(Review of) Cognitive Development

1
(Review of) Cognitive Development

• Perspectives of development
• Piaget and intellectual development
• Vygotsky and sociocultural theory
• Information processing
• Cognitive development and the Web

2
Perspectives

• Origins of development
• Nature-nurture?
• Sequence of development
• Continuous-discontinuous?
• Similarity of development
• Normative-individual differences?
• Universality of development
• Universal-context/cultural effects?

3
Piagetian theory

• Biological theory of intellectual development
• Intelligence is ability of organism to adapt to
  its environment
• Description of stages of development
• Sensorymotor
• Preoperational
• Concrete operational
• Formal operational
• Methods of inquiry
• Observation
• Clinical interview

4
Theory of Development
Through the process of adaptation,
behavioral/cognitive schema get (re)organized.
Assimilation
5
Stages of Development

• Sensorimotor (0-2 years of age)
• Coordination of sensory and motor systems
• Transition from reflexive to reflective behaviour
• Preoperational (2-7 years of age)
• Development of representation
• Development of symbolic thought
• Preconceptual substage (2-4)
• precausal
• egocentric
• appearance/
• reality

6
Stages of Development

• Preoperational continued
• Intuitive substage (4-7)
• Centered on one perceptual property or another
• Leads to
• conservation failures
• irreversible thought
• inability to categorize hierarchically

7
Stages of Development

• Concrete Operational (7-11 years of age)
• Concrete operations allow child to think
  logically about real objects/events
• Focus on multiple properties
• Reversible thought
• Categorization
• Concrete

8
Stages of Development

• Formal Operational (11-15 years of age)
• Hypothetico-deductive reasoning allows adolescent
  to think rationally and systematically about
  abstract concepts
• Abstract representation
• Abstract reasoning
• Adolescent egocentrism (imaginary audience)

9
Piagetian Theory and the Web

• What can 6-9 year olds do/not do on the Web?
• preop - con op
• What can 10-12 year olds do/not do on the Web?
• con op - formal op
• What can 13-16 year olds do/not do on the Web?
• formal op

10
Vygotskys Sociocultural Perspective

• Learning and development are interrelated
• Biological maturation
• Learning in a sociocultural context
• Development lags behind learning
• Zone of proximal development
• Scaffolding

11
Vygotsky and the Web

• What can 6-9 year olds do/not do on the Web?
• context
• scaffolding
• What can 10-12 year olds do/not do on the Web?
• context
• scaffolding
• What can 13-16 year olds do/not do on the Web?
• context
• scaffolding

12
Information Processing

• Emphasis on the cognitive system
• What develops?
• What does the system look like at different
  points in time?

13
Elaborative Rehearsal
Retrieval
Maintenance rehearsal
14
What develops?

• Attention
• Maintenance rehearsal
• Chunking
• Elaborative rehearsal
• Contents of LTM
• Retrieval

15
Information Processing and the Web

• What can 6-9 year olds do/not do on the Web?
• What can 10-12 year olds do/not do on the Web?
• What can 13-16 year olds do/not do on the Web?