Piaget's theory of Cognitive Development Flashcards
Cognitive Development
the development of all mental processes, in particular thinking, reasoning and our understanding of the world
What did Piaget propose?
that children do not know any less than adults do, instead they think entirely different from grown ups
What is Maturation and Environment the key to?
how children thinking changes: as children get older, certain mental operations become possible, and at the same time through interactions of the world
What two aspects did Piaget look at in children’s learning?
- the role of motivation in development
- the question of how knowledge develops
Schema
- A mental structure containing all the information we have about one aspect of the world..
- They become more complex during development as we acquire more information about an item, developed from experience
- Mental framework of beliefs and expectations that influence cognitive processing
What does Piaget claim children are born with?
- small number of schemas, enough to allow to them to interact with other people e.g. sucking, crying
- these are developed over time as a consequence of the child’s interaction with its environment
Me-schema
- child’s knowledge about themselves is stored
‘Motivation to learn’
we are motivated to learn when our existing schemas do not allow us to make sense of something new, leading to disequilibrium
Disequilibrium
- creates motivation to learn as there is a sense of uncomfort
- children experience an imbalance between what is understood and what is encountered
What happens to children as a result of disequilibrium?
- to escape this mental state and adapt to new situations, the child learns and explores more through developing new schemes or adapting old ones.
- This results to them being in the state of equilibrium
Equilibrium
- A pleasant state of balance and occurs when experiences of the world match the state of our current schema
- the preferred mental state
How is new information built into our understanding of a topic?
via assimilation or accommodation
Assimilation
When new experience is understood within existing schema. It doesn’t radically change our understanding of the schema so we can incorporate the new experience into our existing schema
Example of assimilation
Child with a dog at home meets another breed of dog, the child will add the information about the dog into dog schema
Accommodation
When new experiences require major schema change. It is very different from our current schema so it involves the creation of a whole new schema or wholescale changes to existing ones. The child adapts existing schema in order to understand new information that doesn’t appear to fit
AO3 - + There is supporting evidence
- Howe et al put 9-12 yr olds in groups to discuss how objects move down a slope
- It was found that the level of children knowledge and understanding increased after the discussion
- but the children did not reach the same conclusion or pick up the same facts about movement down the slope
- this supports Piaget’s idea that children learn through their own personal mental representations as suggested in the study that the children had different thought and opinions despite discussing and learning of the same item
AO3 - + Piaget’s ideas has application in education in the sense that it revolutionised teaching
- Early years classrooms learning is focused around play and discovering new aspects of the world
- Activity based classrooms allow children to learn in a more natural way
- As children actively engage in tasks, this allow them to construct their own understanding of the curriculum
- This replaced old fashioned classrooms whereby children sat silently in rows copying from the board
- This is therefore a strength as it has had a direct positive impact on education and so it enables us to continue to seek out active ways of allowing learning to occur
