Week 3 Flashcards
Stage theories of development
Assimilation and accommodation:
Assimilation is a cognitive process that manages how we take in new information and incorporate that new information into our existing knowledge. This concept was developed by Jean Piaget and is known for his theory of cognitive development in children. He also proposed that assimilation of knowledge occurs when a learner encounters a new idea, and must ‘fit’ that idea into what they already know. Think of this as filling existing containers.
Assimilation is the process of using or transforming the environment so that it can be placed in preexisting cognitive structures. Accomodation is the process of changing cognitive structures in order to accept something from the environment. Both processes are used simultaneously and alternately throughout life.
Sensorimotor and preoperational stages of development:
Piaget proposed four stages of cognitive development: the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational period. The sensorimotor stage is the first of the four stages in cognitive development which “extends from birth to the acquisition of language” (Tuckman & Monetti, 2010, p.51). In this stage, infants progressively construct knowledge and understanding of the world by coordinating experiences (such as vision and hearing) with physical interactions with objects (such as grasping, sucking, and stepping). Infants gain knowledge of the world from the physical actions they perform within it.
During the preoperational stage of cognitive development, Piaget noted that children do not yet understand concrete logic and cannot mentally manipulate information. Children’s increase in playing and pretending takes place in this stage. However, the child still has trouble seeing things from different points of view. The children’s play is mainly categorised by symbolic play and manipulating symbols. The preoperational stage is logically sparse in regard to mental operations. The child is able to form stable concepts as well as magical beliefs. The child, however, is still not able to perform operations, which are tasks that the child can do mentally, rather than physically. Thinking in this stage is still egocentric, meaning the child has difficulty seeing the viewpoint of others.
Zone of proximal development and scaffolding:
The term ‘zone of proximal development’ refers to a concept developed by psychologist Lev Vygotsky and refers to the difference between a learner’s ability to perform a task independently, rather than with guidance. Vygotsky’s theories stress the fundamental role of social interaction in the development of cognition, as he believed strongly that community plays a central role in the process of making meaning. Unlike Piaget’s notion that children’s development must necessarily precede their learning, Vygotsky argued learning is a necessary and universal aspect of the process of developing culturally organised, specifically human psychological function.
Here are some examples of the zone of proximal development:
- A student is able to perform simple addition when working with a teacher or parent, but is frustrated when performing the task alone. By guiding the student to use tools and strategies, and by asking questions about why he/she is using each tool or strategy, the student is able to fortify knowledge and eventually add independently.
- Tennis students are able to hit the ball over the net but are challenged by serving. Through appropriate coaching that focuses on their strengths, they are able to learn to serve the ball effectively.
- A learner driver is able to effectively drive forward and backward but cannot parallel park. Through targeted guidance from a teacher, the driver is able to learn how to park.
Read Chapter 4: Big developmental theories: Piaget, information-processing, Vygotsky (Links to an external site.) (Meadows, 2017, pp. 89–112), which covers Piaget and Vygotsky’s classical theories.
- Piagets - cognitive development
- Vygotsky - attachment theory
Cognitive Development: Piaget, Information-Procession and Vygotsky:
- what develops - noting what changes between different ages
- how these changes happen
Piagetian Theory:
- Assimilation and Accommodation occur together, though on may dominate the other, their functioning gives rise to a series of structure of cognition. Cognition is otganised into systems of representations, rules, categories, procedure and so forth, which eventually amount to unified coherent organization of logical operations. Involves taking information that is relating what one discovers for the first time to what one knows already, would also seem to be important.
- The piagetian child is an active thinking who continually strives to understand the world in a coherent way. They do not depend on education or culture.
- what changes during cognitive development, move from childhood from thinking that was fragmened, partial, concret and closely tied to experience to thinking that was logical, abstract and very flexiable by adolescence. Cognitive progress was due to the childs self-generated efforts.
Causes of Cognitive Development:
- 1. organic growth, maturation of central nervous systems. Proceeds the first year or two after birth and continues. 2. explaining how cognition developed was the role of exercise and of acquired experience in the actions performed upon objects, direct physical experience and indirect reflective experience. 3. social interaction and transmission, taught or guided and imitate.
Equilibration: (4)
- how development occured. Centred on logico-mathematical experience and was invoked to co-ordinate the diverse contributions of maturation and experiences. ‘need; for a coherently organised and consistent way of thinking. Partially adequate ways of thinking conflicting with the data provided by the external world, or with their own inconsistent processes and results and having to be improved.
Stages:
- ,.
- Sensorimotor - birth to 2 years - reflexs to the beginning of symbolic functioning
- Pre-operational - 2 - 7 years - lack operational thought, ego centric, beginning the use of representational systems language and imagery.
- Concrete Operational - 7 - 11 years - less egocentric, think more systematically and quantitatively
- Formal Operational (Adolescents to Adulthood) - more integrated and abstract
Information-Processing Approaches:
- how is information coded
- how children represent info, how its identified, coded , manipulated, stored, retrieved and transformed.
- argues that information-processing through the memory stores and workspaces becomes faster and less effortful over childhood, or as people acquire more expertise.
- propose that the development of a series of distrinct executive strategies for solving problems is key.
- over time, processes used to manipulate symbols, becomes more complex, accessible, exhaustive, flexible and faster
- Representations - its possible that there are built-in biases in how information is registered, coded and stored.
- Inhibition and Flexibility - ability to switch between tasks or rules, developes through preschool, development of the prefrontal cortex seems to be involved.
- development and learning involve the gradual process of prceduralization and a process of explicitation and increasing accessibility.
- Rules, algorithms and efficiency - increasing use of rules which are sufficient, do not need supplements or exceptions, rather than rules which are only partially correct. There is a similar development shift towards using more efficient processing to use procedures which are more powerful and require less rote repetition and unskilled labour.
- Developmental Mechanisms - models differ in details but common features, are increases in attentional resources, general component is processes which modify the knowledge base, strengthening or weakening links, determining that change is needed.
- fewer demands on resources to modify the knowledge base and set the recurrent regularities up as a sort of package which can be called up en bloc.
- Further elaboration - resources need to be inside the persons head.
Cognition and its Social Construction:
- cognitive development involves the internalisation, transformation and use of routines, ideas and skills which are learned socially from more competent partners. Children develop more sophisticated cognitive competences despite only having simpler ones in their own repertoire because adults have more sophisticated competence and guide the child repeatedly.
- child being led to behave in ways which the culture has developed as cognitively useful.
- self-scaffolding is when a child is about to take what has been learned and apply it to new situations.
- stresses close and complex relationships between external social processes and internal psychological ones.
- functional regression may be apart of the internalisation of any complex skill
Language and Thought:
- use of language to guide their own thinking.
The Zone of Proximal Development:
- if we are to provide learning opportunities which will enable the child to develop, we need to know not just what the child can do independently but also what the child can do with such assistance as demonstrations, prompts or leading questions.
Read up to Stage 4 of Chapter 1: The development of object concept (Links to an external site.) (Piaget & Cook, 1954, pp. 3–66).
According to Piaget [1954] and his followers, human infants are not born with the concept of an object. They do not understand that objects continue to exist when out of sight. For infants up to about 10 months of age, objects can blink out of existence and come into existence with no apparent cause. The object concept is the knowledge that objects are permanent, independent entities that exist in space and time even when one cannot perceive or act on them. Humans would be almost unable to function without this knowledge.
To understand how the budding intelligence constructs the external world, we must first ask whether the child, in its first months of life, conceives and perceives things as we do, as objects that have substance, that are permanent and of constant dimensions. If this is not the case, it is then necessary to explain how the idea of an object (object concept) is built up. The problem is closely connected with that of space. In this first chapter, then, substance and space should be considered simultaneously, and it is only through abstraction that we shall limit ourselves to object concept. Observation and experimentation combined seem to show that object concept, far from being innate or given ready-made in experience, is constructed little by little. Six stages can be discerned, corresponding to those of intellectual development in general. During the first two stages (those of reflexes and the earliest habits), the infantile universe is formed of pictures that can be recognized but that have no substantial permanence or spatial organization. During the third stage (secondary circular reactions), a beginning of permanence is conferred on things by prolongation of the movements of accommodation (grasping, etc.) but no systematic search for absent objects is yet observable. During the fourth stage (“application of known means to new situations”) there is searching for objects that have disappeared but no regard for their displacements. During a fifth stage (about 12 to 18 months old) the object is constituted to the extent that it is permanent individual substance and inserted in the groups of displacements, but the child still cannot take account of changes of position brought about outside the field of direct perception. In a sixth stage (beginning at the age of 16 to 18 months) there is an image of absent objects and their displacements. This chapter extensively examines these six stages.
Read 8.1 of Chapter 8 Cognitive development in the preschool years (Links to an external site.) (Harris & Westermann, 2014, pp. 133–135).
Pre-Operational Stage - Preschool years:
Reversibility - the child has an understanding that actions can be reversed - children at this age are not able to understand what this is.
Egocentrism - to consider the world entirely from ones own point of view - unable to differentiate what is subjective and what is objective.
DB
This week, our focus was on the children’s cognitive development and construction of reality. We learnt that children develop through their interactions with the physical world and with people. Around the age of 2-6/7 years, children begin to move from simply developing physical/motor and sensory skills ( eg SENSORI- MOTOR), to an increase in play and pretending as they further learn and work through what they have observed in their world, and they “assimilate” what they encounter with what they already have learnt. At this age, children lack logic and reasoning and only see things from their own point of view - what is called being egocentric. The child also has difficulty focusing on more than one aspect of a situation - what is called centration. Children in this age also lack the higher order skill of being able to manipulate mental representations, notably by identifying, organising, and elaborating such representations or retrieving them from memory. This means the child cannot use logic or transform, combine or separate ideas. We call these “cognitive operations”. That is why a child this age is in the PRE OPERATIONAL stage, as they are PRE cognitive operations.As you see in the video, our responses here were correct - the older child has developed the cognitive “operations” to understand the task, and the more abstract idea that because something changes shape it doesn’t mean that the amount changes (either lollies like the video example, or water in a beaker like the exercise question). The younger child, being PRE operational thought skills, can’t understand this idea and says that with the visual change of stimulus there is a change in the amount and now one has more than the other.
The other theorist we looked at this week was Vygotsky, who hypothesised that social interaction is an important part of young children’s cognitive development. The term ‘zone of proximal development’ refers to a concept developed by Vygotsky and refers to the difference between a learner’s ability to perform a task independently, rather than with guidance. See the diagram below in the PDF file:
It’s fairly self-explanatory, but the zone of proximal development is where development and learning can occur - children can learn skills they don’t already know and can’t do on their own, but they can do with assistance and guidance. Importantly, Vygotsky’s theories stress the fundamental role of social interaction in the development of cognition, as he believed strongly that community plays a central role in the process of making meaning. Unlike Piaget’s notion that children’s development must necessarily precede their learning, Vygotsky argued learning is a necessary and universal aspect of the process of developing culturally organised, specifically human psychological function. Opposed to Piaget’s more process based development theory (ie children move through stages by developing skills to move to next stage), Vygotsky’s theory is more dynamic and less-ordered (ie children can learn through development or before development).
The Piaget and Cook (1954) article describes the six substages of sensorimotor development with the fourth stage being marked by the development of object permanence.
Reflexive Schemes
Birth –1 month
Newborn reflexes
Primary Circular Reactions
1 – 4 months
Simple motor habits centred around own body
Secondary Circular Reactions
4 – 8 months
Repeat interesting effects in surroundings
Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions
8 – 12 months
Intentional, goal-directed behaviour; object permanence
Tertiary Circular Reactions
12 – 18 months
Explore properties of objects through novel actions
Mental Representations
18 months – 2 years
Internal depictions of objects or events; deferred imitation
- According to Piaget’s theory the preoperational stage for children’s development is primarily between: (B)
a - 4-8 years of age
b - 2.5 – 6 years of age
c - 18 months – 4 years of age
d - 3.5-7 years of age
- Egocentrism is defined as a period when children learn to consider a situation from multiple viewpoints: (FALSE)
True
False
- Reversibility is defined as when children learn: (C)
a - To walk backwards
b - To speak in sentences
c - That actions can be reversed
d - To pivot on the spot and change directions spontaneously
- Piaget’s “three mountain’s task” is linked to the key concept of: (A)
a - Egocentrism
b - Reversibility
c - Cortisol
d - Preoperational stage
- One of the key criticisms of Piaget’s research made by Donaldson (1978) and Siegal (1997) was that: (C)
a - Preschoolers shouldn’t do research
b - Preschoolers didn’t know what mountains were
c - The tasks would make little sense to pre-schoolers given their relative stage of language development
d - Parents shouldn’t allow their children to participate in research if they aren’t financially compensated
