Slide 1
7—Cognitive Developmental
Approaches
• Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
• Applying and Evaluating Piaget’s Theory
• Vygotsky’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
• Summary
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Slide 2
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
• Piaget’s theory is a general, unifying story
of how biology and experience sculpt
cognitive development.
– Adaptation involves adjusting to new
environmental demands.
– Piaget stressed that children actively construct
their own cognitive worlds.
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Slide 3
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
• Processes of Development
– Schemes: Actions or mental representations that organize
knowledge.
• Behavioral schemes characterize infancy.
• Mental schemes develop in childhood.
• Two processes are responsible for how children use and
adapt their schemes:
– Assimilation: Incorporating new information into
existing schemes.
– Accommodation: Adjusting schemes to fit new
information and experiences.
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Slide 4
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
– To make sense out of their world, children
cognitively organize their experiences.
• Organization: Piaget’s concept of grouping isolated
behaviors into a higher-order, more smoothly
functioning cognitive system; the grouping or
arranging of items into categories.
• Equilibration: A mechanism to explain how
children shift from one stage of thought to the next.
The shift occurs as children experience cognitive
conflict or disequilibrium in trying to understand the
world.
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Slide 5
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
• Piaget proposed four stages of cognitive
development: sensorimotor, preoperational,
concrete operational, and formal operational.
– Sensorimotor Stage (birth to about 2 years of age):
Infants construct an understanding of the world by
coordinating sensory experiences with physical,
motoric actions. There are six substages:
• Simple reflexes—Piaget’s first sensorimotor
substage corresponds to the first month after birth.
The basic means of coordinating sensation and
action is through reflexive behaviors, such as
rooting and sucking, which infants have at birth.
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Slide 6
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
Piaget’s Four Stages of Cognitive
Development
• Refer to Figure 7.1
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Slide 7
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
– Sensorimotor Stage (continued)
• First habits and primary circular reactions—the
infant coordinates sensation with habits and primary
circular reactions. (1 to 4 months of age)
– Habit: A scheme based on a reflex that has
become completely separated from its eliciting
stimulus.
– Circular reaction: A repetitive action.
– Primary circular reaction: A scheme based on
the attempt to reproduce an event that initially
occurred by chance.
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Slide 8
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
– Sensorimotor Stage (continued)
• Secondary circular reactions
– Piaget’s third sensorimotor substage develops
between 4 and 8 months of age. Infants become
more object-oriented or focused on the world,
moving beyond preoccupation with the self.
• Coordination of secondary circular reactions
– Piaget’s fourth sensorimotor substage develops
between 12 and 18 months of age. Infants
purposely combine and recombine previously
learned schemes in a coordinated way.
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Slide 9
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
– Sensorimotor Stage (continued)
• Tertiary circular reactions, novelty, and curiosity
– Piaget’s fifth sensorimotor substage develops
between 12 and 18 months of age. Infants
become intrigued by the many properties of
objects and the many things they can make
happen to objects
» Tertiary circular reactions: Schemes in
which the infant purposely explores new
possibilities with objects, continually doing
new things to them and exploring the results.
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Slide 10
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
– Sensorimotor Stage (continued)
• Internalizations of schemes
– Piaget’s sixth sensorimotor substage develops
between 18 and 24 months of age. In this
substage, infants’ mental functioning shifts from
a purely sensorimotor plane to a symbolic plane,
and they develop the ability to use primitive
symbols.
» Symbol: An internalized sensory image or
word that represents an event.
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Slide 11
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
– Sensorimotor Stage (continued)
• Object Permanence: The Piagetian term for one of
the infant’s most important accomplishments:
understanding that objects and events continue to
exist even when they cannot directly be seen, heard,
or touched.
• Understanding of Causality: Piaget was very
interested in infants’ knowledge of cause and effect.
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Slide 12
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
The Six Substages of Object Permanence
• Refer to Figure 7.2
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Slide 13
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
Object Permanence
• Refer to Figure 7.3
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Slide 14
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
Using the Violation of Expectations Method
to Study Object Permanence in Infants
• Refer to Figure 7.4
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Slide 15
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
The Infant’s Understanding of Causality
• Refer to Figure 7.5
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Slide 16
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
• Evaluating Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage
– Researchers believe that infants see objects as bounded,
unitary, solid, and separate from their background,
possibly at birth or shortly thereafter, but definitely by 3
to 4 months of age.
– The data do not always support Piaget’s claim that
certain processes are crucial in stage transitions.
• A-not-B error: The mistake made by infants of
selecting a familiar hiding place (A) rather than a
new hiding place (B) as they progress into the fourth
substage, does not show up consistently.
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Slide 17
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
• Evaluating Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage
(continued)
– Researchers believe that Piaget wasn’t specific enough
about how infants learn about their world and that
infants are more competent than Piaget thought.
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Slide 18
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
• Preoperational Thought
– The preoperational stage stretches from approximately
2 to 7 years of age. It is a time when children begin to
represent the world with words, images, and drawings.
Stable concepts are formed, mental reasoning emerges,
egocentrism begins strongly then weakens, and magical
beliefs are constructed.
• Operations: Internalized actions that allow children
to do mentally what before they could only do
physically.
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Slide 19
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
• Preoperational Thought (continued)
– Symbolic Function Substage
• The first substage of preoperational thought,
occurring roughly between the ages of 2 and 4. In
this substage, the young child gains the ability to
represent mentally an object that is not present.
• Egocentrism: The inability to distinguish between
one’s own and someone else’s perspective.
– The Three Mountains Task was used to study
egocentrism.
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Slide 20
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
The Three Mountains Task
• Refer to Figure 7.6
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Slide 21
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
– Symbolic Function Substage (continued)
• Animism: A facet of preoperational thought, the
belief that inanimate objects have “lifelike” qualities
and are capable of action.
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Slide 22
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
The Symbolic Drawings of Young Children
• Refer to Figure 7.7
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Slide 23
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
• Preoperational Thought (continued)
– Intuitive Thought Substage
• The second substage of preoperational thought,
occurring approximately between 4 and 7 years of
age. Children begin to use primitive reasoning and
want to know the answers to all sorts of questions.
– Centration: The centering of attention on one
characteristic to the exclusion of all others.
– Conservation: The awareness that altering an
object’s or substance’s appearance does not
change its basic properties.
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Slide 24
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
Piaget’s Conservation Task
• Refer to Figure 7.8
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Slide 25
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
Some Dimensions for Conservation: Number,
Matter, and Length
• Refer to Figure 7.9
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Slide 26
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
• Concrete Operational Thought
– In this stage, which lasts approximately from 7 to 11
years of age, logical reasoning replaces intuitive
reasoning as long as the reasoning can be applied to
specific or concrete examples.
• Concrete operations: Reversible mental actions on
real, concrete objects.
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Slide 27
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
• Concrete Operational Thought (continued)
– Conservation involves recognizing that the length,
number, mass, quantity, area, weight, and volume of
objects and substances are not changed by
transformations that merely alter their appearance.
• Horizontal décalage: Piaget’s concept that similar
abilities do not appear at the same time within a
stage of development.
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Slide 28
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
• Concrete Operational Thought (continued)
– Classification
• Concrete operational children can divide things into
sets and subsets and understand their relationship.
• Seriation: Ordering stimuli along a quantitative
dimension (such as length).
• Transitivity: The ability to reason about and
logically combine relationships.
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Slide 29
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
Classification: An Important Ability in
Concrete Operational Thought
• Refer to Figure 7.10
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Slide 30
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
• Formal Operational Thought
– Adolescents’ thought becomes more abstract, logical,
and idealistic between 11 and 15 years of age.
• Formal operational thought is more abstract than a
child’s thinking; it is full of idealism and
possibilities.
• Hypothetical-deductive reasoning: The
adolescent’s cognitive ability to develop hypotheses
about ways to solve problems and systematically
deduce which is the best path to follow in solving
the problem.
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Slide 31
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
– Adolescent Egocentrism (David Elkind)
• The heightened self-consciousness of adolescents,
which is reflected in their belief that others are as
interested in them as the adolescents are in
themselves, and in their sense of personal
uniqueness and invincibility.
• Imaginary audience: The adolescent’s attentiongetting behavior, the attempt to be noticed, visible,
and “on stage.”
• Personal fable: An adolescent’s sense of personal
uniqueness and invincibility.
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Slide 32
Review and Reflect:
Learning Goal 1
• Discuss the key processes and four stages in
Piaget’s theory
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Slide 33
Review and Reflect:
Learning Goal 1
– Review
• What are the key processes in Piaget’s theory of
cognitive development?
• What are the main characteristics of the
sensorimotor stage?
• What are the main characteristics of the
preoperational stage?
• What are the main characteristics of the concrete
operational stage?
• What are the main characteristics of the formal
operational stage?
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Slide 34
Review and Reflect:
Learning Goal 2
– Reflect
• Do you consider yourself to be a formal operational
thinker? Do you still sometimes feel like a concrete
operational thinker? Give examples.
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Slide 35
Applying and Evaluating Piaget’s
Theory
• Piaget and Education
– Piaget provided a sound conceptual framework from
which to view learning and education.
• Take a constructivist approach.
• Facilitate rather than direct learning.
• Consider the child’s knowledge and level of
thinking.
• Use ongoing assessment.
• Promote the student’s intellectual health.
• Turn the classroom into a setting of exploration and
discovery.
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Slide 36
Applying and Evaluating Piaget’s
Theory
• Evaluating Piaget’s Theory: Contributions
– Children are active, constructive thinkers.
– His careful observations of children demonstrated
inventive ways to discover how they act on and
adapt to their world.
– Children need to make their experiences fit their
schemes and simultaneously adapt their schemes to
experience.
– Cognitive change is likely to occur if the context is
structured to allow gradual movement to the next
higher level.
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Slide 37
Applying and Evaluating Piaget’s
Theory
• Evaluating Piaget’s Theory: Criticisms
• Some cognitive abilities emerge earlier than Piaget
thought; others may appear later.
• Some concrete operational concepts do not appear in
synchrony.
• Some children who are at one cognitive stage can be
trained to reason at a higher cognitive stage.
• Culture and education exert stronger influences on
children’s development than Piaget believed.
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Slide 38
Applying and Evaluating Piaget’s
Theory
• Evaluating Piaget’s Theory (continued)
– Neo-Piagetians:
• Emphasize how children use attention, memory, and
strategies to process information
• A more accurate portrayal of children’s thinking
requires attention to children’s strategies, the speed
at which they process information, the particular
task involved, and the division of problems into
smaller, more precise steps.
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Slide 39
Review and Reflect:
Learning Goal 2
• Apply Piaget’s theory to education and
evaluate Piaget’s theory
– Review
• How can Piaget’s theory be applied to educating
children?
• What are some key contributions and criticisms of
Piaget’s theory?
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Slide 40
Review and Reflect:
Learning Goal 2
– Reflect
• How might thinking in formal operational ways
rather than concrete operational ways help students
to develop better study skills?
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Slide 41
Vygotsky’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
• The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)
– Vgotsky’s term for the range of tasks that are too
difficult for children to master alone but that can be
mastered with the guidance and assistance of adults
or more-skilled children.
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Slide 42
Vygotsky’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
• Scaffolding
– Changing the level of support over the course of a
teaching session in which a more-skilled individual
(teacher or more advanced peer of the child) adjusts the
amount of guidance to fit the child’s current
performance.
• Dialogue, an important tool of scaffolding, occurs
when the child’s rich but unsystematic,
disorganized, and spontaneous concepts meet with
the skilled helper’s more systematic, logical, and
rational concepts.
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Slide 43
Vygotsky’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development
• Refer to Figure 7.11
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Slide 44
Vygotsky’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
• Language and Thought
– Vygotsky (1962) believed that young children use
language not only for social communication but also to
plan, guide, and monitor their behavior in a selfregulatory fashion.
– Private speech, an important tool of thought during the
early childhood years, represents an early transition in
becoming more socially communicative (Piaget
considered private speech to be egocentric and
immature—research supports Vygotsky’s view).
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Slide 45
Vygotsky’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
• Teaching Strategies
– Assess the child’s ZPD.
– Use the child’s zone of proximal development in
teaching.
– Use more-skilled peers as teachers.
– Monitor and encourage children’s use of private speech.
– Place instruction in a meaningful context.
– Transform the classroom with Vygotskian ideas.
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Slide 46
Vygotsky’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
• Evaluating Vygotsky’s Theory
– Vygotsky’s Social Constructivist Approach:
Emphasizes the social contexts of learning and the
construction of knowledge through social interaction.
– Vygotsky emphasized collaboration, social interaction,
and sociocultural activity.
– The end point of cognitive development differs
depending on which skills are most valued by the
culture.
– Piaget emphasized children’s need to explore their
world; Vygotsky felt that students need many
opportunities to learn with a more-skilled person.
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Slide 47
Vygotsky’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
• Evaluating Vygotsky’s Theory: Criticisms
– He overemphasized the role of language in thinking.
– His emphasis on collaboration and guidance has
potential pitfalls.
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Slide 48
Explorations in Child
Development
Comparison of Vygotsky’s and Piaget’s
Theories
• Refer to Figure 7.12
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Slide 49
Review and Reflect:
Learning Goal 3
• Identify the main concepts in Vygotsky’s
theory and compare it with Piaget’s theory
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Slide 50
Review and Reflect:
Learning Goal 3
– Review
•
•
•
•
•
McGraw-Hill
What is the zone of proximal development?
What is scaffolding?
How did Vygotsky view language and thought?
How can Vygotsky’s theory be applied to education?
What are some similarities and differences between
Vygotsky’s and Piaget’s theories?
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Slide 51
Review and Reflect:
Learning Goal 3
– Reflect
• Which theory—Piaget’s or Vygotsky’s—do you like
better? Why?
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Slide 52
Summary
• In Piaget’s theory, children construct their own cognitive
worlds, building mental structures to adapt to their world.
• Schemes (behavioral/physical and mental/cognitive) are
actions or mental representations that organize knowledge.
• Adaptation involves assimilation, incorporating
information into existing knowledge, and accommodation,
adjusting schemes to account for new information.
• Other important concepts are organization and
equilibration.
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Slide 53
Summary
• Piaget described four qualitatively different stages
of thought: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete
operational, and formal operational.
• In sensorimotor thought, the infant organizes and
coordinates sensations with physical movements.
There are six substages moving from use of simple
reflexes to intentional action and internalization of
schemes.
• A key aspect of the sensorimotor stage is object
permanence, the ability to understand that objects
exist even if they are out of sight.
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Slide 54
Summary
• Preoperational thought is the beginning of the
ability to reconstruct at the level of thought what
has been established in behavior. It involves a
transition to sophisticated use of symbols and has
two substages: symbolic function, characterized
by symbolic thought, egocentrism, and animism;
and intuitive thought.
• Concrete operational thought occurs at roughly 7
to 11 years of age. It involves operations,
conservation, classification, seriation, and
transivity.
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Slide 55
Summary
• Formal operational thought appears between 11 and 15
years of age. It is more abstract, idealistic, and logical than
concrete operational thought.
• Adolescents develop a special kind of egocentrism that
involves an imaginary audience and a personal fable about
being unique and invulnerable.
• Though not an educator, Piaget’s constructivist views have
been applied to teaching. He gave us many useful
concepts; his critics question his estimates of competence
at different developmental levels, his stage concept, and
other ideas.
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Slide 56
Summary
• Neo-Piagetians emphasize the importance of information
processing.
• Zone of proximal development (ZPD) is Vygotsky’s term
for the range of tasks that are too difficult for children to
master alone but that can be learned with the guidance and
assistance of more-skilled adults and peers.
• Scaffolding involves changing the level of support over the
course of a teaching session, with the more-skilled person
adjusting guidance to fit the child’s current performance
level.
• Vygotsky believed that language plays a key role in
cognition.
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Slide 57
Summary
• Applications of Vygotsky’s ideas to education include
using the child’s zone of proximal development, using
scaffolding, monitoring and encouraging children’s use of
private speech, and assessing the ZPD to transform the
classroom with Vygotskian ideas.
• Piaget and Vygotsky emphasized that children actively
construct their understanding of the world; Vygotsky
emphasized that children construct knowledge through
social interaction and depend on tools provided by the
culture.
• Critics say Vygotsky overemphasized the role of language.
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Slide 58
Summary
• Especially important are Vygotsky’s ideas relating
to sociocultural influences on children’s
development.
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