COGNITIVE THEORIES OF DEVELOPMENT

Genetic Epistemology

Cognitive Mediation

GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

Creator: Jean Piaget

Genetic Epistemology:

The study of the development of knowledge

Action = Knowledge

GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

Piaget proposed:

… Physical bodies can adapt to the world

… Humans build mental structures to aid adaptation

… Humans interactive with their environment

… Children think differently at various points in their development

GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

Piaget’s theory is based on a stage approach to development.

All children pass through a series of four universal stages in a fixed order from birth through adolescence:

Sensorimotor

Substage 1 Substage 2

Substage 3 Substage 4

Substage 5 Substage 6

Preoperational

Concrete operational

Formal operational

GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

Movement from one stage to the next occurs:

When a child reaches an appropriate level of physical maturation

Is exposed to relevant experiences.

Coined the term Schemes/schemas to describe the basic building blocks of the way we understand the world. Class room scheme or restaurant schema in

adulthood.

GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

Assimilation: The process in which people

understand an experience in terms of their current stage of cognitive development and way of thinking.

Accommodation: Changes in existing ways of thinking

that occur in response to encounters with new stimuli or events.

Adaptation: Piaget’s term for what most of us

would call learning.

GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

Sensorimotor Stage (0-2 years)

Infant uses senses and motor abilities to understand the world

Beginning with reflexes and ending with complex combinations of skills.

Learning Process:

Primary Circular Reactions: (1-4 months) A behavior/reactions is novel or feels good so they do it again, and again, and again.

Personal behavior such as sucking, making bubbles with mouth.

Secondary Circular Reactions: Involves an act that extends out towards the environment.

She may squeeze a rubber ducky and it goes “quack” so she does it again and again and again.

Tertiary Circular Reactions: (12-24 months) Same cycle as secondary circular reactions except with variation.

GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

Sensorimotor Stage (0-2 years)-Continued

Characteristic Behaviors:

Object Permanence:

Develops the ability to recognize that just because an object is not visible it does not mean it is not there.

Mental Representation:

(18 months) The ability to hold an image in their mind for a period beyond the immediate experience develops.

Goal Directed behavior:

Behavior in which several schemes are combined and coordinated to generate a single act to solve a problem.

SENSORIMOTOR SUBSTAGE ONE

Basic Reflexes (Birth-1 month)

Children enter the world equipped with a set of inherited action patterns and reflexes through which they experience their environment.

The intellectual development of the child begins through these actions.

This is how the child acquires knowledge about its surroundings.

Infants are restricted in what they can know.

Behaviors and schemata are limited.

Adaptation to their surroundings through assimilation and accommodation begins in this stage.

SENSORIMOTOR SUBSTAGE TWO

Primary Circular Reactions (1-4 months) The knowledge and intelligence of the infant now extends

beyond the innate behaviors they were born with.

New acquisitions have only come about through the accommodation of schemata.

Show the first signs of learning.

Modifying their reflexes as a result of their environment.

Come about by a circular means:

Actions that are at first random and activate a reflex are attempted again to try and induce the experience again.

The signs of intentionality have appeared.

Object permanence begins to develop and the active search for a hidden object begins.

SENSORIMOTOR SUBSTAGE THREESecondary Circular Reactions (4-8 months)

Secondary circular reactions are the first acquired adaptations of behaviors that are not reflexive.

An infant in this stage may accidentally cause something interesting to happen and then seek to re-create the happy event.

The interesting events in this case are located in the external world.

In primary circular reactions the interesting events are occurring within the body.

Does not understand the aspects of cause and effect.

Will shift through many behaviors for each activity.

SENSORIMOTOR SUBSTAGE FOUR

Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions (8-12 months)

Actions from previous stage continue to develop.

Difference is that the need now precedes the act.

Intentionality occurs in interactions with the environment.

Infant is moving towards goal directed behavior.

Understanding of cause and effect relationships has come into being in the child’s world.

SENSORIMOTOR SUBSTAGE FIVETertiary Circular Reactions (12-18 months)

Still characterized by a means/ends differentiation.

The infants are no longer restricted to the application of previously established schemata to obtain a goal. Can make the necessary alterations to their schemata to solve

problems

Reflects a process of active experimentation.

Differences in cognition coincide with improved locomotive abilities.

Causal inferences are still unavailable to the infant Must see an action occur before it has any understanding of the

causal relationship.

SENSORIMOTOR SUBSTAGE SIX

Invention of new means through mental combinations

(18-24 months)

Symbolic function and mental representation first appear during this stage. This runs parallel with the development of language.

Children begin to string words together in pairs. The origins of sentences.

Piaget’s 6 Substages of Sensorimotor Development

Substage Age DescriptionSimple reflexes birth–1

monthCoordinates sensations, reflexes

First habits, primary circular reactions

1–4 months Coordination of sensations, habits, and primary circular reactions; body is still main focus of infant

Secondary circular reactions

4–8 months Infant becomes more object-oriented, repeats interesting/pleasurable acts

Coordination of secondary circular reactions

8–12 months

Coordination of vision and touch, eye–hand coordination, intentional acts, coordination of schemes

Tertiary circular reactions, novelty, & curiosity

12–18 months

Infants intrigued by properties of, and things done with, objects; experiments with new behaviors

Internalization of schemes

18–24 months

Infant develops ability to use primitive symbols, forms lasting mental images

GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

At the end of sensorimotor stage:

… Object permanence is understood

… Infant understands a differentiation between self and world

At around 5.5 and 6.5 months of age, an infant can understand simple causal factors.

Piaget’s work is criticized as:

… Being too vague

… Underestimating infant ability

… Being based mostly on his children’s infancy

GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)

Because the child can now use mental representations they are now capable of pretending

Develops to the use of symbols.

Symbols: Thing that represents something else.

Drawings

Written language

Spoken word can represent a dog

Characteristic Behaviors:

Creative Play: Checkers are cookies, papers are dishes, a box is a table and so on.

It is at this time that there develops a clear definition of the past and future.

GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)

Egocentric play: The child sees things pretty much from one point of view: His/Her Own!

Because of this they tend to center on one aspect of any problem or communication at a time.

They are unable to see that there are multiple solutions to a problem and that mommie can be both:

Mom

Dads wife

Decenter: Allows a child to progress on to the next stage.

Deferred imitation: Act in which a person who is no longer present is imitated by children who have witnessed a similar act.

Bandura’s Bobo Doll study.

GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

Concrete Operations Stage (7-11 years)

Operations refers to logical operations or principles we use when

solving problems. Child can now not only use symbols to represent:

Can also manipulate those symbols logically.

Characteristic Behaviors:

Law of Conservation: (age 7) Most children develop the ability to conserve number, length, and liquid volume.

Quantity remains the same despite changes in appearance.

Reversibility: If you mash up a ball of clay and cut it up into pieces it will still form back into the same ball if the pieces are mashed back together.

B CAB CA

Piaget’s Conservation Task

Child is asked if (A) and (C) have the same amount of liquid. The preoperational child says “no” and will point to (C) as having more liquid than (A).

Two identical beakers shown to child, and then experimenter pours liquid from (B) into (C)

Type of conservation Number Matter Length

Initial presentation Two identical

rows of objects shown to child

Two identical balls of clay shown to child

Two sticks are aligned in front of child

ManipulationOne row is spaced

Experimenter changes shape of one ball

Experimenter moves one stick to right

Preoperational child’s answer to “Are they still the same?”

“No, the longer row has more”

“No, the longer one has more”

“No, the one on top is longer”

Some Dimensions of Conservation: Number,

Matter, and Length

GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

Formal Operations Stage (12+ years)

The concrete operations child has a hard time applying his new-found logical abilities to non-concrete (abstract) events.

Characteristic Behaviors:

Hypothetical Thinking: The ability to think abstractly which characterizes adult thinking.

GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY

Information-Processing approaches: Seeks to identify the way that individuals take in, use, and store information.

Encoding: Information is initially recorded in a form usable to memory.

Storage: Placement of material into memory.

Retrieval: Material in memory storage is located, brought into awareness, and used.

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Infantile Amnesia: Lack of memory for experiences that occurred prior to 3 years of age.

ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT

Creator: Lev Vygotsky

(1896-1934)

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

The notion of ZPD implies that a child's development is determined by social interaction and collaborative problem-solving.

Development is guided by culture and interpersonal communication.

ZPD refers to the gap between what a given child can achieve alone and what they can achieve under adult guidance.

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ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENTHigher mental functions develop through social interactions

with significant people in a child's life, particularly parents.

Through these interactions:

Children come to learn the habits of mind of their culture

Including speech patterns, written language, and other symbolic knowledge through

which the child derives meaning and affects a child's construction of their knowledge

ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT

Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice:

1. Between people (interpsychological)

2. Inside the child (intrapsychological).

This applies equally to voluntary attention, logical memory, and to

the formation of ideas.

All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals.

ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT

STAGES OF CONCEPT FORMATION

These were analyzed using a task based on wooden blocks labeled with nonsense syllables.

Children have to work out what the syllable means, e.g., “long and thin”.

Four stages were identified.

ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT

Name of Stage Description of Performance

Vague syncretic No understanding; strategies random

ComplexStrategies used, but unsuccessful

Potential concept Systematic strategies, based on one feature at a time

Mature concept Systematic strategies, based on more than one feature; concept formation

ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENTTeaching Methods:

Reciprocal Teaching

Fostering Communities of Learners

Cultural Mediation: Vygotsky believed that private speech was essential to growth.

Internalization:The specific knowledge gained by a child through interactions with

others represents the shared knowledge of a culture.The mastery of skills occurs through the activity of the child within

society. Riding a bike, driving a car, drinking a can of coke