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C
Cognitive/intellectual development
Synonymous with: Cognition, thinking, problem solving
| Words or phrases linked to this concept | What it means | Why it matters |
| Age-related stages | That children learn differently according to their ages | Largely discounted although evident in our school system |
| Schemas | Repeated patterns of behaviour | Help to interpret childrenā s behaviour in terms of learning |
| Adaptation | Piagetās word for learning, and meaning the ability to adjust to new information and experiences | Explains how we adapt to changes |
| Equilibration | Another of Piagetās terms and one difficult to explain | Piaget believed this allowed children to move from one stage to another |
| Intermental | Means it happens between people | Vygotsky talked of this in terms of language acquisition |
| Intramental | Takes place within the learner | Vygotksy talking again of language acquisition that moves from intermental to intramental |
| Internalisation | One of Vygotskyās key terms meaning something that goes in and takes place in the mind or head and is not evident | When this happens the child is able to deal with ideas and concepts without having to have the object or event at hand |
| Enactive stage | Brunerās first stage of representation where the child uses movement and the senses | The beginning of being able to use tools to represent ideas and feelings |
| Iconic stage | The second stage of representation using images and pictures | The use of a wider range of cultural tools |
| Symbolic stage | The third stage using symbols | The last and most abstract stage |
This is an enormous area of study because those of us involved in the education and care of young children place huge emphasis on how successfully we manage to help children reach particular milestones or targets in their learning. In many places this takes precedence over all other aspects of development ā sometimes at some cost to the individual child. We will start again by looking briefly at what Piaget thought about cognition. You may know that he believed that children proceed in their thinking through clear stages and these stages are age-related. Each stage is characterised by different types of thinking, which he referred to as mental structures or operations. In short he believed that the thinking of a toddler was different from that of a school child, which was different from that of an adolescent. This view has been much disputed. Piaget also observed that young children often engage in repeated patterns of behaviour that look random but are in fact serious. They are attempts to classify and categorise as the child makes sense of the environment and the objects in it. He called these schemas and they are prevalent during infancy. They later become elaborated and internalised ā although this was not a term Piaget would have used. A central theme in Piagetās thinking was that of adaptation, which was the term he used for making sense of the world. Adaptation comes about through the two processes of assimilation, where children take new information into their existing schemas, and accommodation, where children change or adapt their schemas to fit new information. He talked, too, of equilibration, which implies a balance between assimilation and accommodation, which he believed children arrive at much later as their thinking becomes more complex. That is very much a perspective on his view of cognition in a nutshell.
For Vygotsky cognition was more gradual and nuanced and, of course, social. All learning takes place in a context. The childās understanding of the world and the objects, events and people in it is mediated by more expert others and through the use of cultural tools. Concepts or thoughts are not fixed but change and develop over time. Vygotsky talked of everyday concepts ā the ideas children develop through their everyday lives around things such as eating and cooking, birth and death, sickness and health, going on holiday, staying at home, working in the fields or on the street corners. These are the spontaneous concepts that children come to understand through everyday life. He also talked of scientific concepts, which are the sorts of things children learn more formally and usually at school. These are primarily to do with more abstract concepts such as long and short or dark and light. For Vygotsky spoken language was the cultural tool through which most learning is mediated. He said that in the early stages this is intermental, which means that it takes place between people involved in the same activity and then becomes intramental, which means that it takes place within the child and this happens through internalisation.
Memory plays a huge part in cognitive development and it is memory that allows knowledge to be internalised. The internalisation of knowledge allows for the learner to be conscious of what is known and to be able to reflect and consider.
Three additional factors relate to cognitive development and these are imitation, questioning and elaboration. Children often start off by copying or imitation. They then internalise what they have done and this perhaps raises a question in their minds and allows them to elaborate or transform what they have done or thought.
For Bruner there was also a suggestion of cognitive development moving through stages although these were not age related. First there was an enactive stage where the child is thinking whilst manipulating objects. Is this learning through play? The second stage is the iconic stage where the child is able to make a mental image of something and no longer needs the physical object to be present. Here memory clearly comes into play. The final stage is the symbolic stage where the child is able to use abstract ideas to represent the world. The child uses signs and symbols to allow her to think critically.
Case study/examples
Shirley Brice Heath (1983) tracked what a small child called Vilgot did in coming to understand what a book is and what it is used for. His initial actions and interactions depended to a large extent on imitation.
ā¢ At the age of 14 months he came across a book in his collection of toys, opened it, turned the pages and made sounds that were very like talk. In doing this he demonstrated an awareness of how adults sometimes make speech sounds as they turn pages.
ā¢ At 22 months he responded to an adultās suggestion that they should read a book and chose a large novel. The adult sat with him on the floor, turned the pages and made up a story. The child listened, looked at the pages every so often and was quite satisfied with the whole event. Here his actions indicated that he knew that a book carried a story which he could listen to.
ā¢ Four months later he picked one of his own books and handed it to his grandmother. She could not read without her glasses so she started telling the story from memory. Vilgot stopped her and instructed her to read it properly. At that point he knew that there is an invariant pattern to the book. So he was aware of the text itself, what it was and what purpose it served, although he did not yet know the word ātextā.
ā¢ At 30 months he chose a book for an older child and brought it to an adult who offered to read it to him. He turned the pages back and forth and then declined the offer, saying āNo, there is too much text in this bookā. An extraordinary moment indicating that he had understood what the word text meant and made a judgement that too much text meant that the book might be boring for him.
ā¢ Just before his third birthday he asked the adult to write all the names of his family members and some other words using alphabet blocks. Whilst the adult was doing this he picked out and pointed to the letters of his own name, saying āItās in my nameā every time the adult used that letter. His awareness now included a recognition of individual letters.
Children focus their intention on what interests them. That is why play ā the ability to explore in depth the things that interest the child ā is so important. When a child displays an interest in something it is likely that their existing knowledge or understanding about an aspect of the object or situation has been challenged and thus raised some questions in the mind of the child. What do you think Vilgot in the example above might have been interested in? What questions did his interactions around books raise in his mind...
