Child Psychology
Chapter 8: Cognitive Development: Piaget and Vygotsky
Cognition is the term used to describe the mental activity through which human beings acquire, remember, and learn to use knowledge. Cognition includes many mental processes, such as perception, attention, learning, memory, and reasoning.
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development • Piaget made two important observations: o He noticed that children of the same ages tended to get the same answers wrong o He noticed that the errors of children of a particular age differed in systematic ways from those of older or younger children • To study children’s behavior, Piaget relied on observation and interviews o He would give the children a problem and ask them to interpret how they plan to solve the problem • Piaget’s theory proposed that over development, the child acquires new ways of thinking and understanding the world
Piaget’s Main Tenet: The Child Actively Seeks Knowledge • Constructivist View o Children play an active role in acquiring knowledge. Unlike behaviorism, in which the child passively waits for info (or stimuli) from their environments, Piaget argues that children actively seek our info o In addition, child encounter new info, they actively try to fit it in with the knowledge, they already possess. In other words, children construct their own understanding o The goal of this view is to discover how children at different points of their development think about how objects work and are related to one another • Cognitive Organization o Piaget believed that during development, a child’s knowledge of the world gets organized into more complex cognitive structures ▪ Cognitive structure- not a phys entity in the brain, but an organized group of interrelated memories, ideas, and strategies that the child uses in trying to understand a situation ▪ Schemas- a concept; an
Cognition is the term used to describe the mental activity through which human beings acquire, remember, and learn to use knowledge. Cognition includes many mental processes, such as perception, attention, learning, memory, and reasoning.
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development • Piaget made two important observations: o He noticed that children of the same ages tended to get the same answers wrong o He noticed that the errors of children of a particular age differed in systematic ways from those of older or younger children • To study children’s behavior, Piaget relied on observation and interviews o He would give the children a problem and ask them to interpret how they plan to solve the problem • Piaget’s theory proposed that over development, the child acquires new ways of thinking and understanding the world
Piaget’s Main Tenet: The Child Actively Seeks Knowledge • Constructivist View o Children play an active role in acquiring knowledge. Unlike behaviorism, in which the child passively waits for info (or stimuli) from their environments, Piaget argues that children actively seek our info o In addition, child encounter new info, they actively try to fit it in with the knowledge, they already possess. In other words, children construct their own understanding o The goal of this view is to discover how children at different points of their development think about how objects work and are related to one another • Cognitive Organization o Piaget believed that during development, a child’s knowledge of the world gets organized into more complex cognitive structures ▪ Cognitive structure- not a phys entity in the brain, but an organized group of interrelated memories, ideas, and strategies that the child uses in trying to understand a situation ▪ Schemas- a concept; an