Activity #3
Cognitive Development in the Classroom
OBJECTIVE
This activity is aimed at highlighting Piaget's theory of cognitive development as it relates to the classroom. Understanding cognitive development is central to understanding the complexities of teaching and learning at any age, grade or stage.
BACKGROUND and KEY CONCEPTS
Piaget believed that human beings constantly strive to make sense of the world and to master their environment. Individuals gain knowledge through direct experience with objects, people, and ideas.
Vygotsky
also theories about how people learn, but he emphasizes the importance of social interaction and believes that learning cannot occur without it. Experiences provide the raw materials for thinking. Communicating with others makes students use, test, and sometimes change their thinking.
Schemas
are the building blocks of thinking. Schemas may be very small and specific (recognizing a square), or they may be larger and more general (using a map in a new city, or having an idea of what school is like).
Piaget believed that people pass through four stages as they develop:
-In the sensorimotor stage, infants explore the world through their senses and motor activity. They move toward
object permanence
and
goal-directed
activities.
-In the preoperational stage,
symbolic thinking
and
logical operations
begin.
-In the stage of concrete operations, children can think logically about tangible situations and can demonstrate
conservation,
reversibility,
classification, and
seriation.
-In the formal operations stage, people begin to show the ability to perform
hypotheticodeductive reasoning,
coordinate a set of variables, and
imagine other worlds.
At every level of cognitive development, students must he able to incorporate information into their own schemas. Students should act, manipulate, observe, and then talk and/or write about what they have experienced
DIRECTED OBSERVATION/REFLECTIONS
1. Based upon Piaget’s theory, which of the four cognitive stages of development was represented in the classroom you observed? It is possible that student groups may span more than one stage.
2. What behaviors did you observe that led you to identify the stage/s you did?
3. How did the teacher get the students to act on the material they were learning, so they
could create their own meaning for the information?
4. Why does a teacher’s knowledge of cognitive stages matter in terms of the sort of material presented to students and their ability to grasp it, and be intellectually enhanced by it?
Write your responses to these items, along with your reflections about cognitive
development in the group you observed, on a page you insert directly after this one.