Pedagogical Theories (Wk 3 & 6)

Constructivism: learning is a self regulated process that builds on learner's existing knowledge, learners are active participants

Social Constructivism: human development is socially situated and knowledge is constructed through interaction with others. Language and culture play a big role.

factors that influence development

  1. Maturation. Innate/ biological
  2. Activity. Learning by experimenting through mental and physical activity
  3. Social Interaction. Interactions with others (parents, peers, teachers) that contribute to learning experiences
  4. Equilibration. Achieving cognitive balance between what is familiar and unfamiliar through assimilation and accommodation
  1. We learn through encountering slightly different perspectives that challenge thinking and stimulate cognitive development. Socicognitive conlfict: conflict within child's thinking resulting from social interaction.
  1. Assimilation: Adjusting an existing schema to fit a new experience
    Accommodation: in info is used to establish a new model or schema
    Schema: A mental image or cluster or related ideas used to organise knowledge and make sense of new experiences

Congnitive Stages

1. Sensorimotor (0-2)

  • Object permanence
  • Goal-directed action
  • Deferred action
    Dominated by sensory activities (hearing, touching, smelling, seeing, tasting)

2. Pre-operational (2- 6/7)

  • Language acquisition
  • Symbolic thought
    Thinking still limited: appearance dominates perceptions and understanding

Child cannot carry out actions mentally, must manipulate real materials. Create own stories, draw representational pictures, imaginary friends, role-play games, egocentricism

3. Concrete operations (7-11/12)

  • Can represent events mentally
  • Ability to operate logically on surroundings
  • Classifying objects mentally
  • Reversing actions
  • Compensating for changes
  • Seeing from another's viewpoint
    Child can mentally manipulate and thing logically about objects that are present

4. Formal operations (12+)

  • Abstract thought
  • Some hypothetical reasoning in high school
    Can form hypotheses and solve problems systematically

Strengths

  • The stage the child is at, not the age is important
  • Study focus on the errors children make when they solve problems
  • Children's thinking is different and less efficient than adults

Criticisms:

  • Under- or overestimation of abilities
  • Children show evidence of deductive reasoning earlier than Piaget proposed
  • Research generally supports sequences of changes
  • Development is not a matter absence and sudden presence of skills
  • Describing children in terms of what they cannot do, negative
  • Piaget focused on child's role, not corrective feedback and teaching
  • Doesn't sufficiently take into account memory, motivation and emotion
  • Insufficient attention to individual differences among children e.g. gender, cultural background
  • Children don't all develop the same way and in the same time frame. Children use different strategies for the same problems.

Classroom application

Human mental abilities

  • Lower. Inherited, involuntary capacities e..g vision, hearing. Controlled by external objects and events.
  • Higher mental functions. Developed through social interaction e.g. logical and abstract thinking, language. Operate in the head, used to control lower mental functions. Used to solve problems concerning external objects and events.

Zone of Proximal Development
Distance between person's current level of competence on a task and what they can achieve with guidance

Emerging skills (Chapter 2)

Physical development

Language development

School-based skills

Physical growth

Motor development

Brian development

Pragmatics

Phonology

Semantics

Morphology

Syntax

Literacy

Numeracy

Second-language acquisiton

Bio-ecological Social Cultural Theory