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Piaget’s Cognitive-Developmental Theory

Researchers exploring human cognitive development want to understand the typical course of development, individual differences in development, and the mechanisms of development. There are three major theories of cognitive development—Piagetian, core knowledge, and Vygotskian. Among these, the model created by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget gets the most attention.

Piaget saw children as primary actors in their own mental development. That is, from birth, humans actively explore and mentally construct a world that corresponds to the social and natural world they experience. Therefore, Piaget’s approach is seen as constructivist.

You’ve already been introduced to Piaget’s cognitive developmental stages. Here, you’ll look at them in detail. To help prepare you for that challenge, our focus will be on highlighting key terms and concepts.

Basic Characteristics of Piaget’s Stages

Piaget assumed that all aspects of cognitive development mature as a single, integrated system. That is, motor skills, perceptual capacities, moral concepts, and time perception develop together in invariant stages that he considered to be universal.

Piaget’s Ideas About Cognitive Change

For Piaget, our mental representations of the world are organized in schemes. Our most potent mental representations are images and concepts. Images are mental pictures of the immediate environment (people, objects, and spaces). Concepts are mental maps that group similar people, objects, and spaces into categories. For example, at later stages of cognitive development, a doll, a wind-up car, and a ball are likely to be grouped in a toys concept.

Two main processes account for developmental change that begins in the sensorimotor stage—adaptation and organization.. Adaptation involves creating mental skills as we interact directly with the environment. Aspects of adaptation include assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation occurs as we use our current mental schemes to interpret our experiences of the outside world. Accommodation happens when we either replace or alter our mental schemes to make a place for new information.

Piaget maintained that the balance between assimilation and accommodation seesaws back and forth over time. When things aren’t changing much, assimilation is dominant. When a child is subject to rapid change, disequilibrium and disorientation occur, leading to a dominance of accommodation. He called this equilibration. As equilibration takes place, more effective mental schemes result. Organization occurs when internal mental schemes change to assimilate or accommodate new information.

Piaget and Education

If you’re a teacher and wish to embrace Piaget’s ideas about cognitive development, you would adopt three classroom principles:

• Permit children to discover things for themselves through spontaneous interaction with their environment.
• Be aware of children’s sensitivity to learning at their cognitive stage of learning readiness.
• Be aware of variations in individual learning styles and level of cognitive development.

Needless to say, rigid rote learning standards and “teaching to the test” tend to give little consideration to any or all of these principles.

Overall Evaluation of Piaget’s Theory

This final section in the discussion of Piaget’s contributions basically sums up what you’ve learned. It addresses two major questions: Is Piaget’s model clear and accurate? Does cognitive development actually appear in stages?

There’s no single or simple answer to either question. Later research has modified Piaget’s stage theory. Even so, we can acknowledge that Piaget’s pioneering work remains a background against which newer models and theories are developed and appraised.

The Core Knowledge Perspective

In the core knowledge perspective, children are born with innate, genetically determined core domains of thought. The two domains that get the most attention from researchers are referred to as physical knowledge and numerical knowledge.

Core knowledge domains are seen as genetic platforms that developed over the course of human evolution, or rather, they have species survival value. In this context, some core knowledge theorists maintain that, within each core domain, children have sufficient innate understanding to propose naive theories about things like adding and subtracting, as well as relative weight, height, and spatial relations when it comes to objects. That is, children are naive theorists. They can imagine cause-and-effect relationships among things or events.

Other core knowledge domains include innate linguistic capacities, psychological knowledge, and, more controversially, biological knowledge. Psychological knowledge, based on a theory of mind, proposes that preschoolers rapidly develop a sense of self and others, including apparent motivations. The idea of biological knowledge becomes wobbly as one recognizes that body knowledge and understanding is very much influenced through social learning.

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory

Piaget and the core knowledge advocates focus on the relationships between biological and cognitive development. Both also see the child’s innate capacities as the source of cognitive development. Both see children as active explorers of their environments.

Lev Vygotsky, the Russian theorist to whom you’ve already been introduced, didn’t reject these ideas. Human children are born with innate perceptual and memory capacities. However, the distinctive qualities of human cognitive development emerge in the context of social relationships, cultural influences, and the development of language.

Children’s Private Speech

Preschool children talk to themselves as they go about solitary play, drawing, puzzle-solving, or what-have-you. Piaget saw this fact as evidence of egocentric speech.

Vygotsky strongly disagreed. For him, language is the key to human cognitive development. To understand this point of view, try thinking about anything at all without mental wording. Here’s what you’ll discover if you haven’t already: What can’t be worded (or symbol-encoded in the cases of numbers) can’t be thought.

For Vygotsky, language, which can exist only in social worlds, is the scaffolding for all higher levels of cognitive development, including controlled attention, recall, intentional memorizing, planning, abstract reasoning, and self-reflection. In that light, children talk to themselves when alone or engaged in their own space to guide mental processes.

Research has strongly supported Vygotsky’s insights and findings—so much so that Piaget’s ideas about self-talk have been mainly discarded. Self-talk is now called private speech. Private speech gradually shifts toward whispered words and then to mental wording, as cognitive development proceeds.

Social Origins of Cognitive Development

Private speech is maximal when task difficulties are moderate. Why? Vygotsky showed us that private speech maximums mark what he called a zone of proximal development. In that zone, a child is cognitively ready to manage a task if he or she gets some guidance from a mentor, parent, teacher, or peer who’s ahead of the curve. Not only is language the medium of social interaction, but it’s the medium of cognitive development in the child.

However, if social interaction is to promote cognitive development, we’ll observe or detect three key factors.

• Intersubjectivity is what happens when two children who have different viewpoints on a problem arrive at a consensus, or a common understanding. Maybe this is one basis of the famous adage, “Two heads are better than one.”
• Scaffolding is adjusting the support offered in a teaching session to a child’s level of cognitive development. For example, a teacher may break down a task into manageable steps.
• Guided participation is a broader concept than scaffolding. It refers to interaction between more and less skilled participants in solving a problem or accomplishing a task. There are different modes of communication in guided participation. An Aboriginal Australian child may learn how to identify edible roots by imitating an older youth or adult mentor. A very young child may get guidance from an older child when attempting to use crayons to fill a space within the lines. In short, there can be considerable variations in going about scaffolding in different cultures and under different situations.

Vygotsky’s View of Make-Believe Play

For Vygotsky, make-believe play scenarios serve as zones of proximal development. Indeed, make-believe play is a central source of development during the preschool years for two main reasons.

1. As children create imaginary situations, they come to understand that they can act in terms of internal ideas and not just in response to external stimuli.
2. Because play scenarios are rule-based, children learn to think before they act and override impulsive behavior to remain in the game.

Vygotsky and Education

Even from these brief notes, you can probably recognize how Vygotsky’s ideas would influence ideas about effective education. One of the main ideas, of course, is the enormous importance of social interaction as a context for learning.

Reciprocal teaching is especially appropriate in teaching reading comprehension. However, it applies in other areas as well, such as teaching concepts in arithmetic. For example, a teacher and two to four students form a collaborative group to discuss a text passage, such as a stanza in a simple poem. Ideas are shared and compared. Questions are raised and addressed.

In cooperative learning, small groups of students work together toward common goals. The process is aimed at overcoming conflicts in pursuit of intersubjectivity.

Evaluation of Vygotsky’s Theory

You may best understand limitations in Vygotsky’s theories by recognizing that areas he neglected, such as the role of genetic and biological mechanisms in early development, may be due in part to the fact that Vygotsky died of tuberculosis when he was just 38 years old.

The Information-Processing Approach

The brain is an information processor. That’s both the metaphor and the method of the information-processing approach to cognition. A famous science-fiction story by Isaac Asimov, “I, Robot” (made into a 2004 film), makes explicit the idea that the primary differences between data processing machines and humans are chip complexity and limitations imposed on human flesh.

Developmental Theories of Information Processing

Case’s Neo-Piagetian Theory

Robbie Case (1944-2000) maintains that information processing gets more efficient in specific ways as a child moves through Piaget’s cognitive-development stages. In particular, efficiency is related to how effectively a child can use his or her working memory capacity. In turn, that basically involves increasingly complex transformations of mental representations. You can think of a transformation as some way to process and apply information provided by a particular mental schema. As transformation capacity increases, a child conceives more response options.

In any case, processing efficiency depends on three factors:

• Brain development—In infancy and toddlerhood, brain development moves through phases of proliferating synapses followed by synaptic pruning. The gradual result is the establishment of neural pathways that increase the efficiency of links between encoded inputs and task-effective responses. In terms of processing speed, however, optimal efficiency effectiveness is limited by the Piaget-defined developmental stages—sensorimotor, preoperational, and so on.
• Practice with schemes and automization—For Case, children’s mental strategies are determined by their Piagetian stage. In effect, as simple operations become automatic through practice, working memory space is freed up to allow for more complex transformations—more complex thinking and acting. Thus, a child moves from stage to stage.
• Formation of central conceptual structures—As soon as the schemes of a Piagetian stage become sufficiently automatic, more space in working memory is available for manipulating mental representations. At around age 11, enough processing space is available for a child to produce central conceptual structures. Any such structure is a network of concepts and relations that allow a child to think about a wide range of things in complex and novel ways.

Siegler’s Model of Strategy Choice

Robert Siegler, like a number of other researchers, is interested in looking at cognitive development through the perspective of Darwin’s concept of natural selection. In natural selection, a species develops from an ancestral species as its genotype becomes configured to a phenotype that’s optimally adapted to its environment. In effect, genetic profiles become fixed around gene expressions that best permit a species to live and reproduce. Adaptive genetic traits are retained; irrelevant or counterproductive genetic traits are either deleted or rendered inactive.

In child development, a baby is genetically enabled to express a wide variety of task-strategies in dealing with mathematical, motor, or linguistic tasks. However, according to Siegler’s model of strategy choice, a baby will, through trial and error, tend to adopt the strategies that work best for her. By analogy to genetic evolution, some traits will be selected while others will drop into the recessive category or be deleted from the genotype.

Using the techniques of microgenetic research,Siegler and his colleagues found that children experiment with strategies for using basic math principles (as well as things like memory for lists of items, conservation, and reading first words). However, the application of selected strategies follows an overlapping wave pattern. That is, children don’t simply move smoothly toward the most efficient or effective strategies. Instead, they may play around with both effective and less effective strategies until, eventually, the best strategies are most common in any task or problem situation.

Attention

In developing greater capacity in working memory, a child must encode information, operate on it in short-term memory to store it in long-term memory, and then be able to retrieve it into working memory to complete a task or solve a problem. To encode is to identify a stimulus and match it to a mental symbol, such as a word or symbol. However, we couldn’t possibly encode all the information around us on, say, a busy Manhattan street.

So, we don’t. Instead, we pay attention to what seems relevant to us, like the color of a stoplight. Our attention is always selective. Further, when goal-directed behavior (like walking or not walking) is related to what requires our attention (a stoplight), we have to be able to screen out irrelevant information, like the flashing Pepsi ad on a nearby building. That is, we require sustained attention—especially if we want to keep from being hit by a speeding cab or bicycle courier.

Clearly, a child has much to learn before he or she can cope with Manhattan at rush hour. So how do children acquire selective, adaptable attention? Two factors are paramount:

• Inhibition is the capacity to control internal and external distractions. Children are better able to deal with complex information-processing tasks, like interpreting a written paragraph, if they can screen out background sounds, control their emotional responses (like irritation or frustration) , and resist the temptations of distractions (like the aroma of baking cookies from the kitchen).
• Attentional strategies were studied by researcher Patricia Miller, who presented a complex task to three- to nine- year-old subjects. Miller found that the most effective attentional strategies emerged and were refined in this sequence:

1. 1.Production deficiency—Preschoolers almost never engage in attentional strategies.
2. 2.Control deficiency—Slightly older children are inconsistent about producing strategies. When they do, they fail to control or execute them efficiently.
3. 3.Utilization deficiency—Young elementary-school children produce and execute strategies consistently.
4. 4.Effective strategy—This emerges in the middle elementary school years as task performance also improves.

Planning

When you think out a strategy before you act, you’re engaged in planning. As children develop their attentional capacities, they’re more likely to engage in planning. Cognitively, planning requires postponing action while alternatives are weighed. It also involves remembering the steps in the plan, as well as any tools or items required for each step, as in following a recipe.

Memory

During the first two years of life, memory for objects, faces, people, and events makes dramatic gains. However, remembering in these early years isn’t purposeful or organized; it’s an unintentional result of children’s activities. Memory strategies emerge during the preschool years, but, as just noted, the strategies are inconsistent and often ineffective.

Memory does improve along with attentional capacity, although you should keep in mind that the big leap in coordinating memory and attention doesn’t take place until the middle elementary-school years. As you read, become familiar with the main strategies for storing information in the mind’s hard drive, or long-term memory.

Metacognition

Metacognition is self-awareness of one’s thought processes. It develops in children as they develop a theory of mind, a model or a theory based on the understanding that humans are mental creatures. Metacognitive knowledge expands as children gain knowledge of cognitive capacities. When a young child says things like, “I think,” “I remember,” or “Let’s pretend,” he or she is expressing awareness of mental states.

As children gain experience, their theory of mind becomes more sophisticated. For example, by age 10, children understand the idea of certainty of knowledge. They recognize that a person’s declaring that they “know,” “remember,” or “understand” something demonstrates more reliable information than “guessing,” “estimating,” or “comparing.”

As metacognition becomes more sophisticated, private speech allows children to “hear themselves think.” No doubt such experience helps children gain stronger awareness of their mental processes. As that happens, children also gain an understanding of conscious mental strategies.

Cognitive self-regulation is the process of continuously keeping track of progress toward some goal. Monitoring progress, such as evaluating likely next steps in assembling a picture puzzle, requires feedback.. Feedback allows a child to adjust and adapt mental representations. Think of a child using trial and error to fit pieces into a puzzle. That sort of behavior is guided by mentally assessing feedback. In school, as children get better at cognitive self-regulation, they develop a sense of academic self-efficacy. They gain confidence in their ability to solve problems and complete tasks. Parental or teacher guidance can assist that process.

Evaluation of the Information-Processing Approach

Three main points emerge here:

1. The information-processing approach is excellent for studying specific cognitive processes.
2. Because the focus is on parts rather than the whole integrated process, no general theory of cognitive development has appeared out of this approach.
3. .The analogy “mind = computer” falters when we consider the rather mysterious effects of intuition, creativity, and imagination on actual human cognitive development.

the simple life channel. (2017, May 17). Piaget and Vygotsky | Early Childhood Development Theories | cognitive development [Video]. YouTube.