week 3 - theories of children's cognitive development Flashcards
Piaget’s theory is described as?
Constructivist.
According to Piaget development includes what?
Processes of continuities, and processes of discontinuities.
What is continuity?
a gradual change.
What is discontinuity?
a more abrupt change.
What is assimilation?
Incorporate new information into concepts already understood.
What is accommodation?
Improve current understanding in response to new experiences.
What is equillbration?
Process of balancing accommodation and assimilation to create a stable understanding. Equilibrium – disequilibrium – equilibrium.
What are Piaget’s stages of cognitive development?
sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational thought, and formal operations.
What happens in the sensorimotor stage?
age 0-2, Intelligence expressed through sensory and motor abilities.
What happens in the preoperational stage?
age 2-7, Ability to represent experiences in language, mental imagery and symbolic thought.
What happens in the concrete operational thought stage?
age 7-11/12, Ability to reason logically about concrete objects and events.
What happens in the formal operations stage?
age 11/12 up, Become able to think about abstractions and hypothetical situations.
When do children learn object permanence?
Sensorimotor stage can take up to 8 months. (Knowledge that an object continues to exist even if it cannot be seen.)
What is “A not B error”?
The ability to differentiate similar things, example - hidden toy. Learned in sensorimotor stage, around year 1.
What is Egocentrism?
perceiving the world solely from your own point of view.
What is centrafication?
(preoperational stage) focussing on a single, perceptually striking feature of an object or event, to the exclusion of other features.
What is Piaget’s water experiment?
Child sees two equal glasses of water, the water from one of the glasses is poured into a new glass with the same volume but which is skinnier and taller. The child will believe the taller glass has more water.
What is the symbolism of child using banana as a phone in preoperational stage?
Child is being playful, can understand that the banana is not actually a phone.
At the formal operations stage what can children understand?
abstract thought.
At the concrete operational thought stage what can children understand?
logical reasoning about concrete problems.
What are some issues with Piaget’s developmental theory?
Stages not as age reliant as once believed to be, children’s abilities underestimated, ignores social environment contribution, not details about how cognitive changes come about and what triggers them.
What did Vygotsky propose?
Socio-cultural theory.
According to Vygotsky what is children’s primary motivation for learning?
Social experiences, the desire to be like other children.
What were Vygotsky’s views on private speech?
thinking and language and interlinked, thought is internalised speech.
What are the three phases of internalisation of speech?
(1) adult orally produce statements on what to do
(2) child audible tells him/her self what to do or what they need to carry on with a task
(3) Eventually - non-audible instructions that the child tell him/her self.
What is the zone of proximal development (ZPD)?
The distance between actual developmental level (independent capabilities) and potential development (capabilities under guidance). Not a property of the child. Describes what is needed for child to reach optimal potential.
What is information processing theory?
Focuses on the cognitive processes needed for thinking. Used computer simulations to identify the steps needed during thinking to achieve a goal.
How does Information-Processing Theories differ from Piaget’s developmental theory?
instead of set stages, learning and development is more gradual and continuous.
What are the basic processes of the development of memory?
Associating events with one another•recognizing objects (we encode features of the objects to be able to recognise them later, e.g., features of a dog)•recalling facts.
What are the two possible strategies for the development of memory?
Rehearsal (e.g., remember a phone number for only a few minutes) Selective attention (we pay attention only to the information that seems relevant to us).
What is the overlapping waves model?
Children learning is about problem-solving, strategies might be applied sequential as they grow but they might also overlap.
What solution does Piaget’s Theory and Information processing theory offer for: Why do preoperational children fail the conservation tasks?
Piaget - centration.
Information processing theory - limited capacity, inexperience, flexibility switching attention.
Explain the dynamic systems theories.
Development is the product of emergent coherence, learn new things through repetition of other recently learned things, children’s specific actions shape their development.
What is the explanation for the A not B error from the dynamic system theory?
Habit- toy is more often in hole A.
Memory - time between toy being hidden and baby getting to reach is too long.
Attention- baby’s attention was accidentally drawn to A or B making them more likely to try that answer.
According to Piaget, the three sources of continuity of children’s development are:
Assimilation, Accommodation and Equilibration.
According to the ‘Information Processing Theory’, children fail the conservation tasks because
they have limited memory and attention capacities.
The audible or non-audible instructions that the child tells himself/herself when performing a task are called
private speech
According to Vygotsky’s theory, when more competent people provide a temporary framework that supports the child to work at a higher level than otherwise he/she would have been able to, is called
social scaffolding
