Middle Childhood Cognitive Development

Middle Childhood Cognitive Development Piaget’s Theory  Preoperational Thought      formation of stable concepts emergence of mental reasoning egocentrism construction of magical belief systems Concrete Operational Thought (6-12)     allow child to do mentally what was done physically before Conservation Decentration Reversibility 1 A Change in the Logic of Thinking  Piaget: Concrete Operations     “Concrete” because these mental actions are directed toward concrete objects in everyday activities Distinguished from preoperations by their double-sidedness Results in more flexible and organized thinking Can think thru actions, & mentally combine, separate, order, & transform objects & actions Conservation  Understanding that some properties of an object remain the same even when its appearance is altered  Mental operations    Identity Compensation Reversibility 2 Piaget: Conservation of Quantity Piaget: Conservation of Number Children below the age of 6 or 7 rarely display conservation of number, and will say that the elongated row has more. An understanding of logical necessity—that “it has to be that way”—is Piaget’s key criterion of a stagelike change in thinking. Causes of Dev Change in Cog   Piaget believed that all cognitive growth is driven by assimilation and accommodation Other, more recent, explanations    Memory capacity Accumulating knowledge Development of cognitive strategies 3 Influence of Memory on Cognition  Factor 1: Increased speed & capacity of memory processing     Memory span Retrieval speed Speed and capacity are interrelated… Factor 2: Expanded knowledge base  Retention improves because child has more prior info Influence of Memory on Cognition  Factor 3: Acquisition of improved memory strategies     Rehearsal Memory Organization Elaboration Factor 4: Emergence of metamemory  ability to think about one’s own memory processes Additional Cognitive Bridging Strategies  Attention  Planning  Metacognition 4 Increased Classification Skills  Piaget: Set of brown beads and white beads “Are there more brown beads or more beads?”    Children 4-6 cannot attend to the subclass and the superordinate class at the same time; In middle childhood gain ability to understand the hierarchical structure of categories and can categorize objects according to multiple criteria Begin to collect stamps, baseball cards, etc. Is conservation acquisition universal? Children in non-industrial societies lag a year or more behind Piaget’s norms, and in some cases never acquire it, even as adults Is conservation acquisition universal?   Performance improves, however, with training, and when interviewed in their native language and with content with which they are more familiar Thus, conservation is a universal cognitive achievement of middle childhood, as Piaget assumed it was, when these conditions are taken into account 5