Educational Psychology| Part 1: Human Development|Chapter 2: The Development of Cognitive, Learning, and
Language Skills
1. Cognitive Development - Changes in mental skills that occur through increasing maturity and experience.
2. Cognitive Development: Concepts for Teaching
A. The Importance of Cognitive Development to Teachers
1. Expert teachers know what level of cognitive development they can expect from most of the
students in their classes. They use that knowledge to plan lessons, activities, & assessment, as well as
to manage the classroom.
2. We usually think in terms of children being influenced by their environment. It is important as well to
remember that children influence their environment, especially in the context of their families &
friends.
B. Maturation Versus Learning
1. Maturation - any relatively permanent change in thought or behavior that occurs as a result of
biological aging, regardless of personal experience.
2. Expert teachers know that they cannot force a student to think or to do what he or she is not
biologically old enough to do.
3. Learning - Any relatively permanent change in thought or behavior that occurs as a result of
experience.
4. Clarifying the distinction between maturation and learning is important. As a teacher you need to
know which kinds of abilities and behavior you can expect from children of a certain age, regardless
of their particular childhood experiences.
C. Canalization: A Key to Teaching
1. Canalization - extent to which a behavior or an underlying ability develops without respect to the
environment
a. A highly canalized ability is one that develops in nearly all children, despite widely varying
environments. Canalization is closely related to the concept of innateness. For example,
perceptual abilities, such as the ability to see and to hear, are relatively highly canalized. So are
simple memory abilities, such as those used in learning a list of vocabulary words. We develop
simple memory abilities in almost any environment, regardless of whether we are urged to do
so.
b. A weakly canalized ability develops only if the environment supports it. The interpersonal skills
children use with one another and with teachers are relatively weakly canalized; in other
words, children need support and direction from parents, teachers, and their peers to learn
how to deal with others in an appropriate way. Thus a child's environment affects social skills
more strongly than it affects simply memory skills. Teachers are most easily able to help
students develop weakly canalized skills.
D. Cognitive Development: Continuous Versus Stage like
1. Continuous Development
a. Theories that suggest development proceeds continuously assume cognitive abilities are
acquired gradually, such that each new accomplishment builds directly on those that came
before it.
b. Continuous-development theories propose that a person's thinking is not fundamentally
different at any one age or level of development than it is at any other age.
2. Stagelike Development
a. Each stage is associated with qualitatively distinct set of cognitive structures, or mental
patterns of organization that influence our ways of dealing with the world. For example, in
Piaget's stage theory, older children are able to arrange their mental patterns, and to interact
with the world, in ways that younger children, who have not reached that stage, cannot. That
is, the thinking of children in later stages of cognitive development is said to be fundamentally
different from the thinking of children in earlier stages.
b. Behavior unfolds in a one-directional, invariable sequence. In other words, development
always moves forward, never backward; likewise, it always moves in the same way for
everyone, although the rate at which the stages unfold may differ from one person to another.
Educational Psychology| Part 1: Human Development|Chapter 2: The Development of Cognitive, Learning, and
Language Skills
c. Later stages build on earlier stages. As the child grows older, he or she consolidates previously
developed skills and develops new ones.
E. Domain-General Versus Domain-Specific Cognitive Development
1. Domain-General Development - development that occurs more or less simultaneously in multiple
areas
2. Domain-Specific Development - development that occurs at different rates in different areas.
3. Implications for Teaching
A. A number of skills, including many academic and interpersonal skills, develop only with respect to the
environment. Expert teachers are able to recognize these weakly canalized abilities and provide support
and direction for them. They also know what to expect of their students by understanding their
environmental experiences.
B. Some expert teachers subscribe to stage-like views of development- they assume that largely inborn
factors determine the unfolding of a child's abilities over time. As a consequence, they do not push
students into development or force them to skip a stage, because they think that nonenvironmental forces
determine development. Other expert teachers may support a continuous view of development- they
expect children to have at least the rudiments of adult thinking at relatively early age.
4. Piaget's Stage Theory of Cognitive Development
A. At all ages, children actively seek to explore the world and to come to terms with it.
B. Piaget's theory remains the most nearly complete, influential theory to date, although it is certainly not the
only theory of cognitive development.
C. Piaget's theory is a stage theory of cognitive development. It specifies qualitative changes in cognitive
development with each successive stage. Although a child's accomplishments at each stage build on those
in the previous stage, these accomplishments are also distinct from the ones the child demonstrated at the
previous stage.
D. Piaget's theory is also largely domain general. It predicts that children who show cognitive development in
one area generally should show comparable cognitive development in other areas.
E. Explaining Different Levels of Performance in Different Skills
1. Horizontal Decalage - Piaget's term for the temporary difference in performance that a child shows
between various cognitive domains or activities, within a given stage of development.
F. Mechanisms of Cognitive Development
1. Equilibration - balancing of cognitive structures with the needs of the environment
2. Disequilibrium - state of confusion encountered when a situation does not match a preconceived
notion of the way the world is or should be. Piaget suggested that disequilibrium is good for children,
because it serves as the impetus for the development of expertise.
3. Schemas - cognitive framework that provides a way to understand and organize new knowledge
4. Assimilation - revision of existing cognitive schemas to incorporate new information
5. Accommodation - process of creating new schemas, or mental frameworks, to organize information
that cannot be assimilated into existing schemas.
G. Stages of Cognitive Development
1. Piaget proposed 4 stages of cognitive development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete
operational, and formal operational.
2. Sensorimotor Stage
a. Sensorimotor Stage - Piaget's first stage of cognitive development, occurring between birth and
about age 2. the sensorimotor stage is characterized by the development of sensory (simple
input) and motor (simple output) functions. During this stage, infants respond largely in
reflexive (inborn) ways; as they develop, children modify these reflexes to suit the demands of
the environment.
b. Object Permanence - realization that an object continues to exist even when it is not
immediately visible.
c. Representational Thought - well-formed mental representations, or ideas, of external stimuli
3. Preoperational Stage
Educational Psychology| Part 1: Human Development|Chapter 2: The Development of Cognitive, Learning, and
Language Skills
a. Preoperational Stage - Piaget's second stage of cognitive development, occurring between
approximately 2 and 7 years of age. During this stage, the child actively begins to develop
mental representations and learns to use words.
b. Egocentric - centered on the self without understanding of how other people perceive a
situation.
4. Concrete Operational Stage
a. Concrete Operational Stage - Piaget's third stage of cognitive development, occurring from
about ages 7 to 12 years. During this stage, children become able to mentally manipulate
internal representations of concrete objects.
b. Conservation - recognition that even when the physical appearance of something constant in
quantity or amount changes, its underlying quantity remains the same.
c. Reversible Thinking - Ability mentally to reverse a physical operation. According to Piaget, this
ability develops during the concrete operational stage of cognitive development.
5. Formal Operational Stage
a. Formal Operational Stage - Piaget's final stage of cognitive development, occurring at about 11
or 12 years of age and extending through adulthood. Individuals in this stage form and operate
on (e.g., reverse) abstract as well as concrete mental representations.
b. Second-Order Relations - relations between relations, as required by analogical reasoning.
c. Another important ability that develops during the formal operations stage is the ability to
think abstractly- that is, to think about concepts, such as justice or inner peace, that do not
have any concrete, physical equivalents.
H. Evaluating Piaget's Theory
1. Piaget's theory is the most nearly complete theory of cognitive development to date, although it is
heavily oriented toward developing expertise in scientific modes of thinking. The theory offers fewer
ideas about the development of expertise in other modes. Piaget's theory has also been useful in
generating a tremendous amount of research and in suggesting to teachers what children at given
ages can and cannot do.
2. The validity of Piaget's theory-the extent to which it is accurate in describing children's cognitive
development- has been questioned on a number of grounds:
a. The limitations of the stagelike nature of development
b. The ages at which children can first perform various kinds of tasks
c. Whether children's failures to perform certain tasks are actually due to the reasons Piaget gave
d. Whether all adults ever become fully formal operational
e. Whether the theory can be generalized across cultures.
3. The Stagelike Nature of Development
a. No full consensus has been reached among cognitive developmentalists as to whether
development is stagelike or continuous
4. The ages at which children can first Perform Tasks
a. Piaget seems to have overestimated the ages at which children are really capable of
performing various kinds of cognitive tasks. The general trend in research in this field has been
to suggest that children can do many tasks at ages earlier than Piaget thought, as long as the
children are familiar with the content domain in which they are working.
5. Reasons for Failures to Perform
a. What Piaget had taken to be a reasoning failure was actually a memory failure.
6. Cross-Cultural Generalizations
a. Teachers need to learn as much as they can about the cultural background of their students,
and to treat the children in a way that is respectful of their cultural diversity.
b. Sometimes children from diverse cultures do not even understand tests developed in western
cultures.
Educational Psychology| Part 1: Human Development|Chapter 2: The Development of Cognitive, Learning, and
Language Skills
c. When you teach culturally diverse children, do not make assumptions about the cognitive
readiness of members of one group on the basis of knowledge about the cognitive readiness of
members of another group.
7. Reaching the Formal Operations Stage
a. Many adolescents and adults in Western cultures also may not reach formal operations.
I. Neo-Piagetian Views
1. Proposing Different Stages
a. Distinction between optimal and typical levels of performance. The optimal level is the best
performance an individual is capable of making on a given task; the typical level is the level of
performance at which the individual typically operates.
b. Just because people are optimally capable of performing at a certain level, it does not mean
they will typically perform at that level in their every day lives.
2. Proposing More Stages
a. Postformal Thinking - Thinking that goes beyond that of formal operations in some way.
b. Problem Finding - stage of cognitive development proposed by Patricia Arlin, in which an
individual becomes able not just to solve problems, but to find important problems to solve.
c. Dialectic Thinking - Recognition, usually occurring during late adolescence or early adulthood,
that most real-life problems do not have a unique solution that is fully correct, with other
solutions being incorrect; involves thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
d. Thesis - proposed solution to a problem
e. Antithesis - proposed solution to a problem that directly contradicts an existing thesis.
f. Synthesis - proposed solution to a problem that reconciles 2 opposing points of view (the thesis
and the antithesis)
J. Teaching Beyond Piaget
1. Piaget defined some of his stages in terms of what children cannot do. A focus on what children
cannot do may set up negative expectations, which in turn can become self-fulfilling prophecies.
2. Expert teachers know they can expect, and ask for, students to show higher levels of thinking in
subjects in which the students have expertise.
5. Implications for Teaching
A. Piaget's Theory
1. Mix assimilations and accommodations
2. Take into account children's level of cognitive development
3. Teach children in a way that reflects their nature as natural-born scientists
4. Pay as much attention to understanding and correcting the bases of children's errors as to rewarding
their correct answers
5. Teach children in a way that allows new cognitive structures always to build on old ones.
B. Neo-Piagetian Views
1. Problem finding is at least as important as problem solving, and becomes more important in
adolescence and beyond.
2. Students, as they become adolescents, need to be encouraged to think dialectically.
C. Beyond Piaget
1. Expert teachers focus on what children of a given age can do.
2. Children can be pushed just a bit beyond their current level of cognitive development
3. Children should be taught as multifaceted human beings, not just as developing scientists.
6. Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory of Cognitive Development
A. Sociocultural Theory - Vygotsky's major premise that cognitive development is largely from the outside,
inward. Children reflect on the interactions between the people in their world and others, including
themselves, and then make use of these interactions to further their own development.
B. Internalization
1. Internalization - absorption, or taking in, of knowledge from the social contexts in which it is
observed, so that one can use it for oneself.
Educational Psychology| Part 1: Human Development|Chapter 2: The Development of Cognitive, Learning, and
Language Skills
2. Vygotsky believed that language development is the key to being able to internalize complex ideas.
3. Bilingual children have a special advantage in that they can understand conversations in 2 languages.
But they also face special challenges, in that the language in which they are more comfortable may
not be the language in which instruction occurs in school.
C. The Zone of Proximal Development
1. Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) - Range between a child's level of independent performance
and the level of performance a child can reach with expert guidance. Also called the zone of potential
development.
2. Dynamic Assessment Environment - Testing situation, designed to assess a child's zone of proximal
development, in which the examiner not only gives the child problems to solve, but also gives the
child a graded series of hints when the child is unable to solve the problems.
3. Static Assessment Environment - testing situation in which the examiner gives the child problems to
solve, but provides little or no feedback about the child's performance.
D. Scaffolding
1. Direct Instruction - learning situation in which a teacher, parent, or other authority imparts
knowledge to a child by teaching it.
2. Mediated Learning Experience (MLE) - Learning situation in which an adult or older child indirectly
helps a child learn by explaining events in the environment, but without directly teaching some
lesson.
3. Scaffolding - Competent assistance or support, usually provided through mediation of the
environment by a parent or teacher, in which cognitive, socioemotional, and behavioral development
can occur.
4. Scaffolding is a centrally important technique for stimulating cognitive development. In addition to
the strategies described previously, scaffolding strategies include questioning students, modeling
behaviors, and providing feedback on student performance.
5. Teachers who use scaffolding can respond not only to the developed and developing cognitive
abilities of children, but also to their developed and developing behaviors and socioemotional needs.
6. Scaffolding agents include expert, self, peer
7. Scaffolding domains include content and heuristic
8. Evidence suggests that appropriate cognitive, socioemotional, and behavioral scaffolding has positive
effects on cognitive development.
9. Interventions - Action undertaken to improve a child's cognitive, socioemotional, or behavioral
development.
10. Studies of the long-term effects of intervention indicate that if a program does not last long enough,
and if there is inadequate scaffolding after the program, cognitive gains tend to disappear.
E. Evaluating Vygotsky's Theory
Theorist
Position on Stages
Direction of
Development
Major Constructs
Piaget
Stages: Sensorimotor, Preoperational,
Concrete Operational, Formal
Operational
Inside, outward
Equilibrium, assimilation,
accommodation, stage
Vygotsky
Continuous
Outside, inward
Internalization, zone of
proximal development,
scaffolding
7. Implications for Teaching
A. Serve as a role model for students
1. Children learn by internalizing external dialogue. They learn to think critically and well by observing
those around them doing it. One of the most important aspects of being a teacher is serving as a role
Educational Psychology| Part 1: Human Development|Chapter 2: The Development of Cognitive, Learning, and
Language Skills
model for students. Other, more expert students also can serve as role models, although as with any
such models, they can do so for good or for ill.
B. Build rather than hinder language
1. Language and though are intimately and inextricably related. The view that language is key to both
direct instruction and mediated learning experience has direct implications for everyone. It is
especially important for students who come to school speaking a language that is not the principal
language of the school. Teachers need to build rather than hinder children's native languages when
they do not correspond to the language of the school. When language learners are able to interact
within their ZPD, increased positive outcomes are observed.
C. Make sure you neither expect too much nor too little
1. Children do not always operate at the peak of their capacity. Obviously, teachers can expect too
much of children. At least as often, however, they expect too little. Vygotsky's theory points out that
children have a zone of proximal development, and that with proper guidance, children can be
helped to develop further within the range of this zone. One means of development is through the
enhancement of information processing in learning and memory.
8. Information-Processing Theories: Examining learning and Memory Skills
A. Information-processing theorists look at cognitive development in terms of how people of various ages
process information and represent it mentally.
B. Verbal Skills
1. Verbal Comprehension - Ability to understand spoken and written material
2. Words in Sentences
a. Children (as well as adults) use various cues to figure out word meanings.
b. These findings suggest a link between the ability to use verbal contexts and the level of
vocabulary a person develops. One of the best ways for children to increase their vocabulary is
simply to read a lot, which gives them many opportunities to learn words in their natural
contexts.
3. Sentences in Paragraph
a. Children don't notice when sentences in a paragraph contradict each other
C. Quantitative Skills
1. Many times students scramble steps for arithmetic or have a wrong algorithm they are using.
D. Memory Skills
1. Children's memory skills improve with age. 2 factors that influence this improvement: people's
knowledge about the domain in which they are learning and remembers, and people's understanding
of their own memory.
2. Children will learn better, generally speaking, in domains about which they already have more
knowledge.
3. Deficits in memory are frequently observed in children with both reading and mathematical
disabilities.
4. Rehearsal - memory strategy in which a person, either mentally or aloud, recites information over
and over again to remember it.
9. Implications for Teaching
A. Try to understand children's thought processes, not just their final answers
B. Teach strategies for learning
C. Teach knowledge not for its own sake, but rather to help children develop expertise
D. Pay attention to how students represent information
10. 3 major Approaches to Cognitive Development: A Comparison
11. Theory of Mind
A. Autistic children seem to lack or have a seriously defective theory of mind (understanding of how the mind
operates). They also are deficient in their language development. It is, therefore, not surprising that the
development of theory of mind is highly related to children's verbal ability.
12. Language Development
Educational Psychology| Part 1: Human Development|Chapter 2: The Development of Cognitive, Learning, and
Language Skills
A. What makes a language a language?
1. Communication
2. Arbitrariness
3. Meaningful Structure
4. Multiplicity of Structure
5. Productivity
B. Stages of Language Acquisition
1. Prenatal Responsiveness to the Human Voice
2. Cooing
3. Babbling
4. One-Word Utterances
a. Overextension Errors - Application of a word beyond its legitimate use.
b. Underextension Errors - Limiting the application of a word so the word's proposed meaning has
too narrow a range of possible examples.
5. Two-Word Utterances
a. Syntax - rules for combining words.
6. Telegraphic Speech - speech that uses simple syntax in utterances of 2 or 3 words to impart a simple
meaning. Children begin to develop this form of speech at about age 3.
7. Basic Adult sentence structure
C. Theories of Language Acquisition: A comparison
1. Nurture: Acquisition of language by Imitation
a. Emphasizes the role of nurture in language acquisition
b. It has been shown that children prefer listening to child-directed speech (simplified way of
speaking) over other kinds of speech
c. Overregularize -To use word forms that follow a rule rather than recognize an exception to it. (I
Goed Home)
2. Nature: An Innate Ability to Acquire Language
a. Language Acquisition Device (LAD) - Innate predisposition or ability to acquire language.
b. Critical Periods - Certain points during development when individuals are particularly attuned
to various aspects of language (or other) development.
c. Generally, if children learn a second language in an environment of native speakers, they
acquire the accent of a native speaker. Adults, however, typically retain an accent that
identifies them as speakers of another first language, whether or not they learn the second
language from native speakers.
3. Nature and Nurture
a. Hypothesis Testing - As specific to this chapter, children's learning of language by forming
hypotheses about language and linguistic forms and then testing those hypotheses in their
environments.
D. The Relationship between Language and Thought
1. Linguistic Determinism - Theory of the relationship between language and thought that suggests the
structure of our language shapes or thought processes.
2. Linguistic Relativity - Theory of the relationship between language and thought that suggests the
structure of our language shapes our thought processes.
E. Bilingualism and Education: An Introduction
1. Some people think children need to learn English and we should have English-only classrooms, others
think the children should keep and learn in their original language.
2. Bilingualism - Ability to communicate in 2 languages.
3. Moving Between Cultures
a. Some children may also be devastated by the teasing they suffer as a result of stumbling over
English, even though they have acquired an age-appropriate mastery of their native language.
b. Also problems in school because they don't fully understand English.
Educational Psychology| Part 1: Human Development|Chapter 2: The Development of Cognitive, Learning, and
Language Skills
4. The status of Languages
a. When the student's native language is valued as much or virtually as much as English, then the
bilingual experience will be a positive one. The individual's cultural identity will not suffer, nor
will cognitive development and learning.
5. The first Language as a Resource for Learning
a. Bilingual Education - Schooling in which 2 languages are used as the medium of instruction.
b. Additive Bilingualism - Addition of a second language that builds on an already well-developed
first language
c. Subtractive Bilingualism - Learning of a second language that starts to replace a first language
that has not yet been fully formed.
13. Implications for Teaching
A. Ensure that children understand the language in which new material is presented
B. Be aware of the effects of your use of language
C. Show respect for all languages, regardless of the language in which you teach
D. Try to develop additive bilingualism
14. Brain Development
15. Expertise and Cognitive Development