Psych 201: Chapter 2 Notes: Cognitive and Language Development
Development: the pattern of biological, cognitive, and socioemotional changes that continue through the lifespan.
Biological processes and genetic inheritance: Development of the brain, gains in height and weight, changes in motor skills, and puberty’s own hormonal changes.
Cognitive processes: changes in the child’s thinking, etc.
Socioemotional processes: changes in the child’s relationships….
Processes are intertwined. For Example, a child’s smile response to parent’s touch depends on all processes for different reasons.
Infancy : birth to 18-24 months.
Activities include: language development , symbolic thought, sensorimotor coordination, and social thinking.
Time of extreme dependence on adults.
Early Childhood: end of infancy to 5 years
Middle and Late Childhood: 6 to 11 years
Children master fundamental skills
Self Control increases and they interact with the social world
Adolescence
Development and Education
Developmentally appropriate teaching practices: teaching at a level that is not too difficult and stressful.
‘Splintered” development: may be uneven across boards.
John Piaget (cognitive constructivism/developmental psychology)
-How do we learn and grow and change?
-Combined biology and philosophy > genetic epistemology
-Continuous adaptation
-Quest for balance (stasis) among transformation and change.
-“equilibration” – process by which new experience or information is either..
1. associated into existing knowledge
2. existing knowledge structures are modified to accommodate new experience or information
“assimilation”= existing frames of reference.
Schema is flexible enough to absorb new experience and information.
-subtraction is inverse of addition
-capitalism and socialism are two different ways to organize society
-planet-solar system-galaxy-clusters-universe-universes in time…
“accommodation”
Sometimes existing frames of reference need to be tweaked/modified/restructured
New information does not fit neatly into old frameworks
Entities –counting, integers, rational, irrational, imaginary
-Assimilation and accommodation work together in tandem to bring about equilibration
Developmental Stages- Piaget
Sensorimotor-birth to 2 years- reliance on senses; innate reflexes
Pre-operations-2-7 years: language, pretended play, egocentric, fooled by mass, length
Concrete Operations -7-11 years: logical, symbolic, sort and classify, concept formation.
Formal Operations- 11 to adult: abstract thought, multiple perspectives.
Cognition unfolds in a sequence of four stages.
Each stage is age-related and consists of distinctive ways of thinking
Each stage is discontinuous
Concrete Operational Stage: Conservation, Classification, Seriation, Transitivity
Proximal Development
ZPD
Vygotsky-social constructivism
-Much of what we learn, we learn from others
-Psychological “tools”, such as notations, signs, numbers and words….
Educational applications
-learning in cooperative soc...
