THEORIES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Piaget’s Stage Theory of Cognitive Development
Swiss biologist and psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980)
observed his children (and their process of making sense of the world around
them) and eventually developed a four-stage model of how the mind processes new
information encountered. According to Piaget, children are born
with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which
all subsequent learning and knowledge is based. He posited that children
progress through 4 stages and that they all do so in the same order. These four
stages are:
- Sensorimotor
stage (Birth to 2 years old). The infant builds an understanding
of himself or herself and reality (and how things work) through
interactions with the environment. It is able to differentiate between
itself and other objects. Learning takes place via assimilation (the organization
of information and absorbing it into existing schema) and accommodation
(when an object cannot be assimilated and the schemata have to be modified
to include the object.
- Preoperational
stage (ages 2 to 4). The child is not yet able to conceptualize
abstractly and needs concrete physical situations. Objects are classified
in simple ways, especially by important features.
- Concrete
operations (ages 7 to 11). As physical experience accumulates,
accomodation is increased. The child begins to think abstractly and
conceptualize, creating logical structures that explain his or her
physical experiences.
- Formal
operations (beginning at ages 11 to 15). Cognition reaches its
final form. By this stage, the person no longer requires concrete objects
to make rational judgements. He or she is capable of deductive and
hypothetical reasoning. His or her ability for abstract thinking is very
similar to an adult.
Vygotsky’s theory
of cognitive development
As stated above, Vygotsky believed children’s thinking is
affected by their knowledge of the social community (which is learnt from
either technical or psychological cultural tools). He also suggested that
language is the most important tool for gaining this social knowledge; the
child can be taught this from other people via language. He defined
intelligence as “the capacity to learn from instruction”, which emphasises the
fact there is a requirement for a more knowledgable other person or ‘teacher’.
He referred to them as just that: the More Knowledgable Other (MKO). MKO’s can
be parents, adults, teachers, coaches, experts/professionals – but also things
you might not first expect, such as children, friends and computers.
He described something known as the zone of proximal
development (ZPD), which is a key feature of his theory. There are two levels
of attainment for the ZPD:
·
Level 1 – the ‘present level of development’.
This describes what the child is capable of doing without any help from others.
·
Level 2 – the ‘potential level of development’.
This means what the child could potentially be capable of with help from other
people or ‘teachers’.
·
The gap between level 1 and 2 (the present and
potential development) is what Vygotsky described as this zone of proximal
development. He believed that through help from other, more knowledgable
people, the child can potentially gain knowledge already held by them. However,
the knowledge must be appropriate for the child’s level of comprehension.
Anything that is too complicated for the child to learn that isn’t in their ZPD
cannot be learnt at all until there is a shift in the ZPD. When a child does
attain their potential, this shift occurs and the child can continue learning
more complex, higher level material.
Woods and Middleton
(1975) studied the influence of instruction with their experiment. They
provided 3-4 year olds with a puzzle which was beyond their comprehension on
their own. The mother then provided different levels of assistance for the
child:
·
L1 – General verbal instruction (“Very good! Now
try that again.”)
·
L2 – Specific verbal instruction (“Get four big
blocks”)
·
L3 – Mother indicates material (“You need this
block here”)
·
L4 – Mother provides material and prepares it
for assembly
·
L5 – Mother demonstrates the operation
Criticisms of Piaget’s Theory
Sociocultural
approach:
• Children’s thinking is affected by social interactions
-Russian
psychologist Lev Vygotsky portrayed children as social beings intertwined with
other people who were eager to help them learn and gain skills.
Core Knowledge approach:
• Infants and young children have and use a lot of innate
mental machinery for complex abstract thought
-Child as Primate Scientist
o
Children have innate cognitive capabilities that
are the product of human evolutionary processes.
o
Focus on human universals (e.g., language,
social cognition, biological categorization, using numbers)
o
Children are much more advanced in their
thinking than Piaget suggested.
Information
processing approach:
• Children’s thinking is a computational process
• Children’s thinking is not as consistent as the stages
suggest.
Child as Computer
• Concerned with the development of domain-general processes
learning, memory, and problem-solving skills.
• Provides detailed description of the steps involved in
thinking (like a computer program)
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