DVT - Cognitive Development Lesson

 

Cognitive Development

Parents often have different rules for children at different ages, mostly dependent on the mental abilities of the child at those different ages. At age three, most children aren't capable of making safe choices when crossing the street or cooking food, but by the time they're teens, they reason differently and are more able to take care of themselves.

One pioneer in the understanding of these cognitive changes in children was a man named Jean Piaget. While working with intelligence tests, Piaget noted that children of a similar age all tended to give the same wrong answer to certain questions. Through research, Piaget found that as children's understanding of the world develops their brains change and they are exposed to new experiences.

Piaget created a developmental theory called Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development:

Piaget's theory begins with his hypothesis that children and adults have different schemas for the world around them. A schema is a concept or framework that organizes and interprets the information we gather through experience. When we try to understand new or different objects we apply them to schemas that we already have. Incorporating new experiences into a preexisting schema is called assimilation. When we change our schema to fit the characteristics of a new object we are using what is called accommodation. Accommodation and assimilation produce intellectual growth.

According to Piaget, a child's development depends on the maturation of the nervous system and the experiences that they have had. He believed that children progress through four distinct phases.

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