Matakuliah
Tahun
: E1122 - Psikologi Pendidikan
: 2010
Cognitive and Language Development
Pertemuan 3
What is Development ?
• Development is the pattern of biological, cognitive, and
socioemotional changes that begin at conception and
continues through the life span.
• Most development involves growth, although it also
eventually involves decay (dying)
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Processes and Periods
• Biological, cognitive, and
socioemotional processes
• Biological processes produce changes in the
child’s body and underlie brain development,
height and weight gains, motor skills, and
puberty’s hormonal changes.
• Cognitive processes involve change in the child’s
thinking, intelligence, and language.
• Socioemotional processes involve changes in the
child’s relationships with other people, changes in
emotion, and personality.
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Processes and Periods
• Periods of Development
•
•
•
•
•
Infancy : birth – 18/24 month
Early childhood : 2 – 5 year
Middle and late childhood : 6 -11 year
Adolescene : 10/12 – 18/21 year
Early adulthood : 20 – 30 year
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Developmantal Issues
• Nature and Nurture
– Nature refers to an organism’s biological inheritance, nurture to
it environmental influences.
– The “nature” proponents claim biological inheritance is the most
important influence on development.
– The “nurture” proponents claim environmental experiences are
the most important.
• Continuity and Discontinuity
– The issue regarding whether development involves gradual,
cumulative change (continuity) or distinct stages (discontinuity)
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Developmantal Issues
• Early and Later Experience
– The issue of the degree to which early experiences (especially
infancy) or later experiences are the key determinants of the
child’s development.
• Evaluating the Developmental Issues
– Nature and nurture, continuity and discontinuity, and early and
later experiences all play a part in development through the
human life span. Along with this consensus, there is still spirited
debate about how strongly development is influenced by each of
these factors.
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Development and Education
• Splintered development
– The circumtences in which development is uneven across
domains.
– One student may have excelent math skills but poor writing kills.
Another student may have excellent verbal language skills, but
not have good reading and writing skills.
– A special challenge is the cognitively advanced student whose
socioemotional development is at a level expected for a much
younger child
– The developmental changes can help you understand the
optimal level for teaching and learning
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Cognitive Development
• The Brain :
– The old view of the brain in part
reflected the fact that scientists did
not have the technology to detect and
map sensitive changes in the brain as
it develops.
– Today, sophisticated brain-scanning
techniques allow better detection of
these changes. Considerable
progress is being made in charting
developmental changes in the brain,
although much is still unknown, and
connections to children’s eduction are
difficult to make
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The Brain
• Brain cells and regions
– The number and size of the
brain’s nerve endings continue to
grow at least untill adolescence.
– Some of the brain’s increase in
size also is due to myelination,
the process of encasing many
cells in the brain with a myelin
sheath.
– The brain has four lobes; Frontal
(voluntary, movement, and
thinking), Parietal (body
sensation, spatial location),
Temporal (hearing, language),
Occipital (vision)
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The Brain
• Lateralization: the specialization of functions in each
hemispheres of the brain;
– Verbal processing; language, speech and grammar
are localized at the left hemisphere.
– Nonverbal processing; the right hemisphere is
usually more dominant in processing nonverbal
information such as spatial perception, visual
recognition, and emotion.
• Plasticity: the brain has plasticity, and its development
depends on context
– Mark Rosenzweig experiment showed that the brain of the animals
growing up in the enriched environment developed better than the
brains of animal reared in standard or isolated conditions.
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The Brain and Children’s Education
• There is a critical or sensitive period – a biological
window of opportunity- when learning is easy, effective,
and easily retained.
• Although children’s brains acquire a great deal of
information during the early years, most learning likely
takes place after synaptic formation stabilizes, which is
after the age of 10
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Cognitive Development Theory
• Piaget’s Theory
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• Vigotsky’s Theory
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Piaget Theory : Cognitive Process
• Schemas ; action or mental representations that organize
knowledge
• Assimilation : Piagetian concept of the incorporation of new
information into existing knowledge (schemas).
• Accomodation : Piagetian concept of adjusting schemas to
fit new information and experiences
• Organization : piagetian concept of grouping isolated
behaviors into a higher-order, more smoothly functioning
cognitive system; the grouping or arranging of items into
categories.
• Equilibration: a mechenism that piaget proposed to explain
how children shift from one stage of thought to the next.
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Piagetian Stages
• Sensorimotor stage ; the first stage, lasting from birth to about
2 years of age, in which infants construct an understanding of the
world by coordinating sensory experiences with motor actions.
• Preoperational stage : the second stage, lasting from about 2 to
7 years of age, symbolic thought increases but opertional thought
is not yet present. The children begins to represent the world with
words and images.
• Concrete operational stage : the third stage, occuring between
7 to 11 years of age.the child thinks opertionally and logical
reasoning intuitive thought but only in concrete situation.
• Formal operational stage : the fourth stage, emerges between
11 to 15 years of age; thought is more abstract, idealistic, and
logical in this stage.
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Evaluating Piaget’s Theory
• Contributions;
– The present field of children’s cognitive development
– Masterful concept s : assimilation and accomodation, object
permanence, egocentrism, conservations, hypothetical reasoning.
– Vision of children as active, constructive thinkers., ect
• Criticisms:
–
–
–
–
Stimates of children’s competence
Stages
Training children to reason at a higher level
Culture and aducation.
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Evaluating Piaget’s Theory
• Neo-Piagetians; developmental psychologists who believe that
Piaget got some things right but that his theory needs
considerable revision, emphasize how to process information
through attention, memory, and strategies.
• Despite such criticism, Piaget’s theory is a very important.
Information about his stages of development can be applied to
teaching children.
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Vygotsky’s Theory
• Zone of proximal development (ZPD); vigotsky’s term for the
range of tasks that are too difficult forchildren to master alone but
that can be materde wiht guidance and assistance from adult or
more-skilled children.
• Scaffolding;,A technique that involves changing the level of
support for learning. A teacher or more-advance peer adjust the
amount of guidance to fit the students current performance.
• Language and Thougt : children use speech not only for social
communication, but also to help them solve tasks.
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Evaluating Vygotsky’s Theory
• Social constructivist approach; emphasizes the social
contexts of learning and that knowledge is mutually built and
contructed; .
• Some critics say Vigotsky overemphasized the role of language
in thinking. Also his emphasis on collaboration and guidance has
potential pitfalls. Might facilitator be too helpful in some cases, as
when a parent becomes too overbearing and controlling?
Further, some children’s might become lazy and expect help
when they might have done something on theri own.
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Comparison of Vygotsky’s and Piaget’s Theory
Topic
Vygotsky
Piaget
Sosiocultural
Context
Strong Emphasis
Little emphasis
Constructivism
Social constructivist
Cognitive Constructivist
Stages
No general stages
Strong emphasis on stage
Key Processes
Zone of proximal development,
language. Dialogue. Tool of the
culture
Schema, assimilation, acomodation,
operations, conservations,
clasification
Role Of
Language
Language plays a powerful role Language has minimal role,
in shaping thought
cognitive primarily direct language
View On
Education
Plays central role, helping
children learn the tools of the
culture
Merely refines the child’s cognitive
skills that have already emerged
Teaching
Implication
The teacher is a facilitator and
guide, not a director
Also view the teacher is a facilitator
and guide, not a director
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