Phillip Wood
Background: Cognitive development in children and the impact of this on education
Key Study: Wood et al. (1976)
Application: Cognitive strategy to improve revision or learning
Key Study: Wood et al. (1976)
Application: Cognitive strategy to improve revision or learning
Background: What is cognitive development?
Background: Piaget
Background: Stages of cognitive development
Background: Vygotsky
Background: Bruner
- Cognition is mental processes that take place in our thoughts.
- Processes like memory, attention and perception all make up cognition.
- Cognitive development is the way thinking changes as a individual grows from a baby to an adult.
- Most cognitive development occurs from birth to adolescence.
Background: Piaget
- Piaget was a Swiss biologist who based his ideas on clinical interviews he had with children.
- From his interviews, Piaget notices certain similarities children showed at different ages.
- He developed an idea of ‘schema’, which is a mental framework we use to organise our thoughts.
- A new infant might have identified dogs as being small, having four legs and a tail. This is the infant’s schema for a dog.
- When the infant sees a large dog for the first time, this doesn’t fit into the existing schema the child had before so the child has to add ‘can be small or large’ into their schema.
- This process is called assimilation (taking in new information) and accommodating (changing the schema to fit in this new information).
- If a child sees a cat for the first time, the child must make a new mental framework or schema for what a cat is.
Background: Stages of cognitive development
- Piaget said that children move through stages of cognitive development that allow them to think in a more complex way as they grow up. He suggested that all children go through these stages in the same way, and in the same order.
- Sensorimotor stage (0–2 years) Children gain knowledge by their physical interactions with the world (touch, taste, etc.). The child develops object permanence (realising that objects exist in the world even when they can’t see them). At the end of the stage the child starts acquiring language and is able to use symbols (e.g. a picture of a rabbit) to represent the real object.
- Pre-operational stage (3–6 years) Memory and imagination is now used more often as the child can develop their use of symbols to represent objects. However, the child shows egocentrism – the belief that what a child sees is the same as what everyone else can see.
- Concrete operational stage (7–11 years) The child loses their egocentric view and can start to think logically. The child understands concepts like conservation (the knowledge that you can change an object’s size, without changing it’s mass, e.g. knowing that if you squash a ball of play dough flat, it still has the same amount of play dough in it even though it is flat).
- Formal operational stage (11–adult) People can think logically and abstractly using symbols to represent abstract concepts (e.g.representing the idea of infinity).
Background: Vygotsky
- Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist, claimed that Piaget’s theories ignore the importance of social and cultural factors on a child’s development.
- Vygotsky believed language was a key to enable learning while Piaget did not place as much emphasis on it.
- One of his key ideas, the zone of proximal development (ZPD), suggests that children learn through interaction with a knowledgeable other (i.e. a parent or teacher).
- This carer can guide the child through their cognitive development by providing a stimulating environment.
- Unlike Piaget, who claimed that all children develop in the same way, Vygotsky suggested that children will develop differently depending upon their ‘knowledgeable other’.
- Seemingly supporting this theory, research by Freund (1990) found that when given the task of putting furniture in the correct rooms of a doll house, children who worked with their mother (a more knowledge other) showed more improvement on the task than those who worked alone.
Background: Bruner
- Bruner’s ideas of cognitive development were based on the child’s ability to be creative and think for themselves. Like Vygotsky, Brunner thought language was a key concept in cognitive development. However, like Piaget, Bruner also thought there were stages of cognitive development.
- Enactive stage (0–1 year) The child needs to physically touch and see objects in order to understand them.
- Iconic stage (1–6 years) Objects no longer need to be actually there but can be represented by a picture or icon.
- Symbolic stage (7 years onwards) Words and numbers can represent the object.
- Bruner thought that when teaching children about new concepts, you should guide children through the three stages in order to help them understand it.
- Bruner’s theory emphasised the importance of a stimulating environment to help children be more motivated to learn, while Piaget claimed that nature was more important in a child’s development.
Aim = To investigate how children of different age groups respond to tutoring when they had a problem to solve.
The pyramid task
Results and conclusions
Results were scored in many ways, including by how well the children put together the pyramid.
Key components of scaffolding
Wood et al. identified several key ideas for teachers and tutors to help scaffold effectively:
The pyramid task
- Children were tested individually for between 20 minutes and an hour.
- The children were asked to put together a wooden pyramid made up of 21 blocks that interlocked together.
- The task was designed to be difficult enough that children could understand it, but not complete on their own.
Results and conclusions
Results were scored in many ways, including by how well the children put together the pyramid.
- Two observers (showing 94% agreement) observed how often the tutor needed to provide assistance and give verbal prompts.
- Each age group conducted a similar number of acts but needed the tutors in slightly different ways.
- The youngest children needed the most help, with the tutor having to show them how to complete the task rather than learning by verbal instruction. They were also the group most likely to go off task and needed the tutor to keep them motivated.
- The middle age group needed the tutor to prompt and correct mistakes they made.
- The eldest group needed the least amount of help. These children were the most independent and only really needed the tutor to confirm whether what they were doing was correct.
- Wood et al. concluded that this is the action of ‘scaffolding’, with the study demonstrating how smaller children need more direct support, while older children need less.
Key components of scaffolding
Wood et al. identified several key ideas for teachers and tutors to help scaffold effectively:
- Recruitment – keep learners interested in the task.
- Reduction in degrees of freedom – help the learners eliminate the number of things they can do wrong, leaving them with the solution.
- Direct maintenance – keep learners motivated by providing them with feedback and moving them on when they complete sections.
- Marking critical features – highlight areas that are important to completing the task.
- Frustration control – try to make the task less stressful but try to make sure learners are independent.
- Demonstration – demonstrate a solution and allow the learner to imitate when needed.
Application: Strategies to improve revision or learning
- Using mnemonics to help remember stages, e.g. Piaget’s stages of Senori-motor, Pre-operational, Concrete operational and Formal operational can be remembered using the mnemonic: Smart People Cook Fish.
- Semantic processing also aids memory (giving material a meaning) and one way to do this would be to answer exam questions and then see where each part of your answer links to a revision mind map.
Revision practice question
Assess the ethnocentrism of research into cognitive development. [15]
Sentence starters for this can be found here.
Assess the ethnocentrism of research into cognitive development. [15]
Sentence starters for this can be found here.
