COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

•LEQ1 – What are Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development?

•LEQ2 – What are three criticisms of Piaget’s theory?

•LEQ3 – How do Vygotsky’s ideas about cognitive development differ from Piaget’s theory?

Jean Piaget

• Swiss psychologist

• Children actively try to make sense out of the world

• Observed his three children

Four Cognitive Stages

• Sensorimotor (birth to 2)• Preoperational (2 to 7)• Concrete Operational (7-11)• Formal Operational (adolescence to

adulthood)

Piaget believed the stages were:

•Biologically programmed•Culturally universal

Sensorimotor• Object permanence• Cause and effect• Child proceeds from reflexes

movement to willing exploration

Preoperational

•Symbolic thought and language emerge

•Egocentric•Use of imagination

Concrete Operational

•Reversibility and conservation

•Logic can be applied to concrete problems

•Able to solve logical, concrete problems

What kind of concrete problem?

Formal Operational

•Solves complex verbal and hypothetical problems

•Able to think abstractly

What kind of abstract problem?

•The Handshake Problem?•The Horse Problem?

HORSE PROBLEM•A man buys a horse for 50 dollars.

Decides he wants to sell his horse later and gets 60 dollars. He then decides to buy it back again and paid 70 dollars. However, he could no longer keep it and he sold it for 80 dollars.

•Did he make money? lose money? or break even? Explain why.

ANSWER

•The answer to this one is that the man saw a 20 dollar profit. Whether you use a number line or a debit/credit approach, the answer is $20.00 profit. I have yet to see a group of people come up with the same answer!

HANDSHAKE PROBLEM

•You are in a roomful of 35 people. Everyone is asked to shake hands with everyone. How many handshakes will there be? How do you know? What strategies will you use?

ANSWER

•The algorithm to solve this problem is:

•The number of hand shakes, squared, minus the number of people, divided by 2.

•n2-n/2. •There would be 595 handshakes if

everyone in the room shook hands with everyone once.

Vygotsky

• Agreed with Piaget that children may reach a developmental level through independent effort

• Disagree: Vygotsky believed that cognitive development is strongly influenced by social and cultural factors

• Proper “guidance” can stretch a child’s cognitive abilities

EXAMPLE – Zone of Proximal Development