Child Development From Infancy to Adolescence. Laura E. Levine

      Jean Piaget. Based on his detailed observation of children, Piaget described them as “little scientists” who actively explore their environment and learn from those experiences.

      Patrick Grehan/ Contributor via Getty Images

      Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was a Swiss scientist who studied children’s thinking using what is called the clinical method. He encouraged children to talk freely and learned about their thoughts from a detailed analysis of what they said (Piaget, 1955).

      Piaget believed we are constantly adapting to our environment by organizing the world in ways we can understand. The units we use to organize our understanding are called schemas. They consist of a concept and all the associations to that concept that we have developed through our past experiences. For example, we all have a schema for gender, which contains all the expectations and associations we activate when we see women and men.

      Schema: A cognitive framework that places concepts, objects or experiences into categories or groups of associations.

      According to Piaget, adaptation consists of two processes: assimilation and accommodation. In assimilation, we take new information and put it into an existing schema, whether it really fits there or not. Take the example of a little boy who goes to the zoo and sees an elephant for the first time. He turns to his mother and says, “Look, it’s a big doggy with two tails.” This child does not have a schema that helps him make sense of an animal with both a trunk and a tail, so he tries to fit this new experience into one of his existing concepts. Will he always think the elephant is a strange dog? Of course not, and this is where the process of accommodation comes in. As his mother points out the unique features of an elephant, the child accommodates this new information by creating a new schema, one for elephants. In Piaget’s theory, a process he called equilibration is the constant seesaw between assimilation and accommodation. As we have new experiences and learn new things about the world, we assimilate new information into existing schemas, but if the new information cannot be assimilated, it throws us into a state of disequilibrium. We then need to change our schemas to accommodate the information, so we can return to a steady state of equilibrium.

      Assimilation: Fitting new experiences into existing mental schemas.

      Accommodation: Changing mental schemas so they fit new experiences.

      Equilibration: An attempt to resolve uncertainty to return to a comfortable cognitive state.

      Like Freud and Erikson, Piaget believed children change in qualitative ways from one age period to the next. The stages he described were based on the way he believed children thought about and understood the world at each age level. Piaget believed children are not just less knowledgeable than adults; rather, they think in qualitatively different ways at each developmental stage. We describe these stages in detail when we examine Piaget’s theory in more depth in each of the chapters on cognitive development.

      Modern Applications of Piaget’s Theory

      Criticism of Piaget’s theory has focused largely on the methodology he used and his conclusions about when children enter each of the stages in his theory, but his greatest legacy may lie in his concept of constructivism (Newcombe, 2011). Remember that in Chapter 1 we talked about the issue of whether children are passive recipients of environmental influences or actively participate in their own development. Piaget believed that children are active learners, always working to construct their understanding of the world. Many teachers use Piaget’s ideas as the basis for their teaching style (Hinde & Perry, 2007), and research in this area is ongoing. For example, Kamii and Rummelsburg (2008) gave first-grade students math-related activities to explore (such as pick-up sticks and group-based arithmetic games) instead of traditional math assignments (such as, “What is 2 + 2?”). At the end of the year, these students scored higher on tests of mental arithmetic and logical reasoning than did similar students who had received teacher-directed, pencil-and-paper instruction. Active engagement in these activities encouraged the children to think about numbers rather than just repeating what they were told (Kamii, 2014).

      Constructivism: The idea that humans actively construct their understanding of the world rather than passively receiving knowledge.

      T/F #4

      Young children learn math more effectively from games such as pick-up sticks than from working out written arithmetic problems. True

      Piaget also emphasized that physical, bodily activities during infancy were the basis for development of thought. This idea has appeared in more recent years as part of the concept of embodied cognition (Kontra, Goldin-Meadow, & Beilock, 2012). In embodied cognition thought and behavior are the outcome of a conversation among multiple “speakers,” including the brain, activity of the body, and environmental stimuli and effects (Marshall, 2016). If you think of a conversation you have had with a group of friends, generally there is not one person who controls the conversation. Instead, each person shapes the topics, direction, and flow of the interaction. In similar fashion, embodied cognition models a complex interaction of many factors that all contribute to the flow and development of human thought and behavior.

      Embodied cognition: The concept that cognition is a product of a complex interaction of the brain, bodily activity, and environmental experience.

      Lev Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory

      Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934), a Russian psychologist, had somewhat different ideas about cognitive development, emphasizing the importance of the social world and of culture in promoting cognitive growth. According to Vygotsky (1986), learning first takes place in the interaction between people; then the individual internalizes that learning and it becomes a part of his own independent thinking.

      Vygotsky was more interested in what a child could become than in how the child currently functioned. He believed that looking at what the child is capable of learning in interaction with a skilled helper is a better indicator of his level of cognitive development than just testing what he already knows. He developed the concept of the zone of proximal development, defined as “the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers” (Vygotsky, 1978a, p. 86).

      Zone of proximal development: According to Vygotsky, this is what a child cannot do independently but can do with help from someone more skilled or knowledgeable.

      Proximal refers to being near or close. A good teacher must first determine what children already know and then challenges them to learn something near enough to what they already know so that they will be able to make sense of it, a process called scaffolding. A scaffold is a structure put around a building to allow people to work on it. In Vygotsky’s concept, adults help the “construction” of the child’s understanding by providing guidance and support (the scaffolding). Just as the scaffold comes down when a building is completed, so too the adult can step back when the child fully understands. For example, a 2-year-old may need you to hold her hand on the handle of a jack-in-the-box but by age 3 she is likely to be able to do it herself. Your input is no longer needed, and your “scaffolding” can come down. You will learn more about these concepts in Chapter