1. Cognitive Development through the Life Span
Jean Piaget understanding how the mind develops

2. What is Cognitive Development?
Cognitive Development describes how our ability to think changes over time.
Adults are able to think in more complex ways than children, but how much more complex?
What do kids at different ages know?

3. Swiss Psychologist - worked at measuring intelligence of kids.
Noticed that the answers of children of the same age were very similar.
The mind of a child is not just a mini-adult mind. Kids do not just “know less” than adults, they “think differently.”
Jean Piaget
Children reason in wildly illogical ways about problems whose solutions are self evident to adults

4. Schemas
Piaget believed children are active thinkers - trying to make sense of the world.
Schema: a concept or framework that organizes and interprets information.
This is an “impossible” object because we have no schema for it - we cannot see it in the real world (have students try to draw it)
Schemas are molds in which we pour our experiences -

5. Schema of a dog - four legs, tail, snout, pointy ears

6. Assimilation
Assimilation - new experiences are interpreted according to our current schemas
Is it possible a little kid would call this a dog? That’s assimilation at work, the kid would need to build a new schema for a horse

7. Accommodation
Accommodation - adapting our current understanding/schema to incorporate new information
A kid might call this a dog, but would have to redefine the schema of a dog to incorporate this new funny looking dog

8. Stages of Development
A 4 year old understands things that a 1 yr old physically cannot, the same way an 18 year old can understand things an 8 year old cannot.

9. Sensorimotor Stage (age 0-2)
Babies take in the world through their sensory and motor interactions with objects - looking, hearing, grasping.
Very young babies live in the present - what they don’t see does not exist.

10. Object Permanence
Babies younger than 8 months do not understand that when something is removed from their sight, it actually still exists. Piaget thought that something clicked at around 8 months, but current research suggests that object permanence develops more slowly over time - you may see a 3 month old look for a toy for a second after it’s hidden

12. Scale Errors
18 month to 30 month old infants do not take size into account and may try to perform impossible tasks

13. Preoperational Stage (age 2-7)
Kids at this age are still too young to perform mental operations.
Idea of conservation - a child is not capable of doing the mental operation of understanding that the quantity of something can remain the same despite changes in shape

14. Egocentrism
In the preoperational stage children are egocentric - they have difficulty perceiving things from another’s POV.
“Do you have a brother?”
“Yes”
“What’s his name?”
“Jim”
“Does Jim have a brother?”
“No”
Do we ever fully outgrow egocentrism? Often even adults assume that if something is clear to us it will be clear to others. But this does not mean that kids are willfully malicious, they don’t have the capability of understanding how to not be egocentric

15. Theory of Mind
Preschoolers start to develop the ability to infer the mental states of others (what others are thinking and feeling).
Why do kids talk to themselves so much?
It’s not that this is absent in the preoperational stage - it is a growing ability. But it is an ability that children with autism lack - they have a difficult time communicating with others and inferring what others think.
Toward the end of the preoperational stage children are more capable of thinking in words - and that through talking to themselves they can solve problems. 2nd graders who talk to themselves while they solve problems tend to be better at 3rd grade math.

16. Concrete Operational (age 7-11) vs. Formal Operational (age 11 and up)
Children are able to understand concrete concepts - like conservation.
8 + 4 = ?
= ?
Formal Operational
Reasoning expands beyond the concrete to encompass abstract reasoning.
Hypotheticals and Deduction.

17. The information above most strongly supports
French divers recently found a large cave along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The cave is accessible only through an underwater tunnel. The interior of the cave is completely filled with seawater and contains numerous large stalagmites, which are stony pillars that form when drops of water fall repeatedly on a single spot on a cave floor, leaving behind mineral deposits that accumulate over time.
The information above most strongly supports
which one of the following?
(A) The Mediterranean Sea was at a higher level in the past than it is now.
(B) The water level within the cave is higher now than it once was.
(C) The French divers were the first people who knew that the tunnel leading to the cave existed.
(D) There was once an entrance to the cave besides the underwater tunnel.
(E) Seawater in the Mediterranean has a lower mineral content now than it had when stalagmites were being formed.
Researchers today look at Piaget’s ideas as more fluid, not so restricted to stages, but research has confirmed that all over the world children seem to cognitively develop in generally the same way.
His ideas have been especially significant to elementary education - basing lessons are students’ cognitive abilities.