EDU 301 – EDUCATIONAL
PSYCHOLOGY
COGNITIVE APPROACHES IN LEARNING
Cognitive Approaches in Learning
 Piaget
 Vygotsky
 Bruner
PIAGET’S THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
 What is Intelligence?
 According to Piaget, it is a basic life function
that enables an organism to adapt to its
environment.
 All intellectual activity is undertaken with
one goal in mind-cognitive equilibrium
 Piaget described children as constructivist
Cognitive Schemes: the structure of intelligence
 Scheme is a term used by Piaget to describe the
models, or mental structures, that we create to
represent ,organize, and interpret our experiences.
 There are 3 kinds of intellectual structures:
1.Behavioral schemes
 First intellectual structures to emerge
2.Symbolic schemes
 Appears ~2 year of life
3.Operational schemes
 7 years+
How we gain knowledge: Piaget’s Cognitive
Processes
 Organization is the process by which children combine existing
schemes into new and more complex intellectual structures.
 Adaptation is an inborn tendency to adjust to the demands of the
environment.
 The goal of adaptation is to adjust to the environment; this occurs
through assimilation and accommodation.
 Assimilation is the process of interpreting new experiences by
incorporating them into existing schemes.
 Accommodation is the process of modifying existing schemes in
order to incorporate or adapt to new experiences.
PIAGETIAN
CONCEPT
Equilibrium
Toddler who has never
seen anything fly but
birds thinks that all
flying objects are birds
Assimilation
Seeing an airplane
flying prompts the
child to call it a birdie
Accommodation
Child experiences conflict
upon realizing that the new
birdie has no feathers.
Concludes it is not a bird
and asks for the proper
term or invents a name.
Equilibrium restored
Equilibrium
Assimilation
Accommodation
Organization
Organization
Forms hierarchal scheme
consisting of a
superordinate class (flying
objects) and two
subordinate classes (birdies
and airplanes).
Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
 According to Piaget, a child’s development
progresses through 4 qualitative stages and an
invariant developmental sequence-universal
pattern of development, which are:
 The Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to 2 Years)
 The Preoperational Stage (2 to 7 Years)
 The Concrete-Operational Stage (7 to 11 Years)
 The Formal-Operational Stage (11-12 Years and Beyond)
The sensorimotor stage (Birth-2 years)
 The 6 Developmental stages of Problem-Solving
abilities:
1. Reflex activity (0-1mon.) exercising and
accommodation of inborn reflexes
2. Primary circular reactions (1-4 mon.) repeating
acts centered on ones own body
3. Secondary circular reactions (4-8 mon.)
repeating acts toward external objects
Sensorimotor
4. Coordination of secondary schemes (8-12 mon.)
combining acts to solve simple problems.
5. Tertiary circular reactions (12-18 mon.)
experimenting to find new ways of to solve
problems
6. Symbolic problem solving (18-24 mon.) inner
experimentation without relaying on trial-anderror experimentation
Development of imitation
 Deferred imitation (18-24 mo.) is the ability to
reproduce the behavior of an absent model.
 Development of Object Permanence (8-12 mo) is the
idea that objects continue to exist when they are no
longer visible or detectable through the other senses.
 A-not-B error: tendency of 8-12- month olds to search for a
hidden object where they previously found it even after
they have seen it moved to a different location.
Challenges to Piaget’s account of sensorimotor
development:
 Neo-nativism: idea that cognitive knowledge is innate
and subject to biological constraints
 “theory” theories: theories of cognitive development
that combine neo-nativism and constructivism
Preoperational stage (2-7 yrs)
 There is an increase in their use of mental symbols
to represent objects and events they encounter
 The Preconceptual Period is the early substage of
preoperations, from age 2 to age 4, characterized by the
appearance of primitive ideas, concepts, and methods of
reasoning. Marked by the appearance of symbolic
function and play.
 The Intuitive Period is the later substage of
preoperations, from age 4 to age 7, when the child’s
thinking about objects and events is dominated by
salient perceptual features.
The Preconceptual Period:
 Emergence of Symbolic thought
 Symbolic function
 Ability to use symbols to represent objects or experiences
 Symbolic play
 Play where one object, action, or actor symbolizes another
Deficits in preconceptual reasoning:
 Animism- attributing lifelike qualities to
inanimate objects
 Egocentrism- viewing the world from only one’s
perspective
 Appearance/Reality distinction- inability to
distinguish deceptive appearances from reality
The intuitive period:
Here cognition is described as:
 Centered a tendency to focus on one aspect of a
situation and not on others due to their inability to
understand:
 Conservation- recognition that the properties of an
object or substance do not change when its appearance
is altered in some superficial way.
 Reversibility- ability to reverse or negate an action by
mentally performing the opposite action
The Concrete-Operational Stage
(7 to 11 Years)
 Here children are said to think more logically about real
objects and experiences
 Some examples of operational thought
 Conservation
 Reversibility
 Logic
 Classification
 ability to create relationships between things.
 Relational Logic
 Mental seriation
 Transitivity
 The sequencing of concrete operations
 Horizontal decalage- different levels of understanding conservation
tasks that seem to require the same mental operations
The Formal-Operational Stage
(11-12 Years and Beyond)
Ability to reason logically about hypothetical process and events
that may have no basis in reality
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Hypothetico-Deductive Reasoning
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Thinking Like a Scientist
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a formal operational ability to think hypothetically.
Inductive reasoning- type of thinking where hypotheses are generated and
then systematically tested in experiments.
Personal and Social Implications

The formal operation stage paves the way for:
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Identity formation
Richer understanding of other peoples psychological perspectives
The ability to way options in decision making
An Evaluation of Piaget’s Theory

Piaget’s Contributions
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Founded the discipline we know today as cognitive development.
Convinced us that children are curious, active explorers who play
an important role in their own development.
His theory was one of the first to explain, and not just describe,
the process of development.
His description of broad sequences of intellectual development
provides a reasonably accurate overview of how children of
different ages think.
Piaget’s ideas have had a major influence on thinking about
social and emotional development as well as many practical
implications for educators.
Piaget asked important questions and drew literally thousands
of researchers to the study of cognitive development.
Challenges to Piaget’s cognitive developmental
theory:
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Underestimated developing minds
Failed to distinguish competence from
performance
It is believed by some that Cognitive
development does not evolve in a qualitative and
stage like manner- it tends to develop gradually
Provides a vague explanation on cognitive
maturation
Devoted little attention to social and cultural
influences
Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective
Sociocultural theory states that:
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Cognitive development occurs in a sociocultural
context that influences the form it takes
Most of a child’s cognitive skills evolve from social
interactions with parents, teachers, and other more
competent associates
The role of culture in intellectual
development:
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Vygotsky proposed that we should evaluate
human development from four interrelated
perspectives:
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Microgenetic-changes that occur over brief periods
of time-minutes and seconds
Ontogenetic-development over a lifetime
Phylogenetic-development over evolutionary time
Sociohistorical- changes that have occurred in one's
culture and the values, norms and technologies
such a history has generated
Tools of intellectual adaptation
 Vygotsky (1930-1935/1978) proposed that infants
are born with a few elementary mental functions –
attention, sensation, perception and memory – that
are eventually transformed by the culture into new
and more sophisticated mental processes he called
higher mental functions.
The Social Origins of Early Cognitive
Competencies:

Zone of Proximal Development range of tasks
that are too complex to be mastered alone but
can be accomplished with guidance and
encouragement from a more skillful partner
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Scaffolding- the expert participant carefully tailors
their support to the novice learner to assure their
understanding
Apprenticeship in Thinking and Guided
Participation:
 guided participation, adult-child interactions in which
children’s cognitions and modes of thinking are
shaped as they participate with or observe adults
engaged in culturally relevant activities.
 Our culture is one that uses what Vygotsky termed
context-independent learning
Implications for Education:
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Children are seen as active participants in their
education
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teachers in Vygotsky’s classroom would favor guided
participation in which they:
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structure the learning activity
provide helpful hints or instructions that are
carefully tailored to the child’s current abilities
monitor the learner’s progress
gradually turning over more of the mental activity to
their pupils
Promote cooperative learning exercises
Bruner
 Studied cognitive development of children after
looking at problem-solving abilities
 Stands between Piaget and Vygotsky
 Biology plays a role in cognitive development
 Individuals have to be active in their development
 Need to construct own understanding of the world
 Language reflects experience and can transform
experience
Modes of
processing
information
Enactive
representation
Iconic mode
Symbolic mode
Enactive
representation
• Interaction
with
environment
in a physical
way
• This type of
learning
continues a
lifetime
especially
when learning
a new skill
Iconic mode
• Develops
from the age
of 1
• Information is
stored as
mental
images
Symbolic mode
• Develops
around the
age of 7
• Important
shift in
cognitive
development
Bruner : Theories and Practice
 Maturational Readiness
 Assumes that at certain ages individuals are ready
and capable to learn certain concepts
 Development cannot be hurried
 Learning a concept before a child is ready prevents
the child from discovering it themselves and limits
their understanding
Bruner : Discovery Learning
 Knowledge needs to be constructed
 Student as active in the learning process
 Relates to spiral curriculum – the manner in which
the subject is taught should reflect the mode of
thinking
 Teacher has a role in facilitating the development
of the individual’s coding system
 Peers could provide support in the context
Summary
Piaget – learning process is the concept of
schemas
Piaget
Vygotsky
Bruner
Vygotsky – role of language is emphasized,
social interactions that make thought and
problem solving possible
Bruner - Individuals are born with biological
systems to help make sense of the world.
Individuals need to actively construct
knowledge. Role of language is emphasized