Piaget & Vygotsky

Cognition

is the activity of knowing and the processes through which knowledge is acquired.

Cognitive development

are changes that occur in mental activities such as attending, preventing, learning, thinking and remembering.

Genetic epistemology

is the experimental study of the development of knowledge, developed by Piaget.

Intelligence

in Piaget's theory, an organism, a basic life function that enables an organism to adapt to the environment.

Cognitive equilibrium

is Piaget's term for the state of affairs in which there is a balanced or harmonious, relationship between one's thought processes and the environment.

Constructivist

is one who gains knowledge by acting or otherwise operating on objects and events to discover properties.

Scheme

is an organized pattern of thought or action that one constructs to interpret some aspect of one's experience.

Organization

is an inborn tendency to combine and integrate available schemes into coherent systems or bodies or knowledge.

Adaptation

is an inborn tendency to adjust to the demands of the environment.

Assimilation

is the process of interpreting new experiences by incorporating them into existing schemes.

Accommodation

is the process of modifying existing schemes in order to incorporate or adapt to new experiences.

Sensorimotor period

is Piaget's first intellectual stage, from birth to two years, when infants are relying on behavioral schemes as a means of exploring and understanding the environment.

Reflex activity

is the first substage of Piaget's sensorimotor stage; infants' actions are confined to exercising innate reflexes assimilating new objects into these reflexes to these novel objects.

Primary circular reactions

is the second substage of Piaget's sensorimotor stage; a pleasurable response, centered on the infant's own body, that is discovered by chance and performed over and over.

Secondary circular reactions

is the third substage of Piaget's sensorimotor; a pleasurable response, centered on external object, that is discovered by chance and performed over and over.

Coordination of secondary circular reactions

is the fourth substage of Piaget's sensorimotor stage; infants begin to coordinate two or more actions to achieve simple objective. This is the first sign of goal directed behavior.

Tertiary circular reactions

is the fifth substage of Piaget's sensorimotor stage; an exploratory scheme in which the infant devises a new method of acting on objects to reproduce interesting results.

Inner experimentation

is the sixth substage of Piaget's sensorimotor stage, the ability to solve simple problems on a mental, or symbolic level without having to rely on trial-and-error experimentation.

Deferred imitation

is the ability to reproduce a modeled activity that has been witnessed at some point in the past.

Object permanence

is the realization that objects continue to exist when they are no longer visible or detectable through the other senses.

A-not-B error

is the tendency of 8- to 12-month-olds to search for a hidden object where they previously found it even after they have seen it moved to a new location.

Neo-nativism

is the idea that much cognitive knowledge such as object concept, is innate, requiring little in the way of specific experiences to be expressed and there are biological constraints, in that the mind/brain is designed to process certain types of information in certain ways.

Preoperational period

is Piaget's second stage of cognitive development, lasting from about age 2 to age 7, when children are thinking at a symbolic level by are not yet using cognitive operations.

Symbolic function

is the ability to use symbols to represent objects and experiences.

Representational insight

is the knowledge that an entity can stand for something other than itself.

Animism

is an attributing life and lifelike qualities to inanimate objects.

Egocentrism

is the tendency to view the world from one's own perspective while failing to recognize that others may have different points of view.

Appearance/reality distinction

is the ability to keep the true properties of characteristics of an object in mind despite the deceptive appearance the object has assumed.

Centration

is in Piaget's theory, the tendency of preoperational children to attend to the one aspect of a situation to exclusion of others.

Conservation

is the recognition that the properties of an object or substance do not change when its appearance is altered in some superficial way.

Decentration

is in Piaget's theory, the ability of concrete operational children to consider multiple aspects of a stimulus or situation.

Reversibility

is the ability to reverse or negate an action by mentally performing the opposite action.

Concrete-operational period

is Piaget's third stage of cognitive development, lasting from about age 7 to 11, when children are acquiring cognitive operations and thinking more logically about real objects and experiences.

Mental seriation

is a cognitive operation that allows one to mentally order a set of stimuli along a quantifiable dimension such as height or weight.

Transitivity

is the ability to recognize relations among elements in a serial order.

Horizontal decalage

is a child's uneven cognitive performance; an inability to solve certain problems even though one can solve similar problems requiring the same mental processes.

Formal operations

in Piaget's fourth and final stage of cognitive development, from age 11 or 12 and beyond, when the individual begins to think more rationally and systematically about abstract concepts and hypothetical events.

Hypothetico-deductive reasoning

is in Piaget's theory, a formal operational ability to think hypothetically.

Inductive reasoning

is the type of thinking that scientists display, where hypotheses are generated and then systematically tested in experiments.

Socioculturual theory

Vygotsky's perspective on cognitive development, in which children acquire their culture's values, beliefs and problem-solving strategies through collaborative dialogues with more knowledgeable members of society.

Ontogenetic development

is the development of the individual over his or her lifetime.

Microgenetic development

are changes that occur over relatively brief periods of time, in seconds minutes or days as opposed to larger-scale changes, as conventionally studied in ontogenetic development.

Phylogentic development

is development over evolutionary time.

Sociohistorical development

are changes that have occurred in one's culture and the values, norms and technologies such a history has generated.

Zone of proximal development

Vygotsky's term for the rand of tasks that are too complex to be mastered alone but can be accomplished with guidance and encouragement from a more skillful partner.

Scaffolding

is a process by which an expert, when instructing a novice's behavior in a learning situation, so that the novice gradually increases his or her understanding of a problem.

Egocentric speech

is Piaget's terms for the subset of a young child's utterances that are nonsocial-that is, neither directed to others nor expressed in ways that listeners might understand.

Private speech

Vygotsky's term for the subset of a child's verbal utterances that serve a self-communicative function and guide the child's thinking.