Cognitive development theories

Piaget: Key ideas

Introduction to Piaget

Jean Piaget was employed at the Binet Institute in the 1920s, where his job was to develop French versions of questions on English intelligence tests. He became intrigued with the reasons children gave for their wrong answers on the questions that required logical thinking. Over the next fifty years, this curiousity led to the development of his theory of "genetic epistemology".
Piaget's theory differs from others we have studied in several ways:

concerned with children, rather than all learners
focus on development, rather than learning per se; doesn't address learning of information or specific behaviors like other theorists
discrete stages marked by qualitative differences, rather than a gradual increase in number and complexity of behaviors, concepts, ideas, etc.

The goal of the theory is to explain the mechanisms and processes by which the infant, and then the child, develops into an individual who can reason and think using hypotheses. To Piaget, cognitive development was a progressive reorganization of mental processes as a result of maturation and experience. Children construct an understanding of the world around them, then experience discrepancies between what they already know and what they discover in their environment.
There are three basic components to Piaget's theory:

Types of knowledge (physical, logical-mathematical, and social-arbitrary)
Stages of development (sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal operational)
Processes that enable the transition from one stage to another (assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration)

Piaget's proposed stages of development

An important thing to understand about these different levels is that they are qualitatively different. In other words, at each successive stage, it's not just a matter of doing something better, but of doing a different thing altogether.

The function of cognitive growth is to produce increasingly powerful cognitive structures that permit the individual to act on the environment with greater flexibility.

The sensorimotor period ranges from birth to about age 2. Infants learn mostly through trial and error learning. Children initially rely on reflexes, eventually modifying them to adapt to their world. Behaviors become goal directed, progressing from concrete to abstract goals. Objects and events can be mentally represented by the child (sometimes called object permanence). For example, if you place a toy under a blanket, the child who has achieved object permanence knows it is there and can actively seek it. Before this stage, the child behaves as if the toy had simply disappeared. The attainment of object permanence generally signals the transition to the next stage.

The preoperational period ranges from about ages 2 to 7. Children in this stage can mentally represent events and objects (the semiotic function), and engage in symbolic play. Their thoughts and communications are typically egocentric. They are able to focus on only one aspect or dimension of problems. For example, suppose you arrange two rows of blocks in such a way that a row of 5 blocks is longer than a row of 7 blocks. Preoperational children can generally count the blocks in each row and tell you the number contained in each. However, if you ask which row has more, they will likely say that it is the one that makes the longer line, because they cannot simultaneously focus on both the length and the number. The ability to solve this and other "conservation" problems signals the transition to the next stage.

Children in the concrete operational period are usually ages 7 to 11. They gain the abilities of conservation (number, area, volume, orientation) and reversibility. Their thinking is more organized and rational. They can solve problems in a logical fashion, but are typically not able to think abstractly or hypothetically.

The formal operational period begins at about age 11. As adolescents enter this stage, they gain the ability to think in an abstract manner, the ability to combine and classify items in a more sophisticated way, and the capacity for higher-order reasoning.

Processes of development

The continual process of resolving the discrepancies they encounter moves the child's intelligence into a more mature understanding. Piaget used the concepts of
assimilation and accommodation to explain this continual process.

When children and adolescents encounter something reasonably similar to what they already know, it is assimilated into their existing knowledge. So, for example, when small children put everything they grasp into their mouth, or call all small animals "dogs," they are assimilating.

On the other hand, when children encounter something that is different from what they know, they may change their way of thinking to take into account this new knowledge. This is accommodation. (Assimilation and accommodation should remind you of principles we discussed earlier in Ausubel and schema theory.)

According to Piaget, reorganization to higher levels of thinking is not accomplished easily. The child must "rethink" his or her view of the world. An important step in the process is the experience of cognitive conflict. In other words, the child becomes aware that he or she holds two contradictory views about a situation and they both cannot be true. This step is referred to as disequilibrium.

Equilibration is a regulatory process that maintains a balance between assimilation and accommodation to facilitate cognitive growth. Think of it this way: We can't merely assimilate all the time; if we did, we would never learn any new concepts or principles. Everything new we encountered would just get put in the same few "slots" we already had. Neither can we accommodate all the time; if we did, everything we encountered would seem new; there would be no recurring regularities in our world. We'd be exhausted by the mental effort!
According to Piaget, teaching can support these developmental processes by

Providing support for the "spontaneous research" of the child
Using active methods that require rediscovering or reconstructing "truths"
Using collaborative, as well as individual activities
Devising situations that present useful problems, and create disequilibrium in the child

Bruner: Key ideas

Assumptions

Outcome of cognitive development = thinking

The intelligent mind creates from experience "generic coding systems that permit one to go beyond the data to new and possibly fruitful predictions."

Children as they grow must acquire a way of representing the "recurrent regularities" in their environment.

Cognitive growth involves an interaction between basic human capabilities and "culturally invented technologies that serve as amplifiers of these capabilities."

Aim of education = autonomous learners

Major themes: a sequence of representational systems and the role of culture in cognitive growth (schooling as an instrument of culture)

Three modes of representation

Enactive, iconic, symbolic

The usual course of intellectual development moves through the stages in order.

Stages are not age-dependent.

Assertions/implications for instruction

"Any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development."

Subject matter must be made "ready" for the child.

The instructional challenge is to provide problems that both fit the manner of the child's thinking and tempt him/her into more powerful modes.

Stages may also be applicable to adults learning unfamiliar material?

Modes of representation imply the ideal sequence for instruction, but when learners have well-developed symbolic systems, it may not be necessary to go through the entire sequence. Also, the mode of instruction should match the criteria that will be used for measuring learning outcomes.

The spiral curriculum: presenting similar topics at every age, but consistent with the child's form of thought.

"Discovery learning" can serve a key role in facilitating the transition from one mode of thought to another.

Discovery = "all forms of obtaining knowledge for oneself by the use of one's own mind." It is accomplished by rearranging or transforming evidence to create additional new insights.

Discovery is not just an instructional technique, but an important learning outcome in itself.

The teacher's job is to guide the discovery process. E.g., in teaching a particular concept, the teacher should present the set of instances that will best help learners develop an appropriate model of the concept. The teacher should also model the inquiry process (a la Schoenfeld?)

The role of culture in cognitive development

Intelligence is, to a great extent, the internalization of "tools" provided by a given culture. Thus, culture-free means intelligence-free. Thus, members of different cultures will exhibit different kinds of reasoning and inference.

Vygotsky: Key ideas

Major themes/assumptions/assertions

Vygotsky's theory is an explicit attempt to develop a Marxist psychology; i.e., the structure and practices of socially organized labor provide the context for how people act and think.

Vygotsky maintained a broader view of development than other theorists: how did humans come to develop higher psychological processes in the first place? Within that framework, how do children come to possess the cognitive functions they exhibit later in life?

Individual development cannot be understood without reference to the social and cultural context within which it is embedded. Higher mental processes in the individual have their origin in social processes.

Mental processes can be understood only if we understand the tools and signs that mediate them. In higher forms of human behavior, the individual actively modifies the stimulus situation as a part of the process of responding to it.

No single principle (such as Piaget's equilibration) can account for development.
Appropriate methods for studying intellectual development:

emphasis on experimentation/observation in natural, authentic settings
cross-species comparisons
sociohistorical factors that mediate development

The social origins of higher mental processes

Social context is so important to Vygotsky that it is not simply one more variable to be accounted for; rather, social activity (i.e., the interaction between individual and context), not the individual him/herself, is the appropriate unit of analysis in psychology.

Development does not proceed toward socialization; development is the conversion of social relations into mental functions. "Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later on the individual level; first, between people, then inside the child... All the higher functions originate as actual relations between individuals."

The child converts social relations into psychological functions through mediation. Mediation is defined as changing a stimulus situation in the process of responding to it.
Mediation occurs through a linking tool or sign:

tool = something that can be used in the service of something else
sign = something that stands for something else (indexical, iconic, symbolic)
sign use arises from something not originally a sign operation
language is the most important kind of sign use in acquisition of higher psychological processes, because it frees children from the constraints of their immediate environment (decontextualization)

The diversity of symbols across cultures leads to differences in the levels of mental functions that are developed. Thus, universal stages of psychological development across cultures cannot be identified.

Any higher mental function necessarily goes through an external stage in it development because it is initially a social function. E.g., "egocentric speech" is social speech in process of becoming internal thought.

Words are social stimuli that make it possible for an individual to know him/herself as one might know another. Thus, human mental activity is a particular case of social experience.

The zone of proximal development: the difference between problem-solving the child is capable of performing independently, and problem-solving he/she is capable of performing with guidance or collaboration; defines the area in which maturation/development is currently taking place and suggests target for instruction.

Implications for instruction

Instruction should lead (i.e., precede) development. It should be targeted at the "leading" edge of the zone of proximal development.

Instruction should provide learners with authentic situations in which they must resolve dilemmas.

In an instructional setting, social "partners" should be at different levels of development, and they should jointly construct the problem solution.

A contemporary application of Vygotsky's theory is "reciprocal teaching", used to improve students' ability to learn from text. In this method, teacher and students collaborate in learning and practicing four key skills: summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting. The teacher's role in the process is reduced over time.

Implication of Vygotsky for assessment of learning: Individualized testing can give only a partial picture of the child's capabilities (since it fails to account for the ZPD).

Learning activities

Whose stage is it, anyway?

Suppose you were faced with the task of teaching math to a culturally diverse group of second-graders (about 7 years old) at an urban elementary school. Briefly summarize what you think Piaget, Bruner, and Vygotsky would suggest concerning what to teach and how to teach it. (Don't be concerned about the specific content to be taught, just the nature of the learning tasks, and how they might be determined and organized.)

Last Updated: 10/99