Southern Philippines College

Julio Pacana St., Licuan, Cagayan de Oro City

A PROJECT PRESENTED TO THE

COLLEGE OF EDUCATION

IN PROJECT FULLFILMENT OF
Principles of Teaching II

Submitted to:

DR. MANUELITO L. ROJAS

Submitted by:

Roy L. Agbon
BSED-II
Theories of Cognitive Development
Psychology of Childhood

Summary
Age-related changes in Children ’s knowledge and thinking
Piaget’s Theory
There are distinct stages of cognitive development,
with the following properties.
Qualitative change: Children of different ages (and at different stages) think in different
ways.
Broad applicability: The type of thinking at each stage pervades topic and content
areas.
Brief transitions: Transitio ns to higher stages of thinking are not necessarily
continuous.
Invariant sequence: The sequences of stages are stable for all people through all time.
Stages are not skipped. Three processes work together from birth to account for
continuities:
Assimilation: People tran slate incoming information into a form they can understand.
Accommodation: People adapt current knowledge structures in response to new
experience.
Equilibration: People balance assimilation and accommodation to create stable
understanding. Nature and nurture interact to produce cognitive development.
Adaptation: Childre n respond to the demands of the environment in ways that meet
their own goals.
Organization: Children integrate particular obse rvations into a body of coherent
knowledge.
Overview of Piaget ’s Stages
1. Sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years)
Knowledge tied to sensory and motor abilities
Fails tests of the object concept
2. Preoperational stage (2 to 7 years)
Objects and events are represented by mental symbols
Fails tests of conservation
3. Concrete operational stage (7 to 12 years)
Children can reason logically about concrete objects and events.
Fails to engage in systematic hypothesis testing
4. Formal operational stage (12 years and up)
Children can reason abstractly and hypothetically.
Insight
My insight in Piaget’s Theory is that there are changes and stages in children’s
cognitive development based on the children’s age. Children of different ages (and at
different stages) think in different ways . Transitions to higher stages of thinking are
not necessarily continuous. Children understand the conservation concept when they
understand that changing the appearance or arrangement of objects does not change
their key properties. Children’s thinking is affected by social interactions , Infants and
young children have and use a lot of innate mental machinery for complex abstract
thought. Children’s thinking is a computational process , Children’s thinking is not as
consistent as the stages suggest. Piaget very greatly underes timated children’s
abilities. Children construct their own knowledge from experimenting on the world.
Children learn many things on their own without the intervention of older children or
adults. Children are intrinsically motivated to learn and do not need rewards from
adults to motivate learning. Piaget generally underestimated preschoolers’ cognitive
abilities by using needlessly misleading tasks , even using Piaget’s tasks, changes in
performance were not stage -like. Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky portrayed
children as social beings intertwined with other people who were eager to help them
learn and gain skills. Some of children’s abilities are culturally-dependent, some
cognitive change originates in social interaction . Children are both learners and
teachers. Vygotsky, unlike Piaget, thought that abstract thinking could not develop on
its own, but required language and W estern schooling.

Reference’s;

Preoperational child is a myth (Gelman, 1978)

Class inclusions are represented by preschoolers
(Markman, 1990)
Conservation errors are almost universally
conversational errors (Mehler & Bever, 1968;
McGarrigle & Donaldson, 1974 )
Cognitive Principles and Guidelines for Instruction

Summary
He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a
rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast. Leonardo da Vinci quoted
in [Fripp 2000]
W hen we present instruction to our students, we always build in ou r
assumptions: our expectations as to what students will do with whatever we g ive
them, our assumptions about the nature of learning, and our assumptions about the
goals of our particular ins truction. Sometimes those assumptions are explicit, but
more frequent ly they are unstated and rarely discussed. Some p ertain to choices we
get to make, such as t he goals of instruction. Others are assumptions about the
nature and response of a physical sys tem—the student—and these are places where
we can be right or wrong about how the system works. It is clear, from all the
different things that people can do t hat require memory, that memory is a highly
complex and structured phenomenon. Fortunat ely, we only need to understand a
small part of the structure to get started in learning more about how to teach physics
effectively. There are a few critical ideas that are relevant for u s. First, memory can
be divided into two primary components: working memory and long -term memory.
W orking memory is fast but limited. It can only handle a small number of data blocks,
and the content tends to fade after a few seconds. Long-term memory can hold a
huge amount of information —facts, data, and rules for how to use and process
them—and the information can be maintained for long periods (for years or even
decades). Most information in lon g-term memory is not immediatel y accessible. Using
information from long-term memory requires that it be activated (brought into working
memory).Activation of information in long -term memory is produ ctive (created on the
spot from small, stable parts) and associative (activating an eleme nt leads to
activation of other elements).
W orking memory appears to be the part of our memory t hat we use for problem
solving, processing information, and maintaining information in o ur consciousness.
Cognitive and neuroscientists have studied working memory rather extensively. Not
only is it very important to understand working memory in order to understa nd
thinking, but working memory can be studied with direct, carefully controlled
experiments [Baddeley 1998]. For our concerns here, two characteristics are
particularly important:
W orking memory is limited.
W orking memory contains distinct verbal and visual parts.
W orking memory is limited. The first critical point about wo rking memory for us
to consider is that working memory can only handle a fairly smal l number of “units” or
“chunks” at one time. Early experiments [Miller 1956] su ggested that the number was
“7 (-+) 2”. W e cannot understand that number until we ask, “W hat do they mean b y a
unit?” Miller’s experimen ts involved strings of numbers, letters, or words. But cl early
people can construct very large arguments! If I had to write out everything that is
contained in the proof of a theorem in string theory, it would take hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of pages. The key, of course, is that we don’t (write out everything, that
is). Our knowledge is combined into hierarchies .
Insight

W orking memory has a limited size, but it can work with chunks that can have
considerable structure.
W orking memory does not function independently of long -term memory. The
interpretation and understanding of items in working memory depend on their
presence and associations in long -term memory.
The effective number of chunks a piece of information tak es up in working
memory depends on the individual’s knowledge and mental state ( i.e., whether the
knowledge has been activated) of blocks (or chunks) that we can work with even with
our limited short -term processing ability. Long-term memory is involved in essentially
all of our cognitive experiences—everything from recognizing familiar objects to
making sense of what we read. An important result is that recall from long-term
memory is productive and context dependent. Long-term memory is productive. W hat
we mean here by “prod uctive” is that memory response is active. Information is
brought out of long -term storage into working memory and processed. In most cases,
the response is not to simply find a ma tch to an existing bit of data, but to build a
response by using stored information in new and pro ductive ways. This construction
is an active, but in most cases, an automatic and unconsc ious process. Think of
language learning by a small child as a prototypical example. Chi ldren create their
own grammars from what they hear.7 Another model of the recall proc ess is computer
code. A result, such as sin(0.23 rad), may be stored as tables of data from which one
can interpolate or as strings of code that upon execution will produce the appropriat e
data. Analogs of both methods appear to be used in the brain. Long-term memory is
context dependent. Long-term memory is structured and associative. The key to
understanding student reasoning is understand ing the patterns of association that
activate kno wledge elements. In general, a pattern of as sociation of knowledge
elements is sometimes referred to as a knowledge structure. A pattern that tends to
activate together with a high probability in a variety of contexts is often referred to as
a schema (plural, schemas or schemata) [Bartlett 1932] [Rumelhart 1975]. W hen a
schema is robust and reasonably coherent I d escribe it with the term mental model.
Since scientific models tend to be organized around the existen ce, properties, and
interaction of objects, when a mental model has this character I r efer to it as a
physical model. A physical model may or may not agree with our curr ent community
consensus view of physics. By “strong” or “weak” we simply mean a high or low
probability of activating a link to other related (and appropriate) items in a student’s
schema.

Reference’s;

In the theory of communications, this leads to the “given -new principle” in

conversation [Clark 1975] and writing [Redish J 1993].
See [Baddeley 1998] and [Smith 19 99] and the references therein.
The evidence for this is also strong from neurophysiological lesion studies [Shallice
1988].
I learned this from reading the paper of Halloun and Hestenes [Halloun 1985a] that
also in spired Mazur—see chapter 1.
ology of Childhood