Piaget's theory
Piaget devised a model describing how humans go about making sense of their world by gathering and organizing information.
He was interested in providing an explanation of the development of thinking from infancy to adulthood.
Cognitive development
It is much more than the addition of new facts and ideas to an existing store of information; our thinking processes change radically from birth to maturity as we strive to make sense of the world.
Influences on cognitive development
Biological factors (maduration)
Related to the unfolding of the biological changes that are genetically programmed. Teachers and parents have little impact on this aspect of cognitive development, except to ensure that children get the nourishment and care they need to be healthy.
All work together to influence cognitive development.
Activity
With physical maduration comes the increasing ability to act on the environment and learn from it. As we do so, we explore, test, observe, and eventually orgnanize information. We are likely to alter our thinking processes at the same time.
Social transmission
Cognitive development is influenced by social transmission or learning from others. Without it, we would need to reinvent all the knowledge already offered by pur culture. The amount of knowledge people can learn from social interaction varies according to their stage of cognitive development.
Basic tendencies in thinking
Organization : combining, arranging, recombining and rearranging behaviours and thoughts into coherent systems/tendenecy to organize thinking processes into psychological structures.
Adaptation: tendency to adapt to their environment.
Schemes
Psychological structures which are the systems for understanding and interacting with their world.
Basic building blocks of thinking.
Organized systems of actions and thoughts that allow us to mentally represent or think about the object and events in our world
Assimilation
We use our existing schemes to make sense of the events in our world.
We try to understand something new bt fitting it into what we lalready know.
Accommodation
We must change existing schemes to respond to new situation.
We adjust our thinking to fit new information by creating new schemes.
Equilibration:process of searching for balance. Organizing, assimilating and accommodating can be seen as balancing act when dealing with changes in thinking
.
Equilibrium
We apply a particular scheme to an event or situation and the scheme works.
Disequilibrium
The schemes we have do not produce a satisfying result and we become uncomfortable.
Readiness: Piaget believed that one of the factors that affect cognitive development is “readiness”. Children learn when they are biologically mature to reach that stage.
Four stages of Cognitive Development
Infancy: the sensorimotor stage
Early childhood to the early elementary years: the preoperational stage
High school and college: formal operations
Late elementary to middle school: the concrete operational
Importance of the senses/object permanence/goal directed actions/reverse actions.
Beginning of reverse thinking/ semiotic function//development of language/egocentrism.
Concrete operations/reverse thinking/classification/still physical world
Hypothetico-deductive reasoning/adolecent egocentrist/scientific thinking.
Limitations
Problems with the stages.
Underestimating children's abilities
Cognitive development and...
Culture
Piaget's theory overlooks the effects of the learner's culture and social group in cognitive development.
Interaction
Interaction only encouraged cognitive development by creating disequilibrium. Thus, he believed that the most helpful interactions were those between peers, as they are on an equal basis and can challenge each other’s thinking.
Learning
Cognitive development has to come before learning; the child had to be cognitively ready to learn. He claimed that learning is subordinated to development and not vice versa.
Language
Cognitive development is prior to language. The latter starts to develop in the preoperational stage as the child is ready.
Implications for teachers
Implications for teachers
-Help children to learn how to learn and furnish their minds.
-Learn about the students by listening carefully and paying attention to how they solve problems.
-Match teaching practices to the children's current knowledge and abilities.
-Students are the best sources of information about their own thinking.
-Students must be neither bored by the work that is too simple nor left behind by teaching they cannot understand. (see equilibrium).
-Students should be actively engaged in the learning process.
-Students need to interact with teachers and peers in order to test their thinking, to be challenged, to receive feedback, and to watch how other work out problems.
-Students should act on, manipulate, observe, and then talk/write about what they have experienced.