Université Libanaise
Rectorat
Educational Psychology
Course Instructor: Dr Rita Zgheib
Rita.zgheib@gmail.com
1 COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT -1
1.1
3 HOURS: NOVEMBER 25, 2014
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENTAL THEORIES
 Learning is more powerful if learners actively construct their own understandings.
 Learning experiences are far more effective if they take into account the cognitive
development levels of learners.
 Students’ knowledge construction is assisted by the nature of their interactions with
people and objects in their environment.
Cognitive development “involves changes in reasoning and thinking, language acquisition, and
the ways individuals gain store and remember or recall knowledge of their environment.” –
Seifert and Hoffmung, 1994, p. 6.
1.2
CONSTRUCTIVISM - PIAGET
Jean Piaget (1896 –1980) was a Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher known for
his epistemological studies
with
children.
His theory
of
cognitive
development and
epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology". Genetic epistemology is a study
of the origins (genesis) of knowledge (epistemology). The discipline was established by Jean
Piaget. The goal of genetic epistemology is to link the validity of knowledge to the model of its
construction. It shows that how the knowledge was gained affects how valid it is.
Piaget placed great importance on the education of children. As the Director of the International
Bureau of Education, he declared in 1934 that "only education is capable of saving our societies
from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual. Jean Piaget was "the great pioneer of the
constructivist theory of knowing”. However, his ideas did not become widely popularized until
the 1960s.
Piaget was born in Neuchâtel, in the Francophone region of Switzerland. Piaget was a precocious
child who developed an interest in biology and the natural world. His early interest in zoology
earned him a reputation among those in the field after he had published several articles on
mollusks by the age of 15.
He was educated at the University of Neuchâtel, and studied briefly at the University of Zürich.
Piaget moved from Switzerland to Paris, France after his graduation and he taught at the GrangeAux-Belles Street School for Boys. The school was run by Alfred Binet, the developer of the Binet
intelligence test, and Piaget assisted in the marking of Binet's intelligence tests. It was while he
was helping to mark some of these tests that Piaget noticed that young children consistently gave
wrong answers to certain questions. Piaget did not focus so much on the fact of the children's
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answers being wrong, but that young children consistently made types of mistakes that older
children and adults did not. This led him to the theory that young children's cognitive processes
are inherently different from those of adults. Ultimately, he was to propose a global theory of
cognitive developmental stages in which individuals exhibit certain common patterns of
cognition in each period of development. In 1921, Piaget returned to Switzerland as director of
the Rousseau Institute in Geneva. In 1923, he married and had three children, whom Piaget
studied from infancy. In 1964, Piaget was invited to serve as chief consultant at two conferences
at Cornell University (March 11–13) and University of California, Berkeley (March 16–18). The
conferences addressed the relationship of cognitive studies and curriculum development and
strived to conceive implications of recent investigations of children's cognitive development for
curricula. In 1979 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Social and Political Sciences.
Piagetian theory consists of two main parts:
A. His ideas about the purpose and nature of intelligence.
B. A stage theory perspective on human cognitive development.
A. Piagetian View of Intelligence:
. Intelligence: A set of cognitive capabilities that allows people to adjust to the demands of the
environment. These capabilities are:
1. Knowledge Structures:
The basic structure is the scheme or schema – an organized pattern of thought or action
used by people to understand and interact with their world. People tend to organize
knowledge about their experiences into categories.
All cats in the
neighborhood meow.
Scheme for understanding cats:
All cats meow.
CASES:
Mrs. Rayburn, a junior high science teacher, is amazed how resilient her students' belief
systems are. She shows them a science demonstration that contradicts their beliefs, and
the students find a way to make the demonstration fit with their beliefs. "I guess that's
one reason why it is hard to change students' misconceptions about science."
Mrs. Pantera's sixth grade science students often have developed some misunderstandings of physical science concepts such as heat and gravity. "I often need to
assess students' understanding of these concepts before I introduce them. I can then try
to create experiences that allow them to confront and hopefully change their particular
misunderstandings."
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. These are examples of cognitive functions. But what are cognitive functions?
2. Cognitive Functions:
Organization: The general tendency of biological
organisms to combine structures into more
complicated structures or systems.
Adaptation: The process used to develop and
refine schemes to adjust to our environments.It
occurs through two complementary subprocesses:
•Assimilation: Interpreting environmental events in terms of existing
schemes. Infant calls ALL men "Daddy!"
•Accomodation: When evironmental experiences cause a person to
change the nature of a scheme. Not all men are Daddy.
. Relate each of the cases above to a subcategory of adaptation.
. Self-Regulation: From a Piagetian perspective, people are motivated to make sense of the
world so they can adapt to its demands. To accomplish this, people must self-regulate and
maintain a sense of balance among the many factors that influence their ability to understand
and adapt to their environments – cognitive balance. Equilibrating means assessing current
understanding in terms of how well it explains experiences and maintaining an appropriate
balance between assimilation and accommodation in making sense of these experiences.
CORNERSTONE IDEAS for the constructivist approach.
B. Piagetian Stage Theory:
. Assumptions:
 Each stage is characterized by the development of cognitive structures or capabilities that
are qualitatively different from those of earlier stages.
 The sequence of stages is the same for all children; but the timing can change.
 Development is cumulative.
 Children may demonstrate capabilities from two stages simultaneously – horizontal
décalage.
 In general, development occurs through a series of four stages:
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Formal Operations
Stages:
Concrete Operations
Preoperational
Sensorimotor
0-2
1.
2-6 or
7-10 or 11
11-13 Years
Sensorimotor:
Infants think and develop schemes through their motor responses to stimuli in their environment.
By the end of this stage infants should have developed:
- Intentionality: Actions are no longer mere neonatal reflexes.
- Object Permanence: Infants demonstrate permanence by continuing to search for objects that
are hidden or out of sight (18-24 months old).
2.
Preoperational:
Symbolic Thought: the ability to think symbolically - Semiotic function.
a. Deferred imitation: The ability to imitate a model that is no longer there.
b. Symbolic play: Pretend play; make believe. An excellent example of assimilation.
Characteristics of the Preoperational Stage:
- Irreversibility: Their operations cannot be reversed.
- Egocentrism: Tendency to judge things from their point of view.
- Centration: Limit of perspective to one aspect of a complicated stimulus.
3.
Concrete Operations:
. They understand the nature of physical realities.
a. Conservation: change in appearance does not mean a change in quantity.
Identity
If nothing is added or taken
away nothing changes.
Negation
For an action, there is another
that undoes its effect .
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Compensation
Changes in one aspect
explains the observed change
in another.
b. Seriation and Classification: Series: 1, 2, 3,
4.
Categories: positive digits
Formal Operations:
a. Hypothetico-Deductive Reasoning: The ability to reason from hypotheses. Become
capable of forming theories and hypotheses.
b. Propositional Logic: The ability to determine the truth or fallacy of propositions that may
or may not have a basis in experience.
c. Ability to Consider What-Ifs: The ability to go beyond the content of the logic they are
evaluating.
Current Status to the Piagetian Theory:
 Piagetians tend to underestimate the capabilities of infants and young children.
 Children’s performance seems to be influenced by a number of factors other than
cognitive development.
 As many as 40-60% of young adults and adolescents do not achieve formal operational
thought.
 Development is so gradual that two people within the same stage may be very different
in terms of their cognitive development. Movement from one stage to the other occurs
gradually.
. THE COMPETENCE/PERFORMANCE RELATIONSHIP.
1.3
VYGOTSKY’S SOCIO-HISTORICAL THEORY
Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky: (1896 – 1934) was a Soviet psychologist, the founder of a theory of
human cultural and bio-social development commonly referred to as cultural-historical
psychology, and leader of the Vygotsky Circle.
Vygotsky's main work was in developmental psychology, and he proposed a theory of the
development of higher cognitive functions in children that saw reasoning as emerging through
practical activity in a social environment. Vygotsky also posited a concept of the Zone of Proximal
Development, often understood to refer to the way in which the acquisition of new knowledge is
dependent on previous learning, as well as the availability of instruction.
During his lifetime Vygotsky's theories were controversial within the Soviet Union. In the 1930s
Vygotsky's ideas were introduced in the West where they remained virtually unknown until the
1970s when they became a central component of the development of new paradigms in
developmental and educational psychology.
. The major emphasis of Vygotsky’s theory is the importance of understanding cognitive
development in terms of the social and cultural contexts in which it occurs.
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A. The Role of Cultural Tools in Cognitive Development
. Each environment provides cultural tools to support or mediate students’ activities:
Technical Tools:
Cultural tools that are used to act on objects
A hammer and a nail
Psychological Tools:
Cultural tools that guide or mediate thoughts
and behaviors
Language; mnemonics
B. Development of Higher Order Mental Functions
. A function is a mental process such as attention, memory, perception, and thinking. These
functions appear first in their elementary form which develop naturally in all living creatures and
are not voluntary.
. Higher mental functions are unique to humans, are under the control of the person, social in
origin, and are assisted by psychological tools.
C. General Genetic Law of Cultural Development
. Any higher form of mental functions exists first on the social level. Internalization is the process
by which an individual acquires the social higher order mental functions. – Egocentric speech
which gradually becomes inner speech.
. Zone of proximal development
DISTANCE
What a learner can accomplish
while working with a more skilled
adult or a peer
What a learner can
accomplish independently
in a domain
D. The Historical Process of Cultural Development
. Vygotsky believed that theory in human development must account for the changes that occur
at four historical levels:
Phylogeny
The development of
the species
The history of
humans since
becoming a species
Ontogeny
The history of
individual children
The history of
development of
psychological
processes during an
experimental task
. This is of vital importance to the teacher in the classroom:
- First: Ontogeny is important: Two students fail the course. Each for a different reason. Thus, two
different remedies.
- Second: Individual development in terms of the individual’s cultural or social group.
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Educational Implications of the Vygotskian Theory
A.
The Zone of Proximal Development and Strategy and Skill Learning
1. Tutoring within the zone of proximal development: In a tutorial approach, learners
interact with more skilled peers or adults to perform a task that those learners cannot
perform independently. This guidance is referred to as scaffolding. Scaffolding is a threestep process:
Adult or skilled learner assumes most of the responsibility for completing the task.
Adult or skilled learner share the responsibility for completing the task with the
student gradually relinquishing control to the learner.
Learner takes full responsibility for completing the task.
2. Collaborative problem solving within the zone of proximal development: In this case, the
idea of scaffolding by a more skilled learner is replaced by the ideas of two learners
collaborating together to accomplish a goal.
B.
The Zone of Proximal Development and Assessment
To assess learning potential more accurately, Vygotskians suggested that standardized ability
tests should be supplemented with measures of a learner’s zone of proximal development. In this
case, evaluators would scaffold learners as they attempted problems that were slightly above the
assessed independence level.
1.4
A.
GESTALT – WERTHEIMER, KOFKA, AND KOHLER
Gestalt Psychology
Gestalt psychology, founded by Max Wertheimer, was to some extent a rebellion against
molecularism. In fact, the word Gestalt means a unified or meaningful whole, which was to be the
focus of psychological study instead. It had its roots in a number of older philosophers and
psychologists:
Ernst Mach (1838-1916) introduced the concepts of space forms and time forms. We see a square
as a square, whether it is large or small, red or blue, in outline or technicolor... This is space
form. Likewise, we hear a melody as recognizable, even if we alter the key in such a way that
none of the notes are the same.
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Christian von Ehrenfels (1859-1932), is the actual originator of the term Gestalt as the Gestalt
psychologists were to use it. In 1890, in fact, he wrote a book called On Gestalt Qualities. One
of his students was none other than Max Wertheimer.
Oswald Külpe (1862-1915) is best known for the idea of imageless thoughts. He showed that
some mental activities, such as judgments and doubts, could occur without images.
Max Wertheimer (1880 – 1943). Max studied law for more than two years, but decided he
preferred philosophy. He left to study in Berlin, where he took classes from Stumpf, then got his
doctoral degree (summa cum laude) from Külpe and the University of Würzburg in 1904.
In 1910, he went to the University of Frankfurt’s Psychological Institute. While on vacation that
same year, he became interested in the perceptions he experienced on a train. While stopped at
the station, he bought a toy stroboscope -- a spinning drum with slots to look through and pictures
on the inside, sort of a primitive movie machine or sophisticated flip book. His first subjects were
two younger assistants, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka. They would become his lifelong
partners.
He published his seminal paper in 1912: "Experimental Studies of the Perception of
Movement." In 1933, he moved to the United States to escape the troubles in Germany. While
there, he wrote his best known book, Productive Thinking, which was published posthumously
by his son, Michael Wertheimer, a successful psychologist in his own right.
Wolfgang Köhler (1887 – 1967) received his PhD in 1908 from the University of Berlin. He then
became an assistant at the Psychological Institute in Frankfurt, where he met and worked with
Max Wertheimer. In 1922, he became the chair and director of the psychology lab at the University
of Berlin, where he stayed until 1935. During that time, in 1929, he wrote Gestalt Psychology. In
1935, he moved to the U.S.
Kurt Koffka (1886 – 1941 received his PhD from the University of Berlin in 1909, and, just like
Köhler, became an assistant at Frankfurt. In 1911, he moved to the University of Giessen, where
he taught till 1927. While there, he wrote Growth of the Mind: An Introduction to Child
Psychology (1921). In 1922, he wrote an article for Psychological Bulletin which introduced the
Gestalt program to readers in the U.S. In 1927, he left for the U.S. to teach at Smith College. He
published Principles of Gestalt Psychology in 1935.
B.
The Theory
Gestalt psychology is based on the observation that we often experience things that are not a part
of our simple sensations. The original observation was Wertheimer’s, when he noted that we
perceive motion where there is nothing more than a rapid sequence of individual sensory
events. This is what he saw in the toy stroboscope he bought at the Frankfurt train station, and
what he saw in his laboratory when he experimented with lights flashing in rapid succession (like
the Christmas lights that appear to course around the tree, or the fancy neon signs in Las Vegas
that seem to move). The effect is called apparent motion, and it is actually the basic principle of
motion pictures.
If we see what is not there, what is it that we are seeing? You could call it an illusion, but it’s not
a hallucination. Wertheimer explained that you are seeing an effect of the whole event, not
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contained in the sum of the parts. We see a coursing string of lights, even though only one light
lights at a time, because the whole event contains relationships among the individual lights that
we experience as well.
Furthermore, say the Gestalt psychologists, we are built to experience the structured whole as well as
the individual sensations. And not only do we have the ability to do so, we have a strong tendency
to do so. We even add structure to events which do not have gestalt structural qualities.
C.
The Gestalt Laws
In perception, there are many organizing principles called gestalt laws.
1.
The most general version is called the law of pragnanz. Pragnanz is German for pregnant,
but in the sense of pregnant with meaning, rather than pregnant with child. This law says that
we are innately driven to experience things in as good a gestalt as possible. “Good” can mean
many things here, such a regular, orderly, simplicity, symmetry, and so on, which then refer to
specific gestalt laws. For example, a set of dots outlining the shape of a star is likely to be
perceived as a star, not as a set of dots. We tend to complete the figure, make it the way it “should”
be, finish it. Like we somehow manage to see this as a "B"...
2.
The law of closure says that, if something is missing in an otherwise complete figure, we
will tend to add it. A triangle, for example, with a small part of its edge missing, will still be seen
as a triangle. We will “close” the gap.
3.
The law of similarity says that we will tend to group similar items together, to see them
as forming a gestalt, within a larger form. Here is a simple typographic example:
OXXXXXXXXXX
XOXXXXXXXXX
XXOXXXXXXXX
XXXOXXXXXXX
XXXXOXXXXXX
XXXXXOXXXXX
XXXXXXOXXXX
XXXXXXXOXXX
XXXXXXXXOXX
XXXXXXXXXOX
XXXXXXXXXXO
It is just natural for us to see the o’s as a line within a field of x’s.
4.
Another law is the law of proximity. Things that are close together as seen as belonging
together. For example...
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**************
**************
**************
You are much more likely to see three lines of close-together *’s than 14 vertical collections of 3
*’s each.
5.
[
Next, there’s the law of symmetry. Take a look at this example:
][
][
]
Despite the pressure of proximity to group the brackets nearest each other together, symmetry
overwhelms our perception and makes us see them as pairs of symmetrical brackets.
6.
Another law is the law of continuity. When we can see a line, for example, as continuing
through another line, rather than stopping and starting, we will do so, as in this example, which
we see as composed of two lines, not as a combination of two angles...:
7.
Figure-ground is another Gestalt psychology principle. It was first introduced by the
Danish phenomenologist Edgar Rubin (1886-1951). The classic example is this one...
Basically, we seem to have an innate tendency to perceive one aspect of an event as the figure or
fore-ground and the other as the ground or back-ground. There is only one image here, and yet,
by changing nothing but our attitude, we can see two different things. It doesn’t even seem to be
possible to see them both at the same time!
But the gestalt principles are by no means restricted to perception -- that’s just where they were
first noticed. Take, for example, memory. That too seems to work by these laws. If you see an
irregular saw-tooth figure, it is likely that your memory will straighten it out for you a bit. Or, if
you experience something that doesn’t quite make sense to you, you will tend to remember it as
having meaning that may not have been there. A good example is dreams: Watch yourself the
next time you tell someone a dream and see if you don’t notice yourself modifying the dream a
little to force it to make sense!
Learning was something the Gestalt psychologists were particularly interested in. One thing they
noticed right away is that we often learn, not the literal things in front of us, but
the relations between them. For example, chickens can be made to peck at the lighter of two gray
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swatches. When they are then presented with another two swatches, one of which is the lighter
of the two preceding swatches, and the other a swatch that is even lighter, they will peck not at
the one they pecked at before, but at the lighter one! Even something as stupid as a chicken
“understands” the idea of relative lightness and darkness.
Gestalt theory is well known for its concept of insight learning. People tend to misunderstand
what is being suggested here: They are not so much talking about flashes of intuition, but rather
solving a problem by means of the recognition of a gestalt or organizing principle. The most
famous example of insight learning involved a chimp named Sultan. He was presented with
many different practical problems (most involving getting a hard-to-reach banana). When, for
example, he had been allowed to play with sticks that could be put together like a fishing pole,
he appeared to consider in a very human fashion the situation of the out-of-reach banana
thoughtfully -- and then rather suddenly jump up, assemble the poles, and reach the banana.
A similar example involved a five year old girl, presented with a geometry problem way over her
head: How do you figure the area of a parallelogram? She considered, then excitedly asked for
a pair of scissors. She cut off a triangle from one end, and moved it around to the other side,
turning the parallelogram into a simple rectangle. Wertheimer called this productive thinking.
The idea behind both of these examples, and much of the gestalt explanation of things, is that the
world of our experiencing is meaningfully organized, to one degree or another. When we learn
or solve problems, we are essentially recognizing meaning that is there, in the experience, for the
“dis-covering.”
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Isomorphism suggests that there is some clear similarity in the gestalt patterning of stimuli and
of the activity in the brain while we are perceiving the stimuli. There is a “map” of the experience
with the same structural order as the experience itself, albeit “constructed” of very different
materials! We are still waiting to see what an experience “looks” like in an experiencing brain.
1.5
BRUNER’S COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY
Jerome Seymour Bruner: (October 1, 1915) is a psychologist who has made significant
contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational
psychology, as well as to history and to the general philosophy of education. Bruner is currently
a senior research fellow at the New York University School of Law. He received a B.A. in 1937
from Duke University and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1941.
Jerome Bruner received a bachelor's degree in psychology, in 1937 from Duke University. He
went on to earn a master's degree in psychology in 1939 and then a doctorate in psychology in
1941 from Harvard University.
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In 1939, Bruner published his first psychological article studying the effect of thymus extract on
the sexual behavior of the female rat.
During World War II, Bruner served on the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme
Headquarters of the Allied Expeditory Force Europe committee under Eisenhower, researching
social psychological phenomena. In 1945, Bruner returned to Harvard as a psychology professor
and was heavily involved in research relating to cognitive psychology and educational
psychology. In 1970, Bruner left Harvard to teach at the University of Oxford in England. He
returned to the United States in 1980 to continue his research in developmental psychology. In
1991, Bruner joined the faculty at New York University, where he still teaches students today. As
an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, he studies how psychology affects legal practice.
Throughout his career, Bruner has been awarded honorary doctorates from Yale and Columbia,
as well as colleges and universities in such locations as Sorbonne, Berlin, and Rome, and is a
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
A.
Knowledge Representation
According to Bruner, an important factor in the development of an intelligent mind is the ability
to represent knowledge. Knowledge representations allow learners to store rules or
generalizations that can organize and explain recurrent themes in their experience. Bruner cites
three systems of representations which develop in sequence. By the time people reach
adolescence, they typically have all three representation systems.
Representation
1. Enactive
2. Iconic
3. Symbolic
Description
Example
Remarks
Representation
through The series of actions for Children may know how to
motor responses
tying a knot
do things that they cannot
explain verbally
The use of mental images to Reporting knowledge of Verbal messages are better
represent knowledge
circles by a mental picture of understood
when
circles
represented in the form of
pictures
The use of arbitrary symbol A student represents a rule Very important in the
systems such as language or such as” I need to invert and development of logic
mathematical notation
multiply when I divide
fractions”
B. Culture and Cognitive Development
Similar to Vygotsky’s cultural tools, Bruner has amplifiers. He believed that cultural systems
assist cognitive development by helping learners acquire the amplification systems of the culture.
Amplifiers of action
Hammers & shovels
Amplifiers of senses
Microscopes & pictures
Amplifiers of thought
Logic systems & language
One particular form of an instructional interaction that interested Bruner is the interaction
between adults and children in problem-solving situations. Adults guide or support learners as
they solve problems together – scaffolding.
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C.
Bruner and Classroom Instruction
Discovery Learning: Knowledge students discover for themselves is the most unique personal
knowledge they have. – OWNERSHIP. “Discovery, like surprise, favors the well-prepared mind.”
Bruner also supported scaffolded discovery learning.
D. Curriculum Design:
1. The Psychology of a Subject Matter: This includes:
a. The key organizing principles or ideas of a discipline.
b. The characteristic way in which practitioners of that discipline solve problems.
The importance of organizing a curriculum around the psychology of the subject matter is that it
tends to replace breadth of coverage with depth of coverage, an idea referred to as less is more.
2. Spiral Curriculum: Periodically revisiting key organizing ideas in a discipline throughout a
curriculum. Each time an idea is revisited, it is done at a higher level of complexity.
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1.6
CONSTRUCTIVISM
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