Chapter 7 Flashcards
What did Piaget devote his life to?
To studying how children think, not just what they know
Why did Piaget use the clinical method?
Because it is a flexible question and answer technique used to discover an individual child’s line of reasoning. He felt that investigator should use it to fully understand that child’s mind.
How did Piaget define intelligence?
A basic life function that helps an organism adapt to its environment
What is a scheme?
Cognitive Structures! Organized patterns of action or thought that people construct to interpret their experiences.
What is organization?
children systematically combine existing schemes into new and more complex ones
What is adaptation?
process of adjusting to the demands of environment
What is equilibration?
process of achieving mental stability where our internal thoughts are consistent with the evidence we are receiving from the external world
What is assimilation?
process by which we interpret new experiences in terms of existing schemes or cognitive structures
What is accommodation?
process of modifying existing schemes to better fit new experiences
What determines a child’s stage of cognitive development?
Reasoning processes (not their age!) determines a child’s stage of cognitive development.
What are the four lasting insights Piaget left the field with?
- Infants and children are active in their own development
- Infants seek to master problems and understand them using assimilation/accommodation
- Young people think differently than older people do
- His stages describe development for children from hundreds of cultures that have been studied.
List the 4 challenges to Piaget
1) Understanding Young Minds
2) Wrongly claiming that broad stages of development exist
3) Failing to adequately explain development
4) Giving limited attention to social influences on cognitive development.
What is a competence-performance distinction?
There is an important difference between understanding a concept (competence) and passing a test designed to measure it (performance).
What is constructivism?
Maintaining that children actively create or build their own understandings of the world based on their experiences
What is neuro-constructivism theory?
New knowledge is constructed through changes in the neural structures of the brain in response to experiences.
How did Vygotsky think culture and social experiences affects our thinking?
Culture and social experiences affect HOW we think, not just what we think. He expected cognitive development to vary from society to society depending on the mental tools such as the language that the culture values and makes available.
What differences did Luria see between remote and urban children’s thought?
Remote children gave similar responses and urban children gave more distinctly individual answers.
How do children acquire their society’s mental tools?
By interacting with parents and other more experienced members of the culture and by adopting their language and knowledge.
What is the zone of proximal development?
Gap between what a learner can accomplish independently and what she can accomplish with the guidance and encouragement of a more-skilled partner.
What is guided participation?
Actively participating in culturally relevant activities with the aid and support of their parents and other knowledgeable guides
Bruner’s scaffolding?
The more-skilled person gives structured help to a less-skilled learner but gradually reduces the help as the less-skilled learned becomes more competent.