HUMAN DEVELOPMENT & LEARNING

Cognitive Development According to Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky

AS humans grow and develop from infancy to adulthood , they pick up knowledge and information on how to understand and do things . How they process this knowledge according to the different stages of their growth is the focus of studies of cognitive psychology

Lexically , cognition is defined as "the process of knowing and , more precisely , the process of being aware , knowing , thinking , learning and judging . The study of cognition touches on the fields of psychology linguistics , computer science , neuroscience , mathematics , ethology and

philosophy "Cognitive Psychology " 2004 ) The development part refers to the reasoning and understanding ability an individual develops , as he grows older

There are many theories as to how and when humans develop their cognition . Two of the more known theorists as Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky

In his observation of an organism 's development , biologist Dr . Jean Piaget came up with his development model that divides and identifies the stages of cognitive development in human beings . He began with the accidental discoveries and reflexes made by infants to the more curious explorations and imagination of childhood and culminating into the final stage of the capability for abstract thinking of adults

Put simply , Piaget outlined the development of an individual 's ability to grasp concepts both from within and the environment from simple to the more complex and put them to practical use in adapting to daily living

The first Sensory-Motor Stage that starts from infancy to the age of 2 , is where infants assimilate or discover physical schemas or actions In an interview with Richard Evans in 1973 , Piaget defines schemes as instruments of action . But they are generalizing instruments we could think of them as practical concepts (Evans , 1973 ,

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Accommodation is the application of a simple action . The most common example of this is how a baby assimilates the how to ' of sucking , and thus can adapt to the sucking of a bottle big or small . In the Pre-Operational Stage , there is a concept called animism ' where a child views anything that moves as living . At age 4-6 , anything with activity is alive ' The age between 6-8 they become more discriminating and limit life to things that move . Here , a child thinks a feather floats or a leaf falls because it is alive . By age 8 and onwards , they become smarter and limit this thinking to things that move on their own . This concept comes to an end when children consider only plants and animals to be living

The Concrete Operational Stage that starts from elementary up to early adolescence sees logic and operational thinking come into play Systematic analysis is yet immature but the individual starts grasping relations between objects and processes that are mathematical in nature The thought flow becomes more organized and appreciation of cause and effect is more apparent

The final stage is the Formal Operational Stage from age 11 to 15 Here , the individual is fully capable of logic and systematic...