Chapter 7



Chapter 7

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

Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) Swiss psychologist who became leading theorist in 1930’s

Primary method was to ask children to solve problems and to question them about the reasoning behind their solutions

Discovered that children think in radically different ways than adults

Proposed that development occurs as a series of ‘stages’ differing in how the world is understood

Intelligence is viewed as a basic life function that helps in adapting to the environment.

Intelligence is a form of equilibrium, and the process of achieving it is called equilibration.

Children must construct knowledge.

Cognitive schemes: The structure of intelligence

Behavioral (or sensorimotor) schemes: Organized patterns of behavior that are used to represent and respond to an object or experience

Symbolic schemes: Experiences represented mentally

Operational schemes: Internal mental activity performed to reach a logical conclusion

Piaget believed that “children are active thinkers, constantly trying to construct more advanced understandings of the world”

These “understandings” are in the form of structures he called schemas

Schemas are frameworks that develop to help organize knowledge

How We Gain Knowledge: Piaget's Cognitive Processes

Organization is the process where existing schemes are combined into new and more complex intellectual structures.

Adaptation is the process of adjusting to the demands of the environment.

Assimilation: The process of attempting to fit new experiences to existing schemes

Accommodation: The process of modifying existing structures in order to account for new experiences

Assimilation: a basic process that involves responding or interpreting new experiences in terms of existing schemes--in terms of what the child already knows.

Example: an infant may respond to a washcloth using two existing schemes, grasping and sucking. The infant grabs the washcloth, (an act of assimilation to the grasping scheme) stuffs a corner of it in his mouth, and sucks on it, (an act of assimilation to the sucking scheme).

In each case the infant has used an existing response and incorporated the washcloth into his existing notion of scheme of graspable, suckable objects.

Accommodation: a process that involves modifying existing schemes in light of new experiences. washcloth example-- the infant used an existing scheme in the process of grasping the washcloth. However, because of the unique properties of the washcloth, the response itself had to be modified (accommodated) and the child's scheme of graspable objects modified (accommodated) to include washcloths.

Every adaptive act involves the complementary processes of assimilation and accommodation. questionable whether sucking on washcloths is particularly adaptive - they are sometimes soapy, etc. - accommodation in this case may involve the exclusion of washcloths from the sucking scheme and creation of a new scheme of "things with which to wash the face and body" (but not floors, cars, etc. unless they have become relegated to the category of rags).

The Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to 2 Years):

Coordinating Sensory Inputs and Motor Capabilities

Information is gained through the senses and motor actions

In this stage child perceives and manipulates but does not reason

Symbols become internalized through language development

Object permanence is acquired

Development of problem-solving skills

Reflex activity (First month of life): Infant's actions are based on reflexes

Primary circular reactions (1 to 4 months): First nonreflexive schemes are simple repetitive acts centered on their own bodies.

Secondary circular reactions (4 to 8 months): Interest in external objects

Coordination of secondary schemes (8 to 12 months): Coordination of two or more actions to achieve simple objectives

Tertiary circular reactions (12 to 18 months): Active curiosity and motivation to learn about the way things work

Symbolic problem solving (18 to 24 months): Behavioral schemes are internalized; mental symbols are constructed which can be used to guide future behaviors.

Development of deferred imitation begins at 18 to 24 months.

Object permanence: Objects continue to exist when they are no longer visible or detectable through the other senses

What is common to all three major acquisitions that mark the end of the sensorimotor period: object permanence, deferred imitation, and inner problem solving.

Object permanence: the achievement of coming to behave as if objects and people have a continued existence even when they are not in sight or in hand. Although recent research indicates that the search behaviors Piaget required as evidence of understanding of an object's permanence led to underestimation of actual understanding of object permanence, evidence does indicate that it is not until 18-24 months that children show that they can mentally represent invisible displacement of objects and inhibit the impulse to search for hidden objects at locations they know are incorrect.

Deferred imitation refers to the ability to reproduce behavior observed in another - in the absence of the model. Deferred imitation requires the use of a stored memory of the modeled behavior to guide/mediate recreation of the modeled sequence. Although recent research suggests that infants show some evidence of deferred imitation before the latter half of the second year, few can reenact complex behavioral sequences until 18-24 months.

Inner problem solving refers to the ability to arrive at a solution to a problem mentally without having to resort to overt trial-and-error activities. Both deferred imitation and inner problem solving represent remarkable advances over the exercising and accommodation of inborn reflexes of the newborn, allowing for rapid expansion of the behavior repertoire.

Common to all three acquisitions is the utilization of internal images, language, or other means of symbolic representation to guide or mediate behavior

Challenges to Piaget's Account of Sensorimotor Development: Neo-Nativism and "Theory" Theories

Neo-nativism

Infants are born with substantial knowledge about the nature of the physical world.

Knowledge does not have to be constructed.

Infants are also symbolic beings.

“Theory” theories

Infants are prepared from birth to make sense of certain classes of information.

Such innate knowledge is incomplete and requires substantial experience for infants to construct reality.

Infants devise ideas or "theories" about how the world works and then test and modify their theories.

The Preconceptual Period (2 to 4 Years of Age) of the Preoperational Stage

Emergence of symbolic thought and play

Representational insight is in place by 2.5 years.

Dual representation (ability to think about an object in two different ways at the same time) is in place by 3 years of age.

Preconceptual reasoning is primitive by adult standards.

Centration

Egocentrism

Lack the concept of conservation

Animism/ Artificialism

Children display animism (a willingness to attribute life and life-like qualities to inanimate objects)

Children display egocentrism (a tendency to view the world from one's own perspective and to have difficulty recognizing another person's point of view)

Children not yet proficient at dual encoding

The Intuitive Period (4 to 7 Years of Age)

Intuitive thought is an extension of preconceptual thought.

Children now somewhat less egocentric

Children now more proficient at classifying objects on the basis of shared perceptual attributes

Children still incapable of conservation

Did Piaget Underestimate the Preoperational Child?

New evidence on egocentrism shows that children are less egocentric when provided with less complicated visual displays.

Another look at children’s causal reasoning shows that 3-year-olds do not routinely attribute life or lifelike qualities to inanimate objects.

Preoperational children can conserve with training.

The Concrete-Operational Stage (7 to 11 Years)

Understanding of mental operations leading to increasingly logical thought

Classification and categorization

Less egocentric

Inability to reason abstractly or hypothetically

Hypothetico-deductive reasoning

Adolescent egocentrism illustrated by the phenomenon of personal fable and imaginary audience

Some examples of concrete-operational thought

Conservation by decentering and using reversibility

Relational logic using mental seriation (the ability to mentally arrange items along a quantifiable dimension such as height or weight) and transitivity (the necessary relations among elements in a series)

The sequencing of concrete operations

Horizontal decalage: Some forms of conservation are understood much sooner than others.

The Formal-Operational Stage (11 to 12 Years and Beyond)

Hypothetico-deductive reasoning

Thinking like a scientist

Personal and social implications of formal thought

Paves the way for thinking about what is possible in one's life

Questioning begins about everything from parental authority to government spending

Formal operational thought is reached very slowly, if at all.

An Evaluation of Piaget's Theory

Piaget's contributions

Founded the field of cognitive development

Convinced us that children are curious, active explorers of their environment

First to try to explain and not just describe the process of development

Challenges to Piaget

Piaget failed to distinguish competence from performance.

Still a hotly debated topic: Does cognitive development really occur in stages?

Does Piaget "explain" cognitive development? His explanations raise more questions than they answer.

Piaget devoted too little attention to social and cultural influences.

Lev Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory

Cognitive activities reflect cultural context

Culture provides tools for adaptation

Development is socially-mediated

The Role of Culture in Intellectual Development

Vygotsky's four interrelated levels of analysis

Microgenetic: Refers to changes that occur over relatively brief periods of time

Ontogenetic: Development of an individual over his or her lifetime

Phylogenetic: Changes over evolutionary time

Sociohistorical: Changes that have occurred in one's culture, and the values, norms, and technologies generated throughout history

Infants are born with the following tools of intellectual adaptation

Attention

Sensation

Perception

Memory

The Social Origins of Early Cognitive Competencies and the Zone of Proximal Development

Culture and societies influence cognitive development

Cognition proceeds because of social interactions where partners jointly work to solve problems. Learning occurs within the context of cooperative, or collaborative, dialogues between a skillful tutor and a novice pupil.

This partnership is determined by cultural and societal factors

Emphasized the child’s interaction with the social world (other people) as a cause of development

Cognitive abilities increase when information provided within: The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) The difference between what a learner can accomplish independently and what he or she can accomplish with the guidance and encouragement of a more skilled partner

range of tasks too difficult for children to master alone but which can be learned with the guidance and assistance of adults or more skilled peers.

This concept underscores Vygotsky’s emphasis on the importance of social influences on children’s cognitive development.

Scaffolding means changing the level of support. "Scaffolding" is the tendency of more expert participants to carefully tailor the support they provide to the novice learner's current situation.

Over the course of a teaching session, more skilled person (teacher or more advanced peer) adjusts the amount of guidance to fit the student’s current performance level.

Dialogue is an important part of scaffolding in the zone of proximal development. Through interaction, children’s concepts become more systemic, logical and rational.

Apprenticeship in thinking and guided participation

Children's cognitions are shaped as they take part, alongside adults or other more skillful associates, in everyday culturally relevant experiences.

Our culture encourages context-independent learning (learning and discussing things that have no immediate relevance).

The Role of Language in Cognitive Development

Vygotsky believed language to be the foundation for social interaction and thought

Piaget believed language was a byproduct of thought

Piaget's theory of language and thought

Egocentric, self-directed speech merely reflects the child's ongoing mental activity and does not play a role in a child's cognitive development.

Piaget - focused on children’s interaction with the physical world

Vygotsky's theory of language and thought

Nonsocial utterances illustrate the transition from prelinguistic to verbal reasoning.

Self-directed monologues occur more during problem solving.

Private speech helps young children plan strategies and regulate their behavior.

Language is necessary for thought

Critical thinking based on dialogue with others who challenge ideas

Language and Thought

• Language allows children to have social communication, and to plan, guide, and monitor their behavior in a self-regulatory fashion.

• Language used for self-regulation is called inner speech or private speech.

• Vygotsky thought private speech was an important tool for cognitive development, whereas Piaget thought it was egocentric and immature.

• Researchers have found support for the positive role of private speech in children’s development.

Evaluating and Comparing Vygotsky’s and Piaget’s Theories

• Vygotsky’s theory has played an important role in evaluating contextual factors in learning.

• Some critics say Vygotsky overemphasized the role of language in thinking.

• Vygotsky’s theory is considered to be a social constructivist approach because it emphasizes the social contexts of learning and that knowledge is mutually built and constructed.

• Piaget’s theory did not emphasize the social aspect of knowledge construction.

• There is a conceptual shift from Piaget to Vygotsky that involves a shift from the individual to collaboration, social interaction, and sociocultural activity.

Implications for Education

Teaching Strategies Based on Vygotsky’s Theory

• Use the child’s zone of proximal development in teaching.

• Use scaffolding.

• Use more skilled peers as teachers.

• Monitor and encourage children’s use of private speech.

• Assess the child’s zone of proximal development, not IQ.

• Transform the classroom with Vygotskian ideas.

Active learning in the classroom

Cooperative learning exercises

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