1. Cognitive Development - Piaget
Piaget: constructivist: knowledge that the child acquires is constructed from the child’s experience - not innate.
-born with ability and incentive to learn
-must be active in order to learn
-internalization of physical knowledge
-time consuming process to reach maturity - decentration -process by which you become less and less dependent on egocentrism - realize individual has unique experience.

2. Constructivism
The belief that children actively create knowledge rather than passively receiving it from the environment.
Knowledge is constructed from experience
Born with ability and desire to learn.
Must be active to learn.
Thinking/learning is internalization of physical knowledge.
Piaget: constructivist: knowledge that the child acquires is constructed from the child’s experience - not innate.
-born with ability and incentive to learn
-must be active in order to learn
-internalization of physical knowledge
-time consuming process to reach maturity - decentration -process by which you become less and less dependent on egocentrism - realize individual has unique experience.

3. Adaptation
Fundamental process by which schemes are altered through experience.
Comprised of two complementary processes.

4. Mechanisms of Change
Assimilation: information that fits into existing cognitive structure
schemas
Assimilation: information that fits into existing cognitive structure - schemas (file folders).
When children/adolescents encounter something reasonably similar to what they already know - assimilated into existing knowledge.

5. Mechanisms of Change
Accommodation: changing beliefs to fit new conceptual information
Accommodation: changing beliefs to fit new conceptual information. Create new schemas.
When children/adolescents encounter something that is different from what they know - they either ignore it or change their way of thinking to accommodate this new knowledge.

6. Equilibration
Equilibration: regulatory process that maintains a functional balance between assimilation and accommodation

7. Process of Equilibration
Children are satisfied with mode of thought (equilibrium)
Become aware of shortcomings in existing knowledge (disequilibrium)
Adopt a more sophisticated mode of thought (return to equilibrium)

8. Figure - Equilibration

9. Characteristics of Stages of Cognitive Development
Each stage represents a qualitative change in thinking
Culturally Invariant
Includes structures and abilities of previous stages

11. Sensorimotor Stage Birth to 2 years of age
Qualitative change: use senses, motor skills to gain knowledge

12. Piaget – Object Permanence

13. Preoperational Stage 2 to 6/7 years Representational skills
Egocentric thought:
Magical thought
Animism

14. Concrete Operational 6/7 to 11/12 years
Qualitative Change: Operational thinking: mental actions that are reversible
Reversibility: the ability to understand that actions that affect objects, if reversed in sequence, will return the objects to their original state.
Decentration: the ability to comprehend more than one aspect of a problem at a time.

15. Concrete Operational Stage
Logical, but concrete in their thinking, i.e., can think only in terms of concrete things they can handle or see.
Conservation: the principle that attributes such as mass, weight, volume, etc. remain unchanged regardless of irrelevant changes in the external appearance of an object that have no effect on that attribute.

16. Conservation

17. Cognitive Development Preoperational Stage - No conservation
“Cut it up into A LOT of slices, Mom. I’m really hungry!!”

18. Formal Operations 11/12 years through adulthood
Logical and abstract thought:
Adolescent egocentrism: Elkind
Imaginary Audience
Personal Fable
Adolescent egocentrism: have trouble separating your own thoughts and feelings from others.
2 kinds (Elkind)
imaginary audience - confusing your own thoughts with those of hypothesized audience.
Personal fable - tendency to think you and your thoughts and feelings are unique.

20. EVALUATION OF PIAGET’S THEORY: Strengths
Children do move from being more egocentric to less egocentric
Also move from being less systematic and able to use logic to being better able to think in these ways
Children do pass through stages in same order
Constructivistic view of development

21. Criticisms of Piaget’s Theory
Findings may only work with Piaget’s tasks
Can have skills characteristic of two stages at one time period
Only 30-35% of adults reach formal operational stage

22. Vygotsky Soviet Psychologist Thought and Language, 1962
Sociocultural Approach

23. Sociocultural Approach
Children are born with the fundamental cognitive and perceptual abilities
Infants are active learners
Individuals are products of culture

24. Influence of Speech on Development of Thought
3 Developmental Phases
Social speech
Egocentric speech
Inner speech

25. Zone of Proximal Development
Psychological distance between children’s individual performance in problem-solving and potential for higher levels of performance when guided by more capable peers/adults.

26. Criticisms
Assumes that the majority of interactions proceed in optimal fashion.
Little research on individual differences in child-mother dyads.

27. Functional Activities to Facilitate ZPD
Modeling behavior for imitation
Feedback
Contingency management
Direct instruction
Questioning
Task structuring
Cognitive structuring