psych exam 2 cognitive development

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 high-order, smoothly functioning cognitive system

Equilibrium

Shifting from one stage of thought to the next

Sensorimotor stage years

birth-2

Sensorimotor stage substages

• Simple reflexes

• First habits and primary circular reactions

• Secondary circular reactions

• Coordination of secondary circular reactions

• Tertiary circular reactions

• internalization of schemes

simple reflexes

• Birth-1 month (don’t need to memorize specific timeline within each stage)

• Sensation and action coordinated through reflexive behaviors

• Infants begins to produce behaviors that resemble reflexes in the absence of the stimulus for the reflex

First habits and primary circular reactions

second sensorimotor substage

1-4 months

Primary circular reaction: a scheme based on an attempt to reproduce an event that occurred by chance

Habits and circular reactions are stereotyped

Secondary Circular Reactions

third sensorimotor stage

• 4-8 months

• Infants become object oriented

• Secondary circular reactions: actions are repeated because of their consequences (move outward from individual, not a reflexive move that caused something to happen)

Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions

4th sensorimotor substage

8-12 months

Infants must coordinate vision and touch

Actions become outwardly directed

Presence of intentionality

Tertiary Circular Reactions

5th sensorimotor substage

12-18 months

Tertiary circular reactions: an infant purposefully explores new possibilities with objects, doing new things and exploring the results

Internalization of Schemes

6th sensorimotor substage

18-24 months

Infant develops the ability to use primitive symbols

Symbol: an internalized sensory image or word that represents an event

Object permanence

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

A-not-B error

• When infants mistake selecting a familiar hiding place (A) rather than a new hiding place (B)

• Occurs during progression to substage 4

Preoperational Stage age

2-7 years

Preoperational Stage

• Children begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings

• Form stable concepts and begin to reason

preoperational substages

symbolic substage and the intuitive thought substage

Symbolic Function Substage

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

• Between 2 – 4 years, the child draws things representing people, houses, cars, etc. and begins to use language and pretend play

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

Between ages 4 – 7 years

“Why?” questions

Young children seem unaware of how they know what they know

Centration

• focusing of attention on one characteristic to the exclusion of all others (lack of conservation)

• preoperational

Conservation

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

• preoperational

Concrete Operational Stage age

7-11 years

Concrete Operational Stage

• Children can perform concrete operations and they can reason logically as long as reasoning can be applied to specific or concrete examples

• Classify or divide into sets and subsets and consider interrelationships

• Seriation: ability to order stimuli along a quantitative dimension

• Transitivity: ability to logically combine relationship to reach certain conclusions (if A>B and B>C then A>C)

Classification

• An important ability in concrete operational thought

• family tree

Formal operational stage age

11-15 years

Formal operational stage

• Individuals move beyond concrete experience and think in more abstract and logical ways

• Develop images of ideal circumstances

• Hypothetical-deductive reasoning: develop hypotheses and systematically deduce which is the best path to follow

• Critics point out there is more individual variation in formal operational thought than Piaget envisioned

• Adolescent egocentrism

  • Heightened self-consciousness of adolescents

• Imaginary audience

  • Feeling one is the center of attention and sensing one is onstage

• Personal fable

  • Sense of personal uniqueness and invincibility 

  • Danger and psychological invulnerability

piaget and education

• Take a constructivist approach

  • Children learn best when they are active and seek solutions for themselves

• Facilitate rather than direct learning

  • Design situations where students learn by doing

• Consider the child’s knowledge and level of thinking

  • Examine children’s mistakes in thinking and guide them to a higher level of understanding

• Promote the student’s intellectual health

  • Children’s learning should occur naturally

  • They shouldn’t be pressured into achieving too much too early

• Turn the classroom into a setting of exploration and discovery

  • Teachers observe students’ interests and natural participation to determine the course of learning

  • Peer interaction is encouraged so different viewpoints can contribute to advances in thinking

Vygotsky

• emphasized that children actively construct their knowledge and understanding

• He emphasized the role of the social environment in stimulating cognitive development

The zone of proximal development

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

• Changing the level of support over the course of a teaching session

• More skilled person adjusts the amount of guidance to fit the child’s current performance

• Dialogue is an important tool of scaffolding in the ZPD

Private speech

is used for self-regulation–to plan, guide, monitor behavior

inner speech

As children age, they can act without verbalizing, and self-talk becomes

teaching strats (Vygotsky)

• Use the ZPD

  • Teachers begin near the zone’s upper limit, so children can reach the goal with help and move to a higher level of skill and knowledge

  • Observe the child and provide support when needed

• Use more skilled peers as teachers 

  • Children also benefit from the support and guidance of more-skilled children

• Monitor and encourage private speech

  • Encourage elementary school children to internalize and self-regulate

• Place instruction in a meaningful context

  • Provide opportunities to learn in real-world settings

Social constructivist approach

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

Fluid intelligence

Ability to reason abstractly

crystallized

Accumulated info and verbal skills

differences and similarities b/w Piaget and Vygotsky

•  Role of social interaction

  • Piaget: solitary learners, learning through interacting with environment

  • Vygotsky: socialization leads to learning, stronger role for parents

• 2. Importance of language

  • Piaget: cognitive development stimulates language development

  • Vygotsky: language development also stimulates cognitive development

• 3. Concept of readiness

  • Piaget: children learn when they’re developmentally ready

  • Vygotsky: children learn when stimulation is provided by parents, teachers, and other environmental factors

• 4. Role of cultural significance

  • Piaget: stages are universal among all children

  • Vygotsky: cultural and social influences affect development, different children develop at different rates

• 5. Individual vs Collaborative

  • Piaget: children learn best through independent exploration and discovery

  • Vygotsky: children learn best in social situations and when guided by educators