Question

Give me an Analysis of Cognitive Development Theory (its relation to the individual), and a brief example of the theory (what is it?).
Theorist: Jean Piaget
School: Cognitivism

Answer 1

• The goal of the theory is to explain the mechanisms and processes by which the infant, and then the child, develops into an individual who can reason and think using hypotheses.
• To Piaget, cognitive development was a progressive reorganization of mental processes as a result of biological maturation and environmental experience. A child constructs an understanding of the world around them, then experience discrepancies between what they already know and what they discover in their environment.
• Piaget emphasized the importance of schemas in cognitive development and described how they were developed or acquired. A schema can be defined as a set of linked mental representations of the world, which we use both to understand and to respond to situations. The assumption is that we store these mental representations and apply them when needed.
• For example, a person might have a schema about buying a meal in a restaurant. The schema is a stored form of the pattern of behavior which includes looking at a menu, ordering food, eating it and paying the bill. This is an example of a type of schema called a 'script.' Whenever they are in a restaurant, they retrieve this schema from memory and apply it to the situation.
• Another example, babies have a sucking reflex, which is triggered by something touching the baby's lips. A baby will suck a nipple, a comforter (dummy), or a person's finger. Piaget, therefore, assumed that the baby has a 'sucking schema.'
• Assimilation– Which is using an existing schema to deal with a new object or situation.
• A 2-year-old child sees a man who is bald on top of his head and has long frizzy hair on the sides. To his father’s horror, the toddler shouts “Clown, clown”
• Accommodation– This happens when the existing schema (knowledge) does not work, and needs to be changed to deal with a new object or situation.
• In the “clown” incident, the boy’s father explained to his son that the man was not a clown and that even though his hair was like a clown’s, he wasn’t wearing a funny costume and wasn’t doing silly things to make people laugh.With this new knowledge, the boy was able to change his schema of “clown” and make this idea fit better to a standard concept of “clown”.
• The Sensorimotor Stage-Children not only learn how to perform physical actions such as crawling and walking, they also learn a great deal about language from the people with whom they they interact.
• Preoperational stage-At this stage, kids learn through pretend play but still struggle with logic and taking the point of view of other people. They also often struggle with understanding the idea of constancy.
• For example, a researcher might take a lump of clay, divide it into two equal pieces, and then give a child the choice between two pieces of clay to play with. One piece of clay is rolled into a compact ball while the other is smashed into a flat pancake shape. Since the flat shape looks larger, the preoperational child will likely choose that piece even though the two pieces are exactly the same size.
• Concrete opeartional stage-While thinking becomes much more logical during the concrete operational state, it can also be very rigid. Kids at this point in development tend to struggle with abstract and hypothetical concepts.
• Formal operational stage-The ability to thinking about abstract ideas and situations is the key hallmark of the formal operational stage of cognitive development. The ability to systematically plan for the future and reason about hypothetical situations are also critical abilities that emerge during this stage. Abstract concepts like hope,truth,free will etc. are understood better at this stage.
  
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