Cognitive Developmental Approaches: Chapter 6: Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development/ Vygotsky's Theory of Cognitive Development

Classification

-Concrete operational children can understand: •The interrelationships among sets and subsets •Seriation -Ordering stimuli along a quantitative dimension (such as length). •Transitivity -The ability to reason about and logically combine relationships.

The Symbolic Function Substage

-First substage of preoperational thought -Occurring roughly between the ages of 2 and 4. -In this substage, the young child gains the ability to mentally represent an object that is not present. This ability vastly expands the child's mental world.

Egocentrism

-Is the inability to distinguish between one's own perspective and someone else's perspective. -Piaget and Barbel Inhelder (1969) studied children's egocentrism by devising the three mountains task.

Abstract, Idealistic, and Logical Thinking

-The abstract quality of the adolescent's thought at the formal operational level is evident in the adolescent's verbal problem-solving ability. -An increased tendency to think about thought itself. -Thought is full of idealism and possibilities. -As adolescents are learning to think more abstractly and idealistically, they are also learning to think more logically.

Animism

-The belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities and are capable of action. •A young child might show animism by saying, "The sidewalk made me mad; it made me fall down." -A young child who uses animism fails to distinguish the appropriate occasions for using human and nonhuman perspectives.

The Intuitive Thought Substage

-The second substage of preoperational thought. -Occurs approximately between 4 and 7 years of age. -Children begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the answers to all sorts of questions. -This substage is called intuitive, because young children seem so sure about their knowledge and understanding, yet are unaware of how they know what they know.

Schemes

-These are actions or mental representations that organize knowledge. -In Piaget's theory •Behavioral schemes (physical activities) characterize infancy .Mental schemes (cognitive activities) develop in childhood

Language and Thought

-Vygotsky (1962) concluded that young children use language to plan, guide, and monitor their behavior. -This use of language for self-regulation is called private speech.

Hypothetical-deductive reasoning

Adolescent's develop hypotheses, or best guesses, and systematically deduce, or conclude, which is the best path to follow in solving the problem.

Processes of Development (4)

•A different way of understanding the world makes one stage more advanced than another. •Cognition is qualitatively different in one stage compared with another. •Each of Piaget's stages is age-related and consists of distinct ways of thinking. •Piaget believed that there are four stages of cognitive development: -Sensorimotor -Preoperational -Concrete operational -Formal operational

Formal Operational Stage

•Appears between 11 and 15 years of age. •Individuals move beyond concrete experiences and think in abstract and more logical ways. •In solving problems, formal operational thinkers are more systematic and use logical reasoning.

Centration and the Limitations of Preoperational Thought

•Centration: -The centering of attention on one characteristic to the exclusion of all others. •Conservation: -The awareness that altering an object's or substance's appearance does not change its basic properties. •Failing the conservation-of-liquid task is a sign that children are at the preoperational stage of cognitive development. •The preoperational child fails to show conservation not only of liquid but also of number, matter, length, volume, and area. •Children often vary in their performance on different conservation tasks. •A child might be able to conserve volume but not number. •Researchers have discovered links between children's number conservation and the brain's development.

Simple reflexes

•Corresponds to the first month after birth. •Sensation and action are coordinated primarily through reflexive behaviors. •The infant is initiating action and is actively structuring experiences in the first month of life.

First habits and primary circular reactions

•Develops between 1 and 4 months of age. •The infant coordinates sensation and two types of schemes: -Habits and Primary Circular Reaction •A habit is a scheme based on a reflex that has become completely separated from its eliciting stimulus. •A circular reaction is a repetitive action. •A primary circular reaction is a scheme based on the attempt to reproduce an event that initially occurred by chance. •Habits and circular reactions are stereotyped: -The infant repeats them the same way each time. -During this substage, the infant's own body remains the infant's center of attention. -There is no outward pull by environmental events.

Tertiary circular reactions, novelty, and curiosity

•Develops between 12 and 18 months of age. •Tertiary circular reactions are schemes in which the infant purposely explores new possibilities with objects, continually doing new things to them, and exploring the results. •Piaget says that this stage marks the starting point for human curiosity and interest in novelty.

Internalization of schemes

•Develops between 18 and 24 months of age. •The infant develops the ability to use primitive symbols. •A symbol is an internalized sensory image or word that represents an event. •Symbols allow the infant to manipulate and transform the represented events in simple ways.

Secondary circular reactions

•Develops between 4 and 8 months of age. •The infant becomes more object-oriented, moving beyond preoccupation with the self. •The infant also imitates some simple actions. •Although directed toward objects in the world, the infant's schemes are not intentional or goal-directed.

Coordination of secondary circular reactions

•Develops between 8 and 12 months of age. •The infant must coordinate vision and touch. •Actions become more outwardly directed. •Significant changes during this substage involve the coordination of schemes and intentionality.

Lev Vygotsky (1962)

•Emphasized that children actively construct their knowledge and understanding. •In Vygtosky's theory, children are more often described as social creatures than in Piaget's theory. •Children develop their ways of thinking and understanding primarily through social interaction. •Children's cognitive development depends on the tools provided by society, and their minds are shaped by the cultural context in which they live.

Sensorimotor Stage (1)

•From birth to about 2 years of age. •Infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences with physical, motoric actions. •At the beginning of this stage, newborns have little more than reflexive patterns with which to work. •At the end of the sensorimotor stage, 2-year-olds can produce complex sensorimotor patterns and use primitive symbols.

Private speech

•Is an important tool of thought during the early childhood years. •He emphasized that all mental functions have external or social origins. •Children must use language to communicate with others before they can focus inward on their own thoughts. •Children must communicate externally and use language for a long period of time before they can make the transition from external to internal speech. -This transition period occurs between 3 and 7 years of age and involves talking to oneself. -After a while, the self-talk becomes second nature to children, and they can act without verbalizing. -When this occurs, children have internalized their egocentric speech in the form of inner speech, which becomes their thoughts. •Vygotsky reasoned that children who use a lot of private speech are more socially competent than those who don't. •For Vygotsky, when young children talk to themselves, they are using language to govern their behavior and guide themselves.

Object Permanence

•Is the understanding that objects and events continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched. •Acquiring the sense of object permanence is one of the infant's most important accomplishments. •Infants develop object permanence in a series of six substages of sensorimotor development.

Concrete Operational Stage

•Lasts approximately from 7 to 11 years of age. •Logical reasoning replaces intuitive reasoning. •Children at this stage can perform concrete operations, which are reversible mental actions on real, concrete objects. -Conservation •The conservation tasks demonstrate a child's ability to perform concrete operations. •Conservation involves recognizing that the length, number, mass, quantity, area, weight, and volume of objects and substances are not changed by transformations that merely alter their appearance. •Children do not conserve all quantities or conserve on all tasks simultaneously. -Horizontal décalage: •Piaget's concept that similar abilities do not appear at the same time within a stage of development.

Sensorimotor Stage (2)

•Piaget divided the sensorimotor stage into six substages: (1) Simple reflexes (2) First habits and primary circular reactions (3) Secondary circular reactions (4) Coordination of secondary circular reactions (5) Tertiary circular reactions, novelty, and curiosity (6) Internalization of schemes.

Processes of Development (1)

•Piaget's theory is a general, unifying story of how biology and experience sculpt cognitive development. •Adaptation involves adjusting to new environmental demands. •Piaget stressed that children actively construct their own cognitive worlds. •Information is not just poured into their minds from the environment. •Piaget sought to discover how children, at different points in their development, think about the world and how systematic changes in their thinking occur.

Preoperational Stage

•The cognitive world of the preschool child is creative, free, and fanciful. •The label preoperational emphasizes that the child does not yet perform operations, which are internalized actions that allow children to do mentally what before they could do only physically. •Preoperational thought is the beginning of the ability to reconstruct in thought what has been established in behavior. •Lasts from approximately 2 to 7 years of age. •In this stage, children begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings. •Symbolic thought goes beyond simple connections of sensory information and physical action. •Stable concepts are formed, mental reasoning emerges, egocentrism is present, and magical beliefs are constructed. •Preoperational thought can be divided into substages: the symbolic function substage and the intuitive thought substage.

Scaffolding

•This term means changing the level of support. •Over the course of a teaching session in which a more skilled individual (teacher or more advanced peer of the child) adjusts the amount of guidance to fit the child's current performance. -Dialogue: •An important tool of scaffolding (Tappan, 1998). •Occurs when the child's rich but unsystematic, disorganized, and spontaneous concepts meet with the skilled helper's more systematic, logical, and rational concepts.

Processes of Development (3)

•To make sense out of their world, children cognitively organize their experiences. -Organization: •The grouping of isolated behaviors and thoughts into a higher-order system. Continual refinement of this organization is an inherent part of development. -Equilibration and Stages of Development. •A mechanism to explain how children shift from one stage of thought to the next. •The shift occurs as children experience cognitive conflict or disequilibrium in trying to understand the world.

Processes of Development (2)

•Two processes are responsible for how children use and adapt their schemes: -Assimilation •Incorporating new information into existing schemes. -Accommodation •Adjusting schemes to fit new information and experiences.

The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

•Vygotsky's term for the range of tasks that is too difficult for children to master alone but that can be mastered with the guidance and assistance of adults or more-skilled children. •The lower limit of the ZPD is the level of skill reached by the child working independently. •The upper limit is the level of additional responsibility the child can accept with the assistance of an able instructor.