Chapter 7 COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT: PIAGET’S THEORY AND VYGOTSKY’S SOCIOCULTURAL VIEWPOINT

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Chapter 7 COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT PIAGETS THEORY
AND VYGOTSKYS SOCIOCULTURAL VIEWPOINT
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PIAGETS THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• Genetic epistemology experimental study of the
  origin of knowledge
• What is intelligence?
• A basic life function that helps an organism
  adapt to the environment
• Cognitive equilibrium balance between thought
  processes and the environment
• Constructivist approach child constructs
  knowledge

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PIAGETS THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• Gaining Knowledge Schemes and Processes
• Schemes mental patterns (thought/action)
• Organization combine existing schemes into
  new/complex schemes
• Adaptation adjustment to environment
• Assimilation new information into existing
  schemes
• Accommodation modify existing schemes for new
  information

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• Table 7.1 A small sample of cognitive growth from
  Piagets perspective

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PIAGETS STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• Invariant developmental sequence
• Sequencing fixed
• Individual differences entering/emerging stages

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PIAGETS STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• The Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to 2 years)
• Coordinate sensory inputs and motor skills
• Transition from being reflexive to reflective
• Development of Problem-Solving Abilities
• Reflex activity (birth 1 month)
• Primary circular reactions (1-4 months)
• first motor habits, repetitive

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PIAGETS STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• Secondary circular reactions
• (4-8 months)
• Repetitive actions with objects beyond the body
• Coordination of secondary reactions
• (8-12 months)
• Coordinate 2 or more actions to achieve an
  objective (intentional)

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PIAGETS STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• Tertiary circular reactions -12-18 months
• Active experimentation, trial error
• Symbolic problem solving -18-24 months
• Inner (mental) experimentation

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PIAGETS STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• Development of Imitation
• Novel responses by 8-12 months of age
• Deferred imitation 18-24 months
• Research now shows 6-month-olds are capable of
  deferred imitation

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PIAGETS STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• Development of Object Permanence
• Objects continue to exist when they are no longer
  visible/detectable
• Appears by 8-12 months of age
• A-not-B error search in the last place found,
  not where it was last seen
• Complete by 18-24 months

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PIAGETS STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• Challenges to Piaget Account
• Neo-nativism
• Infants are born with substantial innate
  knowledge
• Require less time/experience to be demonstrated
• Young children seem to possess some object
  permanence, memory

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• Table 7.2 Summary of Piagets account of
  sensorimotor development

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PIAGETS STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• Challenges to Piagets Approach
• Theory theories
• Combination of neo-nativist and Piagetian
  perspective
• Infants are prepared at birth to make sense of
  some information
• Beyond this, Piagets constructivist approach is
  generally accurate

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PIAGETS STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• The Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)
• Symbolic function / representational insight
• One thing represents another
• Language
• Pretend (symbolic) play developmentally a
  positive activity
• New views on symbolism
• Dual representation think about an object in 2
  ways at one time (3 years)

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PIAGETS STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• Deficits in preoperational thinking
• Animism
• Attribute life/life like qualities to inanimate
  objects
• Egocentrism
• View world from own perspective, trouble
  recognizing others point of view

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• Figure 7.2 Piagets three-mountain problem.
  Young preoperational children are egocentric.
  They cannot easily assume another persons
  perspective and often say that another child
  viewing the mountain from a different vantage
  point sees exactly what they see from their own
  location.

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PIAGETS STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• Deficits in preoperational thinking
• Appearance/reality distinction
• Cannot distinguish between the two
• Dual encoding
• Representing an object in more than one way at a
  time

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• Figure 7.3 Maynard the cat, without and with a
  dog mask. Three-year-olds who met Maynard before
  his change in appearance nonetheless believed
  that he had become a dog.

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PIAGETS STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• Deficits in preoperational thinking
• Lack of conservation do not realize properties
  of objects do not change just because appearance
  does
• Lack of decentration concentrate on more than
  one aspect of a problem at the same time
• Lack of reversibility mentally undo an action

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• Figure 7.4 Some common tests of the childs
  ability to conserve.

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• Figure 7.5 Reversibility is an important
  cognitive operation that develops during middle
  childhood.

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PIAGETS STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• Did Piaget Underestimate the Preoperational
  Child?
• New evidence on egocentrism
• Piagets tasks were too complex
• Another look at childrens reasoning
• Animism not routine among 3-year-olds
• Can preoperational children conserve?
• Can be trained at 4 years (identity training)

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PIAGETS STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• The Development Theory of Mind (TOM)
• Belief-desire reasoning
• Understand behavior is based on
• What an individual knows or believes
• What they want or desire
• Develops after preschool age
• False-belief task desire, not belief
• Based on lack of cognitive inhibition
• Improves with interaction with siblings

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PIAGETS STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• The Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years)
• Cognitive operations
• Internal mental activity to modify symbols to
  reach a logical conclusion
• Conservation capable of
• Decentering
• Reversibility

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• Table 7.3 A comparison of preoperational and
  concrete operational thought

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PIAGETS STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• Relational logic capable of
• Mental seriation
• Transitivity
• Horizontal decalage different levels of
  understanding that seem to require same mental
  operations
• Based on complexity
• Limited to real or tangible aspects of experience

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• Figure 7.7 Childrens performance on a simple
  seriation task. If asked to arrange a series of
  sticks from shortest to longest, preoperational
  children often line up one end of the sticks and
  create an incomplete ordering (a) or order them
  so the top of each successive stick extends
  higher than the preceding stick (b). Concrete
  operators, by contrast, can use the inverse
  cognitive operations greater than (gt) and less
  than (lt) to quickly make successive comparisons
  and create a correct serial ordering.

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PIAGETS STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• The Formal Operational Stage (11-12 )
• Hypothetico-deductive reasoning
• Ability to generate hypotheses and use deductive
  reasoning (general to specific)
• Inductive reasoning
• Going from specific observations to
  generalizations

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PIAGETS STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• Personal and Social Implications of Formal
  Thought
• Thinking about what is possible in life
• Stable identity
• Understanding of others perspectives
• Questioning others
• Thinking of how the world ought to be

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PIAGETS STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• Does Everyone Reach Formal Operations?
• Early Piaget Yes, at least some signs by 15-18
• Other researchers No. Lack of education
• Later Piaget Yes, but only on problems that are
  either interesting or important
• Seem to be more adolescents at this level than 30
  years ago

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• Figure 7.8 Expertise and formal operations.
  College students show the greatest command of
  formal-operational thought in the subject area
  most related to their major. ADAPTED FROM DE LISI
  STAUDT, 1980.

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AN EVALUATION OF PIAGETS THEORY

• Piagets Contributions
• Founded cognitive development
• Stated children construct their knowledge
• First attempt to explain development
• Reasonably accurate overview of how children of
  different ages think
• Major influence in social and emotional
  development, and education
• Influenced future research

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AN EVALUATION OF PIAGETS THEORY

• Challenges to Piaget
• Piaget failed to distinguish competence from
  performance
• Does cognitive development really occur in
  stages?
• Little evidence of broad stages
• Does Piaget explain cognitive development?
  more of an description
• Little attention to social/cultural influences

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VYGOTSKYS SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

• The Role of Culture in Development
• Ontogenetic development development of an
  individual over his or her lifetime
• Microgenetic development change over relatively
  brief periods of time
• Phylogenetic development changes over
  evolutionary time
• Sociohistorical development changes in ones
  culture

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VYGOTSKYS SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

• Tools of Intellectual Adaptation
• Born with elementary mental functions (attention,
  memory)
• Culture transforms these into higher mental
  functions
• Culture specific tools allow the use of the basic
  functions more adaptively (language, pencils)

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• Table 7.4 Chinese and English number words from 1
  to 20. The more systematic Chinese numbering
  system follows a base-ten logic (i.e., 11
  translating as ten one shi yee) requiring
  less rote memorization, which may explain why
  Chinese-speaking children learn to count to 20
  earlier than English-speaking children.

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VYGOTSKYS SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

• The Social Origins of Early Cognitive
  Competencies
• Many discoveries active learners make occur in
  collaborative dialogue with a tutor
• The Zone of Proximal Development
• Difference between what a learner can do
  independently and what can be done with guidance

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VYGOTSKYS SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

• Scaffolding tendency to tailor support to a
  learner near the limit of capability
• Guided participation/apprenticeship
• May be very formal and context dependent
• May occur in day-to-day activities

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• Figure 7.9 Some functions of shared remembering
  in childrens memory development. Source
  Gauvin, M (2001). The social context of cognitive
  development. New York Guilford, p. 211.

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VYGOTSKYS SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

• Working in the Zone of Proximal Development in
  Different Cultures
• Cultures where adults and children are
  segregated, learning is in schools
• Cultures where adults and children are together
  most of the day, learning is through real life
  observation
• Verbal versus nonverbal emphasis of instruction

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VYGOTSKYS SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

• Playing in the Zone of Proximal Development
• More likely to engage in symbolic play when
  others are present
• Cooperative social play of preschoolers is
  related to later understanding of others feeling
  and beliefs

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VYGOTSKYS SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

• Implications for Education
• Active, not passive learning
• Assess what is known to estimate capabilities
• Guided participations structured by teachers who
  would gradually turn over more of activity to
  students
• Cooperative learning exercises help each other
  very effective!

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VYGOTSKYS SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

• The Role of Language in Cognitive Development
• Primary method of passing modes of thinking to
  children
• Becomes important tool of intellectual adaptation

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VYGOTSKYS SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

• Piagets Theory of Language/Thought
• Egocentric speech
• Self-directed utterances
• Reflected ongoing mental activity
• Shifted to communicative speech with age
• Little role in cognitive development

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VYGOTSKYS SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

• Vygotskys Theory of Language/Thought
• Egocentric is really an illustration of
  transition from prelinguistic to verbal reasoning
• Private speech communicative speech for self
• Serves as a cognitive self-guidance system does
  not disappear, becomes inner speech

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VYGOTSKYS SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

• Which viewpoint should be endorsed?
• Vygotsky
• Social speech gives rise to private speech
• More common with difficult tasks
• Self-instruction improves performance
• Does tend to turn into inner speech

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VYGOTSKYS SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

• Vygotsky in Perspective Summary
• Cognitive development involves
• Dialogues with skilled partners within the zone
  of proximal development
• Incorporation of what tutors say into what they
  say to themselves
• Expect wide variations in development across
  cultures

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VYGOTSKYS SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

• Vygotsky in Perspective Evaluation
• Not yet received intense scrutiny
• Verbal guided participation may be less adaptive
  in some instances than others
• Collaborative problem solving can undermine
  performance
• More a perspective, not a theory with as many
  testable hypotheses as Piaget

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• Table 7.5 Comparing Vygotskys and Piagets
  theories of cognitive development