2ND PART THE COGNITIVE-DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY According to Piaget, children are neither driven by undesirable instincts nor molded

by environmental influences. He views children as constructivists - that is, as curious, active explorers who respond to the environment according to their understanding of its essential features. An age-related change that occurs in mental activities such as attending, perceiving, learning, thinking, and remembering. Piaget viewed intelligence as a basic life function that helps the organism adapt to its environment. Intelligence is a form of equilibrium toward which all cognitive structures or schema tend. Intellectual activity is undertaken with one goal in mind: to produce a balanced or harmonious relationship between ones thought processes and the environment. Human beings inherit two important intellectual functions which he called organization and adaptation. Organization refers to the childs tendency to arrange available schemata into coherent systems or bodies of knowledge Is inborn and automatic. Children are constantly rearranging their existing knowledge to prosuce new and more complex mental structures. Goal of organization is to further the process of adaptation.

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The adaptive function (Adaptation) is the childs tendency to adjust to the demands of the environment. o Adaptation occurs in two ways, Assimilation and Accomodation.

Initially proposed by Jean Piaget, the term accommodation refers to part of the adaptation process. The process of accommodation involves altering one's existing schemas, or ideas, as a result of new information or new experiences. New schemas may also be developed during this process. For example, a young child may have an existing schema for dogs. Dogs have four legs, so the child may automatically believe that all animals with four legs are dogs. When the child learns that cats also have four legs, she will undergo a process of accommodation in which her existing schema for dogs will change and she will also develop a new schema for cats. Accommodation does not just take place in children; adults also experience this as well. When experiences introduce new information or information that conflicts with existing schemas, you must accomodate this new learning in order to ensure that what's inside your head conforms to what's outside in the real world.

For example, imagine a young boy raised in a home that presents a stereotyped schema about another social group. When the young man moves away to college, he suddenly finds himself surrounded by people from this group. Through experience and real interactions with members of this group, he realizes that his existing knowledge is completely wrong. This leads to a dramatic change, or accommodation, in his beliefs about members of this social group.

3RD PART The 4 stages of cognitive development: Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to about age 2). In this stage knowledge of the world is limited (but developing). The child learns that he/she is separate from his environment and that aspects of his/her environment continue to exist even though they may be outside the reach of his senses. Behaviors are limited to simple motor responses caused by sensory stimuli. Substages of the Sensorimotor Stage Reflexes (0-1 month)

During this substage, the child understands the environment purely through inborn reflexes such as sucking and looking. Primary Circular Reactions (1-4 months)

This substage involves coordinating sensation and new schemas Secondary Circular Reactions (4-8 months)

During this substage, the child becomes more focused on the world and begins to intentionally repeat an action in order to trigger a response in the environment Coordination of Reactions (8-12 months)

During this substage, the child starts to show clearly intentional actions. The child may also combine schemas in order to achieve a desired effect. Children begin exploring the environment around them and will often imitate the observed behavior of others. The understanding of objects also begins during this time and children begin to recognize certain objects as having specific qualities. Tertiary Circular Reactions (12-18 months)

Children begin a period of trial-and-error experimentation during the fifth substage. Early Representational Thought (18-24 months)

Children begin to develop symbols to represent events or objects in the world in the final sensorimotor substage. During this time, children begin to move towards understanding the world through mental operations rather than purely through actions Object Permanence Is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched. Acquiring the sense of object permanence is one of the infant's most important accomplishments, according to Piaget

Concrete operational stage The concrete operational stage is the third of four stages from Piaget's theory of cognitive development. This stage, which follows the preoperational stage, occurs between the ages of 7 and 11 years [18] and is characterized by the appropriate use of logic. During this stage, a child's thought processes become more mature and "adult like." They start solving problems in a more logical fashion. Abstract, hypothetical thinking has not yet developed, and children can only solve problems that apply to concrete events or objects. Piaget determined that children are able to incorporate inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning involves drawing inferences from observations in order to make a generalization. In contrast, children struggle with deductive reasoning, which involves using a generalized principle in order to try to predict the outcome of an event. Children in this stage commonly experience difficulties with figuring out logic in their heads. For example, a child will understand A>B and B>C, however when asked is A>C, said child might not be able to logically figure the question out in their heads.

Concrete Operations Stage Conservation concept - changing the appearance or arrangement of objects does not change their key properties. Highly abstract thinking and reasoning about hypothetical situations still remains very difficult.

Concrete operational (seven to eleven years)

Mental operations applied to concrete objects and eventslogical thinking

Achieves conservation of number, mass, and weight and masters reversibility Classifies objects according to several features and can order them in series along a single dimension such as size Milestones: The child can now perform true mental operations, represent transformations and static states, and solve conservation, class, inclusion, time, and many other problems. He/she still has difficulty thinking of all possible combinations and transformations.

Concrete Operations: Activities for Middle Childhood In this stage child evolve from prelogical, egocentric thinking to a more rule-regulated type of thinking. Some of the rules of logic include reversibility, identity, and compensation. One activity that a child at this age would enjoy is a cooking activity with their mom or dad. If you get creative you can incorporate several components of Piagets theories into this activity. Baking involves measurements, which would be useful to the concept of conservation. Measuring cups come in all different shapes so it would be fun to measure the exact same measurement using different types of measuring utensils. Also the ingredients could be classified into different categories such as the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients and so on. Numbers and seriating come into play with the distinct steps in the directions. Children around this age group usually really enjoy helping out in the kitchen, especially if its baking something fun like cookies, so it turns into a great learning opportunity. -Give children the chance to manipulate objects and test out ideas -Do simple experiments, with participation of the students Avoid dealing with more than three of four variables at a time -Reading selections should have a limited number of characters -Experiments should have a limited number of steps Students should have practice classifying objects and ideas on complex levels -Have students group sentences on a piece of paper -Use analogies to show the relationship of new material to already acquired knowledge.

Concrete Operations: 7 to 11 Years

In this stage children begin to think logically but remain very concrete in their logic. This stage is centered on rules that now govern the child's logic and thinking - rules such as: reversibility, identity, and compensation. The first, reversibility, emerges when the child realizes that an action could be reversed and certain consequences will follow from doing so. Identity is the idea that for every action or operation there is another operation that leaves it unchanged. For example, adding or taking away nothing produces no change Compensation is a property defined by the logical consequences of combining more than one operation or more than one dimension. Classification is another achievement of this period. This means that children acquire the skills they lead to the ability to describe things by terms of classes, numbers, and series.

Seriating occurs when a child can order objects in a series because they have acquired knowledge of them through experience.

Concrete Operations Stage (7yrs-11yrs) The Concrete Operations Stage was Piaget's third stage of cognitive development in children. This stage was believed to have affected children aged between seven and eleven to twelve years old. During this stage, the thought process becomes more rational, mature and 'adult like', or more 'operational', Although this process most often continues well into the teenage years. The process is divided by Piaget into two stages, the Concrete Operations, and the Formal Operations stage, which is normally undergone by adolescents. In the Concrete Operational stage, the child has the ability to develop logical thought about an object, if they are able to manipulate it. By comparison, however, in the Formal Operations stage, the thoughts are able to be manipulated and the presence of the object is not necessary for the thought to take place.

Belief in animism and ego centric thought tends to decline during the Concrete Operational stage, although, remnants of this way of thinking are often found in adults. Piaget claims that before the beginning of this stage, children's ideas about different objects, are formed and dominated by the appearance of the object. For example, there appears to be more blocks when they are spread out, than when they are in a small pile. During the Concrete Operational Stage, children gradually develop the ability to 'conserve', or learn that objects are not always the way that they appear to be. This occurs when children are able to take in many different aspects of an object, simply through looking at it. Children are able to begin to imagine different scenarios, or 'what if' something were to happen. This is because they now have more 'operational' thought. Children are generally first able to conserve ideas about objects with which they are most comfortable. Once children have learnt to conserve, they learn about 'reversibility'. This means that they learn that if things are changed, they will still be the same as they used to be. For example, they learn that if they spread out the pile of blocks, there are still as many there as before, even though it looks different!