimentation
4. Coordination of secondary circular reactions is when infants begin to coordinate tow or more actions to achieve simple objectives.
5. Tertiary circular reactions are an exploratory scheme in which the infant devises a new method of acting on objects to reproduce interesting results.
6. Inner experimentation is the ability to solve simple problems on a mental, or symbolic, level without having to rely on trial-and-error experimentation.

9. Development of imitation
Deferred imitation (18-24 mo.) is the ability to reproduce the behavior of an absent model.
Development of Object Permanence (8-12 mo) is the idea that objects continue to exist when they are no longer visible or detectable through the other senses.
A-not-B error: tendency of month olds to search for a hidden object where they previously found it even after they have seen it moved to a different location.
Deferred imitation could be a child witnessing another child’s temper tantrum and then repeating that behavior long after the witnessed tantrum.

10. Challenges to Piaget’s account of sensorimotor development:
Neo-nativism: idea that cognitive knowledge is innate and subject to biological constraints
“theory” theories: theories of cognitive development that combine neo-nativism and constructivism

11. Preoperational stage (2-7 yrs)
There is an increase in their use of mental symbols to represent objects and events they encounter
The Preconceptual Period is the early substage of preoperations, from age 2 to age 4, characterized by the appearance of primitive ideas, concepts, and methods of reasoning. Marked by the appearance of symbolic function and play.
The Intuitive Period is the later substage of preoperations, from age 4 to age 7, when the child’s thinking about objects and events is dominated by salient perceptual features.

12. The Preconceptual Period:
Emergence of Symbolic thought
Symbolic function
Ability to use symbols to represent objects or experiences
Symbolic play
Play where one object, action, or actor symbolizes another

13. Deficits in preconceptual reasoning:
Animism- attributing lifelike qualities to inanimate objects
Egocentrism- viewing the world from only one’s perspective
Appearance/Reality distinction- inability to distinguish deceptive appearances from reality

14. The intuitive period: Here cognition is described as:
Centered a tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation and not on others due to their inability to understand:
Conservation- recognition that the properties of an object or substance do not change when its appearance is altered in some superficial way.
Reversibility- ability to reverse or negate an action by mentally performing the opposite action
Controversies of the preoperational stage:
Perspective-taking abilities tend to develop slowly and gradually instead of qualitatively
Preschoolers have exhibited the ability reason logically
Piaget’s preoperational problems were to complex for preschoolers

15. The Concrete-Operational Stage (7 to 11 Years)
Here children are said to think more logically about real objects and experiences
Some examples of operational thought
Conservation
Reversibility
Logic
Classification
ability to create relationships between things.
Relational Logic
Mental seriation
Transitivity
The sequencing of concrete operations
Horizontal decalage- different levels of understanding conservation tasks that seem to require the same mental operations
In this stage children are acquiring cognitive operations and thinking more logically about real objects and experiences.
Conservation-the recognition that the properties of an object or substance do not change when its appearance is altered in some superficial way.
Decentration-the ability to consider multiple aspects of a stimulus or situation; contrast with centration.
Reversability-the ability to reverse or negate an action by mentally performing the opposite action (negation).
Mental seriation- mentally ordering a set of stimuli along a quantifiable dimension such as height or weight.
Transivity- the ability to recognize relations among elements in a serial order (for example, if A is more than B, and B is more than C, then A is more than C).
Horizontal decalage-developmental inconsistencies

16. The Formal-Operational Stage (11-12 Years and Beyond)
Ability to reason logically about hypothetical process and events that may have no basis in reality
Hypothetico-Deductive Reasoning
a formal operational ability to think hypothetically.
Thinking Like a Scientist
Inductive reasoning- type of thinking where hypotheses are generated and then systematically tested in experiments.
Personal and Social Implications
The formal operation stage paves the way for:
Identity formation
Richer understanding of other peoples psychological perspectives
The ability to way options in decision making
In addition to the development of deductive reasoning abilities, formal-operational children are hypothesized to be able to think inductively, going from specific observations to broad generalizations

17. An Evaluation of Piaget’s Theory
Convinced us that children are curious, active explorers who play an important role in their own development.
His theory was one of the first to explain, and not just describe, the process of development.
His description of broad sequences of intellectual development provides a reasonably accurate overview of how children of different ages think.
Piaget’s ideas have had a major influence on thinking about social and emotional development as well as many practical implications for educators.
Piaget asked important questions and drew literally thousands of researchers to the study of cognitive development.

18. Challenges to Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory:
Underestimated developing minds
Failed to distinguish competence from performance
It is believed by some that Cognitive development does not evolve in a qualitative and stage like manner- it tends to develop gradually
Provides a vague explanation on cognitive maturation
Devoted little attention to social and cultural influences
He claimed that concrete-operators are incapable of reasoning abstractly, when training studies suggest otherwise.
He tended to assume that a child who failed one of his problems simply lacked the underlying concepts, or thought structures, he was testing.

19. STOP HERE
STOP HERE!!!

20. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective
Sociocultural theory states that:
Cognitive development occurs in a sociocultural context that influences the form it takes
Most of a child’s cognitive skills evolve from social interactions with parents, teachers, and other more competent associates
Vygotsky was a Russian developmentalists in the 1920’s and 30’s when Piaget was formulating his theory. Vygotsky dies at 38 never completing his work. He stated that 1) cognitive growth occurs in a sociocultural context that influences the form that it takes, and 2) many of a child’s most noteworthy skills evolve from social interactions with parents, teachers, and other skilled elders.

21. The role of culture in intellectual development:
Vygotsky proposed that we should evaluate human development from four interrelated perspectives:
Microgenetic-changes that occur over brief periods of time-minutes and seconds
Ontogenetic-development over a lifetime
Phylogenetic-development over evolutionary time
Sociohistorical- changes that have occurred in one's culture and the values, norms and technologies such a history has generated

22. Tools of intellectual adaptation
Vygotsky ( /1978) proposed that infants are born with a few elementary mental functions – attention, sensation, perception and memory – that are eventually transformed by the culture into new and more sophisticated mental processes he called higher mental functions.
Example:Young children’s early memory capabilities are limited by biological constraints to the images and impressions they can produce. However, each culture provides its children with tools of intellectual adaptation, which is Vygotsky’s term for methods of thinking and problem-solving strategies that children internalize from their interactions with more competent members of society.

23. The Social Origins of Early Cognitive Competencies:
Zone of Proximal Development range of tasks that are too complex to be mastered alone but can be accomplished with guidance and encouragement from a more skillful partner
Scaffolding- the expert participant carefully tailors their support to the novice learner to assure their understanding
Vygotsky agreed with Piaget that young children are curious explorers who are actively involved in learning and discovering new principles. However, unlike Piaget, Vygotsky believed that many of the truly important discoveries that children make are the result of dialogues that occur between a skillful tutor who models the activity and transmits verbal instruction and a novice learner who seeks to understand the tutors instruction.

24. Apprenticeship in Thinking and Guided Participation:
guided participation, adult-child interactions in which children’s cognitions and modes of thinking are shaped as they participate with or observe adults engaged in culturally relevant activities.
Our culture is one that uses what Vygotsky termed context-independent learning
In many cultures, children do not learn by going to school with other children, nor do their parents formally teach such lessons as weaving and hunting, instead they learn through guided participation. This is a kind of “apprenticeship in thinking.”
Context-independent learning is asking children question that adults already know the answers to, learning and discussing things that have no immediate relevance-knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
The idea of an apprenticeship or guided participation may seem reasonable in cultures where children are integrated early into the daily activities of adult life, such as the agrarian Mayans of Guatemala and Mexico, or the !Kung of Africa whose hunting-and-gathering lifestyle has remained virtually unchanged for thousands of years.

25. Implications for Education:
Children are seen as active participants in their education
teachers in Vygotsky’s classroom would favor guided participation in which they:
structure the learning activity
provide helpful hints or instructions that are
carefully tailored to the child’s current abilities
monitor the learner’s progress
gradually turning over more of the mental activity to
their pupils
Promote cooperative learning exercises

26. The role of language in cognitive development:
According to Piaget:
Children partake in egocentric speech, utterances neither directed to others nor expressed in ways that the listeners might understand
Egocentric speech played a little role in cognitive development
Speech tended to become more social as the child matures-less egocentric
Piaget was very interested in children’s language, and he discovered that infants’ first words were typically centered on objects and activities that they already understood through nonverbal sensorimotor processes. He then concluded that language clearly illustrates the child’s existing schemes but plays no meaningful role in shaping thought or helping the child to construct new knowledge.

27. The role of language in cognitive development cont’d
According to Vygotsky:
Thought and language eventually emerge
A child’s nonsocial utterances, which he termed private speech, illustrate the transition from paralinguistic to verbal reasoning
Private speech plays a major role in cognitive development by serving as a cognitive self-guidance system, allowing children to become more organized and good problem solvers
As individuals develop, private speech becomes inner speech
Vygotsky agreed with Piaget that the child’s earliest thinking is prelinguistic and that early language often reflects what the child already knows.
However, he argued that thought and language eventually merge and that many of the nonsocial utterances that Piaget called “egocentric” actually illustrate the transition from prelinguistic to verbal reasoning. He termed it private speech.

28. To consider… According to contemporary research:
Children rely heavily on private speech when facing difficult problems
There is a correlation between “self-talk” and competence
Private speech does eventually become inner speech and facilitates cognitive development

29. Theories of Cognitive Development: Vygotsky vs. Piaget
Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory
Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory
Cognitive development varies across cultures
Cognitive development is mostly universal across cultures
Stems from social interactions
Stems from independent explorations
Social processes become individual-physiological processes
Individual (egocentric) processes become social processes
Adults are important as change agents
Peers are important as change agents