COGNITIVE VS.

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
Cognitive Development ~ development
of perception, attention, language,
problem solving, reasoning, memory, and
conceptual understanding

Social Development ~ development of

emotions, personality, family and peer
relationships, self-understanding,
aggression, and moral understanding.
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
 Cognition : related to or involving
higher mental processes ( thinking,
reasoning, memory).
 Development: is a progressive series
of orderly and coherent changes in
human beings.
 Cognitive development: The process
by which a child’s understanding of
the world changes as a function of
age and experience.
JEAN PIAGET (1896-1980)

 Swiss psychologist, well known for his work

on cognitive development.
 Worked on children’s thinking at different
ages
to understand their cognitive development.
 Piaget mainly used naturalistic
observation method of research.
 Believed that peoples move through stages
of development that allow them to think in
new, more complex ways.
PIAGET’S THEORY
 Child as scientist
1. construct their own knowledge from
experimenting on the world.
2. learn many things on their own
without the intervention of older
children or adults.
3. are intrinsically motivated to learn
and do not need rewards from adults
to motivate learning
A CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH
 Jean Piaget’s theory remains
the standard against which
all other theories are judged
 Often labeled constructivist
because it depicts children as
constructing knowledge for
themselves
 Children are seen as
 Active
 Learning many important
lessons on their own 5
 Intrinsically motivated to learn
THE THREE MOUNTAIN TASK
 Developed by Jean Piaget.
 Aimed to test whether a children's
thinking was egocentric.
- Indicates in which stage the child is.
PIAGET’S STAGE THEORY

formal operations

concrete operations

pre-operational

sensori-motor

0-2 2-7 7-12 12+

 KEY CONCEPTS IN PIAGET’S
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT THEORY

 Piaget believed that children naturally

attempt to understand what they do not
know.
 This Knowledge is gathered gradually during
active involvement in real-life experiences.
 Piaget introduced different ideas on what is
happening during cognitive development .
 Schemas are mental representations or concepts.
 A schema describes both the mental and physical
actions involved in understanding and knowing.
 Schemas are categories of knowledge that help
us to interpret and understand the world.
 In Piaget's view, a schema includes both a
category of knowledge and the process of
obtaining that knowledge. As experiences
happen, this new information is used to modify,
add to, or change previously existing schemas.
 Is a term Piaget used for children mentally
organizing what they perceive in their
environment.
 Piaget’s term for what most of us would
call learning.
 When new information or experiences
(schemas ) occur, children must adapt to
include this information in their thinking.
 If this new information does not fit with
what children already know, a state of
imbalance occurs.
 The process of taking in new information and adding it
to what the child already knows, to the already existing
schemas.
 Somewhat subjective since pre- existing beliefs
will be used to modify new experiences

 Is adjusting or modifying what is already known

to fit the new information.
 The process is about

 how people organize their thoughts and

 Develop intellectual structures

ON A BLANK SHEET OF PAPER TRY
TO DRAW THIS SAME FIGURE.
Is the process of maintaining balance
between applying previous knowledge
(assimilation) and modifying behavior
to interpret new knowledge
(accommodation ).
Helps to explain how children move
from one stage of thought into the
next as they progress through the
stages of cognitive development.
STAGES OF COGNITIVE
DEVELOPMENT

 Sensorimotor stage (birth-2)

 Preoperational stage (2-7)

 Concrete operations stage (7-11)

 Formal operations stage (12+)

TERMS
Stage: Developmental period during
which a child demonstrates “new”
behaviors and capabilities
Operation: mental processes such as
perception, memory, imagination,
retrospective (hindsight). Ability to solve a
problem without physically doing it.
SENSORIMOTOR STAGE
 Itlasts from birth to 2 years of old.
 the infant uses senses and motor
abilities to understand the world
meaning by touching, sucking, chewing
and shaking.
 between 1 to 4 month, primary
circular reaction, the child use an
action of their own.
E.g. the baby may suck his her thumb.
That feels good. So he or she sucks some
more.
 between 4 to 12 month, the infant turns
to secondary circular reaction which
involves an act that extends to the
environment.
E.g. babies become ticklish, although they
must be aware that someone else is
tickling them or it won’t work.
 they begin to develop object
permanence, the ability to recognize
that just because you cant see something
doesn’t mean it’s gone or the awareness
that object and people continue to exist
even if they are out of sight.
 between 12 to 18 month, tertiary
circular reaction children's begin a
period of trial and error experimentation
with constant variation for
E.g. a child may try out different sounds or
actions as a way of getting attention for
care givers.
 around one and half, the child is clearly
developing mental representation, the
ability to hold image in their mind.
E.g. A child who lost his toy will begin an
active search for the missing object.
 PREOPERATIONAL STAGE
 it lasts 2 to 7 years old.
 the most important development during
this stage is the use of language.
 representation of symbols. A drawing, a
written word or a spoken word can be
understood.
 There is clear understanding of past and
future
E.g. if a child is crying for his mother, and
you say “ mommy will be home soon” it will
now tend to stop crying.
Egocentrism in Language
 thechild during this stage is egocentric , a way
of thinking in which the child view the world
entirely from his/her own perspective.
E.g. a 3 years old playing a hiding games
frequently hide with there faces against a
wall and covering there eyes and it seems to
them that if they cannot see anyone, nobody
else can see them too.
 young children’s center on one aspect of any
problems or communication at a time.
E.g. they may say things like “ I don’t live
in Ethiopia; I live In Hawassa”
preoperational children's have not
yet developed the ability to
understand the principle of
conservatives
which is the knowledge that
quantity is unrelated to the
arrangement and physical
appearance of objects.
CONCRETE OPERATIONAL STAGE
 Understands world through logical
thinking and categories.
 Loss of egocentric thoughts; how other
people might think and feel.
 Children begin to reason logically about
concrete objects and events in their world.
 Manipulation of the symbol they used to
represent in a logical way.
 Better understanding of mental
operations.
• By the age six or seven, most children develop
the ability conservation, serration,
classification decentering, transitivity and
reversibility.
 Conservation is the idea that the quality
remains the same despite changes in
appearance. This quality has seven
elements: number, length, mass, weight,
liquid, area, and volume.

 Tobe more technical, conservation is the

ability to understand that redistributing
material doesn't affect the seven elements
like number, length and volume.
By seven or eight years old, children develop
conservation of substances: if we take a ball of
clay and roll it into a long thin rod, the child
knows that there is still the same amount of
clay.
If you rolled it all back into a single ball, it
would look quite the same as it did. This is a
feature known as reversibility.
By nine or ten, the last of the conservation
tests is mastered: conservation of area
Conservation Concept
FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGE
 12 years- Adolescence /Adulthood
 During this time, people develop the ability to
think about abstract concepts and logically test
hypothesis.
 The concrete operation has hard time applying
the logical ability to non-concrete(abstract)
events.
 This stage involves using logical operations
and using them in the abstract (algebra and
science) rather than the concrete.
 Thisstage allows one to investigate a
problem in a careful and systematic fashion.

 According to Piaget, this stage is not

universal.
• Hypothetical thinking such as, truth,
justice and morality
• Systematic reasoning like scientific
method
The final stage of Piaget's theory
involves an increase in logic, the ability
to use deductive reasoning, and an
understanding of abstract ideas.
 At this point, people become capable of
seeing multiple potential solutions to
problems and think more scientifically
about the world around them.
 The ability to systematically plan for the
future and reason about hypothetical
situations are also critical abilities that
emerge during this stage.
 WHERE PIAGET LEFT US ?
 Piaget’s theory underestimates the
competence of children.
 Piaget’s theory establishes age norms
disconfirmed by the data.
 He characterized development negatively.
 His theory is an extreme competence
theory.
 Piaget’s ignored the influence of parents
and other social factors on our
development
CRITICISMS OF PIAGET’S THEORY
Sociocultural approach:
 Children’s thinking is affected by social
interactions
Core Knowledge approach:
 Infants and young children have and use a
lot of innate mental machinery for complex
abstract thought.
Information processing approach:
 Children’s thinking is a computational
process
 Children’s thinking is not as consistent as
the stages suggest.
OTHER THEORIES ON COGNITIVE
DEVELOPMENT

Socio cultural theory

Core knowledge theory

Information processing
theory
LEV VYGOTSKY
SOCIO-
CULTURAL
THEORY
 SOCIOCULTURAL THEORY
 Children as product of their cultures.

 Cognitive development occurs in interpersonal

contact (interaction with parents, siblings,
teachers, and playmates).

 Whereas Piaget depicted children as trying to

understand the world on their own, Vygotsky
portrayed them as social beings intertwined with
other people who were eager to help them learn
and gain skills.
Language is the foundation of all
higher cognitive processes
private speech

Inner speech

Development is continuous, not

occurring in stages
knowledge is socially constructed
 HOW COGNITIVE CHANGE OCCURS
 Guided participation: knowledgeable individuals
guide learning
 Social scaffolding: More competent people provide
temporary frameworks that lead children to higher-
order thinking.
 Intersubjectivity: Shared communication

 Joint attention: Infants and social

partners focus on common referent.
 Social referencing: Children look to social
partners for guidance about how to respond
to unfamiliar events.
THE VISUAL CLIFF AND SOCIAL
REFERENCING
If Mom looks fearful,
child won’t cross.

If Mom looks happy,

child will cross.

Child uses emotional cues from social partner to

interpret new things!
 PIAGET VS.
VYGOTSKY
 Childas a  Children
scientists learning in a
trying to
understand the social context
world largely through
on their own. interaction with
others.
 Similarities
 Differences in
among
children children due to
context.
INFORMATION PROCESSING
THEORY
 Child as a computer.
 Concerned with the development of
domain-general processes such as
memory, learning, and problem
solving skills.
 provides detailed descriptions of the
steps involved in thinking (like a
computer program)
THREE MAJOR PRINCIPLES:

 Thinking is information processing.

 Change is produced by a process of

continuous self-modification.

 The steps of change can be precisely

specified by identifying mechanisms
of change.
CORE-KNOWLEDGE THEORY
 Child as Theorist
o Children have innate cognitive
capabilities that are the product of
human evolutionary processes.
o Focus on human universals (e.g.
language, social cognition, biological
categorization, using numbers)
o Children are much more advanced in
their thinking than Piaget suggested.
Principles of core-knowledge
theories:
 Children have innate cognitive
capabilities
 Children form informal theories to
help them organize related information
(naïve physics, psychology, and
biology)
 Focus on areas (such as understanding
people) that have been important
throughout human history
 BOTTOM LINE…
WHY SO MANY DIFFERENT THEORIES?
o Post-Piagetian theories deal with different
aspects of development.
 We
incorporate insights from all theories to
help us understand children development
in different ways and in different settings.
 sometimes conflict between approaches,
sometimes greater conflict within an
approach.
 Most researchers view different
approaches as complementary.
 No Grand Unified Theory (yet)