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Cognitive Development and Education (Cognitive) - Coggle Diagram
Cognitive Development and Education (Cognitive)
Cognitive development in children and the impact of this on education
Cognitive development refers to the way children an adults become more skilful learners as they get older
Piaget's theory of cognitive development
Swiss psychologist Piaget (1896-1980) theory of cognitive development is insight that children's thinking is not a similar form of adult thinking, it is entirely different
Schemas, disequilibrium and equilibration:
Store knowledge in schemas -> organised mental structures containing knowledge of aspects of world
Babies born with simple schemas but become more complex through two main processes
Assimilation -> adding new experiences to existing schemas (feeding bottles -> sucking schema)
Accommodation -> changing schema or creating a new one to accommodate the new experiences
Disequilibrium -> motivation to learn something because not understanding something means we are 'out of balance' with the world
Equilibration -> adapting to new situations through cycle of assimilation and accommodation
Stages of cognitive development
Sensorimotor stage (0-2 yrs):
E.g. baby learns to coordinate hand-eye coordination
Milestone in development is object permanence -> baby realises objects exist even when they cannot see them
Pre-operational stage (2-7 yrs):
Children's thinking lacks consistent logic
E.g. children's thinking is egocentric -> only see world from their perspective
Thinking is animistic, attributing lifelike qualities to inanimate objects
Concrete operational stage (7-11 yrs):
Children now apply logic and reasoning to abstract ideas
Use thought systematically to generate hypothesis and follow to logical conclusion
Vygotsky's theory of cognitive development
Russian psychologist Vygotsky (1986-1934) agreed with Piaget's theories
Diverged from Piaget with his emphasis on roles of culture and social interaction
Sociocultural context:
Knowledgeable/experienced adults help intellectual development of children by interacting, showing them skills/cultural values
Intermental process -> see above
Language is crucial in this process, from 2 years, language is necessary for thought and therefore at least partly drives cognitive development
Zone of proximal development (ZPD):
Vygotsky believed that any child functioning at a particular level of development capable of further after adult interaction
Greatest development in thinking happens in gap between what child understands now and what they could with help form others -> gap is ZPD
The impact of cognitive development on education
Piaget: Readiness:
Children become capable of certain thinking forms at certain stages
Not 'ready' to learn new certain things until they reach a particular stage
E.g. children shouldn't be taught maths before operational stage as they cannot conserve number
Piaget: Discovery thinking:
Learning should be child-centred
Teachers facilitate discovery learning. Activities planned to create disequilibrium and then motivate them to learn to restore equilibration
Vygotsky: Scaffolding:
Scaffolding -> expert helps child cross their ZPD
Scaffolding is a task/problem that aims to help children climb to a higher level
Vygotsky: Collaborative learning:
Teachers more direct in scaffolding than discovery learning
Collaborative learning -> method of learning where students of different levels work together to achieve a goal
Helps everyone feel successful
E.g. peer tutoring
Wood et al (1976) on the role of tutoring
Background and aims
Bruner argued that children are natural problem solvers from their early months
Skill acquisition in children is hierarchal
Intervention allows child to solve problem that would be beyond their capabilities without help
Wood et al argued children have to be able to recognise what a solution would look like before being able to produce the steps to solving it without help
E.g. Clinchy (1974) -> 20 questions
Aims:
Wood et al wanted to investigate a 'natural' tutorial session to gain knowledge about the interactive and instructional relationship between the developing child and his elders. The aim was to study the process of skill acquisition and problem solving
The study is not a formal test of a hypothesis about the tutoring process - it is a systematic description of how children respond to different types of help
Method
Investigation using controlled observation in a lab environment
Sample:
30 children (10 3, 10 4, 10 5 year olds)
5 boys/girls per group
Middle/lower class from Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Self selected
20 mins - 1 hour
Procedure
The tutoring procedure:
Gail Ross (a researcher) was tutor. Goal was to allow child to do as much independently as possible
Standardised procedure: - Each child tutored individually - table with 21 blocks, 5 mins of freeplay - tutor demonstrated how 2 blocks go together - three possible outcomes: if child ignored tutor and continued to play the tutor again demonstrated how to join two blocks together, if child selects block himself and tries to assemble them using a method like the tutor's but missed out a part of the process the tutor told the child the construction was incomplete and to compare his with hers and make his similar, if the child took blocks presented by the tutor to construct for himself the tutor corrected any mistake the child made
Tutor only intervened if child stopped or struggled
The scoring system:
Each act by child classified as either: trying to assemble blocks after tutor presented (assisted), trying to assemble blocks after selecting themselves (unassisted), manipulating assembled blocks after tutor presented (assisted), manipulating blocks after selecting themselves (unassisted)
Researchers noted each of the tutors interventions, classed into: direct assistance, verbal error prompt, verbal attempt to get child to make more constructions
All behaviours categorised and inter-rater reliability of 94% achieved between two observers of 594 video-taped events
Results
Observations on tutorials:
Total construction acts -> median = 39 (3), 41 (4), 32 (5)
Pairing acts -> 10% (3), 50% (4), 75% (5)
Reconstructions -> 13 (3), 4 (4), 4 (5)
Tutorial relationship:
Tutorial help -> 64.5% unassisted (3), 79.3% (4), 87.5% (5)
Help from tutor -> assisted: 9 (3), 6.5 (4), 3 (5)
3 year olds ignored tutor 11 times and 5 year olds never
Tutor's type of interaction -> verbal (4)
Conclusions
Scaffolding:
Six steps: (1) recruitment, (2) reduction in degrees of freedom, (3) direction maintenance, (4) marking critical features, (5) frustration control, (6) demonstration
Other conclusions:
Comprehension precedes production
Tutor plays different roles related to age
Evaluation
Validity
Not valid:
Controlled observation in a lab setting so children may not have behaved naturally
Fact they weren't with their usual teacher, they may not have asked as many questions as they usually would
Valid:
The task itself had high validity as it was developed so it would be appealing and similar to the kind of activity children would engage with
Control allowed for researchers to reduce extraneous variables
Reliability
Reliable:
Tutoring procedure was standardised
Increased reliability as each child's experience was consistent
Sampling bias
Bias:
Sample was limited as it was drawn from a very narrow geographical area and socioeconomic grouping (middle class)
Not generalisable
No bias:
Research on scaffolding (Van de Pol et al 2010) confirmed effectiveness suggests Wood et al's results were generalisable
Ethnocentrism
Ethnocentric:
Vygotsky saw individual independence as end goal superior to collaborative learning
Other cultures see collaborative learning as a desirable goal
Nature/Nurture
Nature:
Stages of cognitive development processed in same sequence in every child -> stages driven by biological changes in the brain
Nurture:
Vygotsky emphasises importance of nurture from social environment
Learning can come before development
Freewill/determinism
Deterministic:
Assumption that successful scaffolding of a task will inevitably lead to advances in child's thinking and cognitive development
Scaffolding of a task is responsibility of tutor -> environmental determinism
Freewill:
Children learn best when active rather than passive
Children choose to be active learners and choose to be passive and not learn
Usefulness
Useful:
Scaffolding is a useful way of guiding guiding teaching
Not useful:
Consequences of readiness is that teachers have to carefully match material and tasks to the child's stage of cognitive development but this is believed to hold back the advancement of children's thinking
Conducting socially sensitive research
Socially sensitive:
Can cause stress and reduce self esteem in children, making success more difficult to achieve later on
Could push children beyond what they're capable of which may cause stress
Psychology as a science
Not scientific:
Key research not rigorously controlled -> researchers had no formal hypothesis
Attempted to standardise procedures and increase reliability, but balanced against paying attention to each individual child
Cognitive strategies to improve revision of learning
Context-dependent memory
Importance of context:
Tulving's encoding specificity principle (ESP) -> cue can help us remember something if it is present at encoding
The memory palace:
Start with mental image of somewhere you're familiar with
Form mental images of everything you want to remember
Place them inside the palace
Walk through the various locations to remember what was in the rooms
Mind-Mapping
Basic mind map elements:
Mind map has central element and several lines branching out to sub elements
Further elements:
Complex mind map includes other lines to related concepts
Look is to look visual rather than text-dominated
Psychological basis of mind maps:
Effectiveness of mind maps is organisation
Structures knowledge in meaningful way
Makes student process material semantically
Semantically-organised information is easier to recall