Cognitive Development: Piaget’s Theory and Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Viewpoint

1. Cognitive Development: Piaget’s Theory and Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Viewpoint

2. PIAGET’S THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT • Genetic epistemology is the experimental study of the development of knowledge, developed by Piaget • What is Intelligence? • According to Piaget, it is a basic life function that enables an organism to adapt to its environment. • All intellectual activity is undertaken with one goal in mind-cognitive equilibrium • Piaget described children as constructivist

3. Cognitive Schemes: the structure of intelligence • Scheme is a term used by Piaget to describe the models, or mental structures, that we create to represent ,organize, and interpret our experiences. • There are 3 kinds of intellectual structures: 1.Behavioral schemes • First intellectual structures to emerge 2.Symbolic schemes • Appears ~2 year of life 3.Operational schemes • 7 years+

4. How we gain knowledge: Piaget’s Cognitive Processes • Organizationis the process by which children combine existing schemes into new and more complex intellectual structures. • Adaptationis an inborn tendency to adjust to the demands of the environment. • The goal of adaptation is to adjust to the environment; this occurs through assimilation and accommodation. • Assimilationis the process of interpreting new experiences by incorporating them into existing schemes. • Accommodationis the process of modifying existing schemes in order to incorporate or adapt to new experiences.

6. Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development • According to Piaget, a child’s development progresses through 4 qualitative stages and an invariant developmental sequence or universal pattern of development, which are: • The Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to 2 Years) • The Preoperational Stage (2 to 7 Years) • The Concrete-Operational Stage (7 to 11 Years) • The Formal-Operational Stage (11-12 Years and Beyond)

7. The sensorimotor stage (Birth-2 years) • The 6 Developmental stages of Problem-Solving abilities: 1. Reflex activity (0-1mon.) exercising and accommodation of inborn reflexes 2. Primary circular reactions (1-4 mon.) repeating acts centered on ones own body 3. Secondary circular reactions (4-8 mon.) repeating acts toward external objects

8. Sensorimotor stage cont’d 4. Coordination of secondary schemes (8-12 mon.) combining acts to solve simple problems. 5. Tertiary circular reactions (12-18 mon.) experimenting to find new ways of to solve problems 6. Symbolic problem solving (18-24 mon.) inner experimentation without relaying on trial-and-error experimentation

9. Development of imitation • Deferred imitation (18-24 mo.) is the ability to reproduce the behavior of an absent model. • Development of Object Permanence (8-12 mo) is the idea that objects continue to exist when they are no longer visible or detectable through the other senses. • A-not-B error: tendency of 8-12- month olds to search for a hidden object where they previously found it even after they have seen it moved to a different location.

10. Challenges to Piaget’s account of sensorimotor development: • Neo-nativism: idea that cognitive knowledge is innate and subject to biological constraints • “theory” theories: theories of cognitive development that combine neo-nativism and constructivism

11. Preoperational stage (2-7 yrs) • There is an increase in their use of mental symbols to represent objects and events they encounter • The Preconceptual Period is the early substage of preoperations, from age 2 to age 4, characterized by the appearance of primitive ideas, concepts, and methods of reasoning. Marked by the appearance of symbolic function and play. • The Intuitive Period is the later substage of preoperations, from age 4 to age 7, when the child’s thinking about objects and events is dominated by salient perceptual features.

12. The Preconceptual Period: • Emergence of Symbolic thought • Symbolic function • Ability to use symbols to represent objects or experiences • Symbolic play • Play where one object, action, or actor symbolizes another

13. Deficits in preconceptual reasoning: • Animism- attributing lifelike qualities to inanimate objects • Egocentrism- viewing the world from only one’s perspective • Appearance/Reality distinction- inability to distinguish deceptive appearances from reality

14. The intuitive period: Here cognition is described as: • Centered a tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation and not on others due to their inability to understand: • Conservation- recognition that the properties of an object or substance do not change when its appearance is altered in some superficial way. • Reversibility- ability to reverse or negate an action by mentally performing the opposite action

15. The Concrete-Operational Stage (7 to 11 Years) • Here children are said to think more logically about real objects and experiences • Some examples of operational thought • Conservation • Reversibility • Logic • Classification • ability to create relationships between things. • Relational Logic • Mental seriation • Transitivity • The sequencing of concrete operations • Horizontal decalage- different levels of understanding conservation tasks that seem to require the same mental operations

16. The Formal-Operational Stage (11-12 Years and Beyond) • Ability to reason logically about hypothetical process and events that may have no basis in reality • Hypothetico-Deductive Reasoning • a formal operational ability to think hypothetically. • Thinking Like a Scientist • Inductive reasoning- type of thinking where hypotheses are generated and then systematically tested in experiments. • Personal and Social Implications • The formal operation stage paves the way for: • Identity formation • Richer understanding of other peoples psychological perspectives • The ability to way options in decision making

17. An Evaluation of Piaget’s Theory • Convinced us that children are curious, active explorers who play an important role in their own development. • His theory was one of the first to explain, and not just describe, the process of development. • His description of broad sequences of intellectual development provides a reasonably accurate overview of how children of different ages think. • Piaget’s ideas have had a major influence on thinking about social and emotional development as well as many practical implications for educators. • Piaget asked important questions and drew literally thousands of researchers to the study of cognitive development.

18. Challenges to Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory: • Underestimated developing minds • Failed to distinguish competence from performance • It is believed by some that Cognitive development does not evolve in a qualitative and stage like manner- it tends to develop gradually • Provides a vague explanation on cognitive maturation • Devoted little attention to social and cultural influences

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20. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective • Sociocultural theory states that: • Cognitive development occurs in a sociocultural context that influences the form it takes • Most of a child’s cognitive skills evolve from social interactions with parents, teachers, and other more competent associates

21. The role of culture in intellectual development: • Vygotsky proposed that we should evaluate human development from four interrelated perspectives: • Microgenetic-changes that occur over brief periods of time-minutes and seconds • Ontogenetic-development over a lifetime • Phylogenetic-development over evolutionary time • Sociohistorical- changes that have occurred in one's culture and the values, norms and technologies such a history has generated

22. Tools of intellectual adaptation • Vygotsky (1930-1935/1978) proposed that infants are born with a few elementarymental functions – attention, sensation, perception and memory – that are eventually transformed by the culture into new and more sophisticated mental processes he called higher mental functions.

23. The Social Origins of Early Cognitive Competencies: • Zone of Proximal Development range of tasks that are too complex to be mastered alone but can be accomplished with guidance and encouragement from a more skillful partner • Scaffolding- the expert participant carefully tailors their support to the novice learner to assure their understanding

24. Apprenticeship in Thinking and Guided Participation: • guided participation, adult-child interactions in which children’s cognitions and modes of thinking are shaped as they participate with or observe adults engaged in culturally relevant activities. • Our culture is one that uses what Vygotsky termed context-independent learning

25. Implications for Education: • Children are seen as active participants in their education • teachers in Vygotsky’s classroom would favor guided participation in which they: • structure the learning activity • provide helpful hints or instructions that are carefully tailored to the child’s current abilities • monitor the learner’s progress • gradually turning over more of the mental activity to their pupils • Promote cooperative learning exercises

26. The role of language in cognitive development: According to Piaget: • Children partake in egocentric speech, utterances neither directed to others nor expressed in ways that the listeners might understand • Egocentric speech played a little role in cognitive development • Speech tended to become more social as the child matures-less egocentric

27. The role of language in cognitive development cont’d • According to Vygotsky: • Thought and language eventually emerge • A child’s nonsocial utterances, which he termed private speech, illustrate the transition from paralinguistic to verbal reasoning • Private speech plays a major role in cognitive development by serving as a cognitive self-guidance system, allowing children to become more organized and good problem solvers • As individuals develop, private speech becomes inner speech

28. To consider… • According to contemporary research: • Children rely heavily on private speech when facing difficult problems • There is a correlation between “self-talk” and competence • Private speech does eventually become inner speech and facilitates cognitive development

29. Theories of Cognitive Development:Vygotsky vs. Piaget