KEY CONCEPTS

Cognitive development – Age-related changes, e.g. how children think and behave differently as they get older.

The child is a competent, tiny person set to begin a journey of discovery, thinking and learning called cognitive development. This development is built on thought processes (schemas). Some are present from birth (e.g. sucking) and they follow a pattern of assimilation and accommodation (i.e. they take on board new information and accommodate it with what is already known). Schemas are ‘mental blueprints’ that link things and behaviours. They form the building blocks of thinking and children begin to pick these up and recognize them from birth. Piaget found that the development of a child’s ability to think went through the same stages in a fixed or invariant order. Invariant stages – The same stages, in a fixed order, that the development of a child’s ability to think goes through. He also found that this pattern was universal to all children, everywhere. Universal stages – The pattern or order of the development of thinking that is the same for all children everywhere.

CORE THEORY – Piaget’s Theory

Piaget noticed that children of the same age often got answers wrong in the same way. That is, they were thinking alike, but this changed with age. Piaget observed his own children and their friends solving problems and asked them to explain the reasoning behind their decisions. From this evidence he went on to put together a general stage theory of cognitive development. A stage theory means that; development follows an invariant order, the behaviour in question gets better by the stage, and the pattern is universal. Piaget said that ‘children are scientists’ who are actively involved in making sense of what they see, hear, feel and discover. Piaget came up with four stages of cognitive development. Sensori-motor stage (birth - 2 years old) – Babies spend their time examining their surroundings and placing objects into schemas in their minds (e.g. by sucking, banging, dropping, etc). A feature of the sensori-motor stage is object permanence i.e. when a newborn baby cannot see a thing or person, they do not exist for them anymore. Near the end of the first year babies will look for hidden objects because they have object permanence. Pre-operational stage (2 to 7 years old) – Real thinking is beginning to happen and children use symbols, such as words or mental images to solve problems. There are still some things the child cannot do, for example, egocentrism – a child entering this stage sees things through their own point of view only and cannot see it from another viewpoint. At the end of the pre-operational stage, egocentrism declines. This is called de-centring. Concrete operational stage (7 to 11 years old) – In this stage the child overcomes egocentrism. They also develop new cognitive skills, for example, seriation – the ability to put things into rank order, and conservation – when children know the properties of certain objects remain the same even if they appear to change. For example, if two identical short, fat beakers are filled with the same level of water, then one of the beakers is poured into a tall, thin beaker, a child under 7 will say the tall beaker held more water, those over 7 did not. It is called the concrete operational stage because children can conserve and order things provided that the objects are present or ‘concrete’ (e.g. can be seen or held).

Formal operational stage (11 +) – Adolescents develop the lifelong ability to think hypothetically, which involves solving problems logically and perhaps scientifically, and thinking in an abstract way. General principles are developed which can be applied to other situations. Criticisms: The cognitive stages are not as fixed as Piaget proposed. Some children flick into different stages depending on circumstances, sometimes thinking egocentrically and at other times having strong ideas of right and wrong. There is no guarantee that people develop through all of the stages. Some researchers argue that only about 50% of adults in fact make it to the formal operational stage at all. Thinking does not develop in the same way for children everywhere. Aboriginal children, for example, develop concrete operational thinking, which is useful for physical survival, earlier than European children.

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

ALTERNATIVE THEORY

Vygotsky argued that children are born with considerable thinking abilities, but their cognitive development takes place within their culture. The origin of cognitive development does not lie in maturation but in social and cultural influences. For Vygotsky, the child picks up cultural tools for thinking and these are developed around them in their home. He believed our culture teaches us how to think as well as what to think.

Vygotsky regarded the child as an apprentice – someone who works with a skilled person to learn their trade. The child is helped forward in its thinking by the people around them, who have already become thinkers. ‘We become ourselves through others). Other people around us can help us to realize that potential. The term he used for this idea is zone of proximal development (ZPD). It stands for the gap between where we are currently in our development and where we can move on to with the help of others, particularly adults, around us. For example, a child may have been given a construction kit as a present, but can only make it up with help from a parent or older sibling. The term describing this learning through others is scaffolding (a support framework to allow for the developing child to get on safely with its learning and thinking – just as scaffolding around a house allows builders to get on safely with the job).

CORE STUDY – Piaget and Conservation of Number (1952)

According to Piaget, pre-operational children are influenced by the way things look and are unable to conserve i.e. recognize that certain physical characteristics of object remain the same even when there outward appearance changes. Procedure – A cross-sectional study was used i.e. children of different ages were compared. Children were show, one at a time, two identical parallel rows of counters, with the counters opposite and facing each other one to one. The child then watched the researcher change the layout of the counters by stretching one row but not removing or adding any counters to either row. The children were then asked which of the two rows had more counters. Results – Children in the pre-operational stage tended to say that the rearranged row had more counters because it was longer. Presumably, they were not able to conserve. However, children in the concrete operational stage did largely get it right. They said that both lines had the same number of counters despite the difference in length. They knew appearances can be deceiving, i.e. they could conserve. Limitations: Piaget was criticized for the way he questioned the children in the experiments. The child was asked to say whether the two rows of counters were the same. They were first asked this before the researcher played around with the counters, and again after the re-arranging. In normal circumstances children are only asked the same question twice if they have got it wrong the first time. In other research, when the children were only asked once whether the two rows of counters were the same, a far higher number of children got the right answer. Piaget was criticized for the nature of the task. The task was quite contrived and did not have much meaning to young children. When a game was played using a ‘naughty teddy’ who messed up the row, 60% of children in the pre-operational stage could work it out and pass the conservation of number test. The test had been made child-friendly, and it produced results which contradicted Piaget. Piaget used a relatively small sample of children for his experiment. They may not have been representative of all children. This was especially a problem given the fact that Piaget claimed that his stages of development were universal.

APPLICATIONS

Educating Children - Both Piaget and Vygotsky produced two quite different explanations and theories about how we become thinkers. What they have in common is that both of them have been applied to education and schooling.

Piaget’s influence on education The concept of readiness - Piaget’s theory argues that children can only learn what their current cognitive stage allows them to, so classroom materials and ways of learning in class should match the stage and cognitive level of the pupil. For example, young children should learn through concrete activities and materials; older students should learn by dealing with abstract concepts and hypothetical issues. Young children do things to learn while older children have discussions and debates, and all this matches their cognitive development stages. Discovery learning - Piaget’s theory suggests that learning should be child-centred and, above all, active. Children learn best by doing. In such a system of schooling the role of the teacher is not to pour knowledge down the throats of pupils but instead to raise questions and issues and devise activities for the children to get involved in, and in the process to discover things for themselves first hand. The teacher is a facilitator, helping the child find things and learn independently. Peer support - In Piaget’s theory this means allowing children in class opportunities for unstructured discussion and collaborative learning. It helps the child de-centre and develop the ability to take the other person’s point-of-view.

Vygotsky’s influence on education Role of the teacher - Vygotsky disagreed with Piaget and his strict idea of readiness and letting it all happen in due time. He argued that the teacher should actively intervene, to help the child as a learner develop their understanding and knowledge. For Vygotsky, this intervention plays a vital part in children’s learning experience. The teacher is at the time the main person in their pupils’ zones of proximal development. The spiral curriculum - Vygotsky argued that children are best served in school by what he called the spiral curriculum. This means difficult ideas being presented at first quite simply, and then being revisited at a more advanced level later on. Applying the notion of scaffolding to the classroom - Vygotsky had argued that other people can advance a child’s thinking by providing a support framework or scaffold on which the child can climb and achieve.