Cognitive Development Theory


Basic Cognitive Concepts:
1. Schema - the cognitive structure by which individuals intellectually adapt to and organize their environment.
2. Assimilation - the process of fitting new experience into an existing created schema.
3. Accommodation - the process of creating a new schema
4. Equilibrium - achieving proper balance between assimilation and accommodation.


Stages of Cognitive Development:
1. Sensorimotor (birth to 2 years)
Object permanence – ability attained in this stage where he knows that an object still exists even when out of sight


2. Preoperational Stage ( 2 to 7 years)
Symbolic Function – the ability to represent objects and events.
Egocentrism – the tendency of a child to only see his point of view and assume that everyone else also has his same point of view.
Centration – the tendency of the child to only focus on one thing or event and exclude other aspects.
Lack of Conservation – the inability to realize that some things remain unchanged despite looking different.
Irreversibility – Pre-operational children still have the inability to reverse their thinking.
Animism – the tendency of the child to attribute human like traits to inanimate objects.
Realism - – believing that psychological events, such as dreams, are real
Transductive reasoning – reasoning that is neither inductive nor deductive, reasoning that appears to be from particular to particular.


3. Concrete Operational Stage (7 to 11 years).
Decentering
– the ability of the child to perceive the different features of objects and situations.
Reversibility – the ability of the child to follow that certain operations can be done in reverse.
Conservation – the ability to know that certain properties of objects like number, mass, volume or area do not change even if there is a change in appearance.
Seriation – the ability to arrange things in a series based on one dimension such as weight, volume, size, etc.

4. Formal Operational Stage (11 years and beyond)
Hypothetical Reasoning – ability to come up with different hypothesis about a problem and weigh data to make judgement.
Analogical Reasoning – ability to perceive the relationship in one instance and use that relationship to narrow down possible answers in similar problems.
Deductive Reasoning – ability to think logically by applying a general rule to a particular situation.