Section II ( Piaget & Vygotsky) review

Schemes

actions or mental representations that organize knowledge

Assimilation

using existing schemes to incorporate new information

Accommodation

adjusting schemes to fit new information and experiences

Organization

grouping isolated behaviors and thoughts into a higher-order, smoothly functioning cognitive system

Equilibration

shifting from one stage of thought to the next6

Sensorimotor Stage

The infant constructs an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences with physical actions. An infant progresses from reflexive, instinctual action at birth to the beginning of symbolic thought toward the end of the stage

Preoperational Stage

The child begins to represent the world with words and images. These words and images reflect increased symbolic thinking and go beyond the connection of sensory information and physical action

Concrete Operational Stage

The child can now reason logically about concrete events and classify objects into different sets

Formal Operational Stage

The adolescent reasons in more abstract, idealistic, and logical ways

Object permanence

the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched

A-not-B error

occurs when infants make the mistake of selecting a familiar hiding place (A) rather than a new hiding place (B) as they progress into substage 4 of the sensorimotor stage

Core knowledge approach

infants are born with domain-specific innate knowledge system

In Piaget’s __________, children begin to

represent the world with words, images, and drawings

preoperational stage

Children in this stage do not yet perform ______:

reversible mental actions that allow children to do mentally

what they previously only did physically.

operations

Symbolic function substage

the child gains the ability to mentally represent an object that is not present

Egocentrism

inability to distinguish between one’s own perspective and someone else’s perspective

Animism

belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities and are capable of action

Intuitive thought substage

the child uses primitive reasoning and wants to know the answers to all sorts of questions

Centration

focusing of attention on one characteristic to the exclusion of all others

Conservation

awareness that altering the appearance of an object or substance does not change its basic properties

Concrete operational stage

children can perform concrete

operations and they can reason logically as long as

reasoning can be applied to specific or concrete example

Seriation

ability to order stimuli along a quantitative

dimension

Transitivity

ability to logically combine relations to reach

certain conclusions

Formal operational stage

individuals move beyond

concrete experience and think in more abstract and logical

ways

hypothetical-deductive reasoning

develop

hypotheses, or best guesses, and systematically deduce

which is the best path to follow in solving the problem

Adolescent egocentrism

heightened self-consciousness of

adolescents

Imaginary audience

feeling one is the center of attention

and sensing one is on stage

Personal fable

sense of personal uniqueness and invincibility

Neo-Piagetians

argue for more emphasis on how children

use attention, memory, and strategies to process information

Zone of proximal development (ZPD

is the range of tasks

that are too difficult for children to master alone but that can

be learned with guidance and assistance from adults or

more-skilled children.

Lower limit of ZPD

is the level of skill reached by the child

working independently

Upper limit of ZPD

includes the additional responsibility

the child can accept with the assistance of an able

instructor

Scaffolding

means changing the level of support over the

course of a teaching session

Social constructivist approach

emphasis on the social contexts of learning and the construction of knowledge through social interaction

Postformal thought

is described as Reflective, relativistic, and contextual.

• Provisional.

• Realistic.

• Recognized as being influenced by emotion