Chapter 3 Cognitive Development

3.1 Piaget’s theory of cognitive development

Terms:
Cognition - The mental processes involved in perceiving, attending to,
understanding and recalling information
Social Interaction - (social transmission) The interactions with others (parents,
peers, teachers and so on) that contribute to children’s learning experiences
Constructivism - An explanation of learning that views it as a self-regulated
process that builds on learners’ existing knowledge, and in which learners are
active participants
Sociocognitive Conflict - conflict within the child’s thinking resulting from
social interaction
Equilibration - achieving cognitive balance between what is familiar and
known, and what is new or unfamiliar, through the processes of assimilation
and accommodation
Adaptation - The process of adjusting to new situations and experiences
through the modification of existing schemas (assimilation) or the creation of
new schemas (accommodation)
Assimilation - Adjusting an existing mental model or schema to fit a new
experience
Accommodation - Using fresh information to form a new mental model or
schema
Disequilibrium - Cognitive imbalance resulting from inconsistency between
what is known and expected, and something strange and unexpected
Schema - A mental image or cluster of related ideas used to organise existing
knowledge and to make sense of new experiences
Readiness - Having the prior experiences and knowledge needed for learning
Closeness of the match - The distance between what is already known and new
learning
Sensorimotor period:
Object permanence - attained that object that is out sight still continue to exists
Goal-directed action - uses their own actions and vocalizations to influence the
actions of others in order to achieve a desired goal
Deferred imitation – children’s ability to reproduce actions they have seen and
remembered towards the end of the sensorimotor stage
Operations - Actions that are governed by rules and logic, and are performed
mentally rather than physically
Preoperational Period: not yet able to ‘operate’ but is reliant on manipulating
real materials
Symbolic thought - the ability to represent objects and events mentally
Egocentrism - An individual’s belief that everyone sees the world in exactly the
same way as that individual
Centration - Concentrating on one aspect of a stimulus while ignoring other
features
Animism - The tendency to attribute human characteristics to inanimate objects
Concrete-operations Period - able to ‘operate’
Conservation - child’s understanding that certain characteristics (such as length
or volume) of an object do not change when object’s physical appearance
changes
Reversibility - the ability to mentally reverse thought, such as adding back
something that has been taken away or re-moulding something to its original
shape
Compensation - The ability to see that an increase in one dimension (such as
height) is compensated for by a decrease in another dimension (such as width)
Seriation - The ability to mentally arrange objects or elements in terms of a
dimension such as length, weight or volume
Classification - The ability to mentally group objects in terms of similar
characteristics
Class Inclusion - Understanding that a number of small collections can be
combined in different ways to form a larger collection
Horizontal Decalage - Gradual development within a cognitive stage
Vertical Decalage - Unevenness in cognitive development
Formal-Operations Period: individual now able to think abstractly and
logically to form hypothesis and to solve problems systematically
Deductive Reasoning - Using rules or general principles to find general
solutions to find specific problems
Inductive Reasoning - Inducing general rules or principles from observation of
specific examples

3.2 Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory

Terms:
Internalisation - The transformation of external processes into internal
processes that guide action and thought
Private Speech - Speech used to guide own thinking and actions; it can be both
internal (silent) and external (audible)
Zone of proximal development - The distance between children’s current level
of competence on a task and the level they can achieve with support or
guidance
Scaffolding - The support provided to learners to enable a task to be done
successfully and more independently by adjusting the assistance to fit the
learner’s current level of performance
Cognitive Apprenticeships - Relationships within communities, in which
children learn adult ways of thinking, through both explicit teaching and more
indirect observation and listening to adult talk
Guided Participation - Support provided to enable students to participate in
expert activities in increasingly expert ways
Reciprocal Teaching - A teaching approach in which a teacher guides a group
of students to ask questions that guide learning
3.3 Information-processing approaches to cognitive development
Terms:
Encoding - process of storing information in the long term memory
Retrieval - process of bringing information stored in long term memory back to
be manipulated in working memory
Multistore model - depicts how information is processed and stored in memory
Perception - allocation of meaning to an experienced sensation
Sensory Memory - stores new information, which enters via the sensory
register through the five senses, for between one and three seconds
Attention - allocation of resources to process information
Working Memory - a working space for short-term storage and manipulation of
small amounts of information; contains your conscious thought
Central Executive - controls the processes and flow of information-processing
system
Long-term memory - a permanent storage facility for information
Rehearsal - repeating items as a memory strategy
Organisation - Process associated with storage and retrieval of information in
long-term memory
Elaboration - Process of linking new information with what is stored in
long-term memory
Overlapping waves model - Siegler’s model of strategy use, which states that
people have a set of strategies they choose from, and that over time, less
efficient strategies are replaced with more efficient ones

Chapter 4 Social, Emotional and Moral Development

4.1 Understanding our self
Terms:
Self - Who we are, what makes us unique and who we believe ourselves to be
Self-concept - a collection of information, ideas, attitudes and beliefs we have
about ourselves
Self-esteem - The level of satisfaction and pride that individuals have in the
self
Self-Efficacy - An individual’s sense of being able to manage a task effectively
and successfully in a particular domain
Human agency - the capacity of a person to act on and shape their world
Identity - an internal self-structure in which we organise our beliefs, abilities,
needs and self-perceptions
Psychoanalytic approach - a theoretical stance proposing that personality
develops when children move through a series of stages that present conflicts
that have to be resolved
Psychosocial Development - Psychological development in a social context
Psychosocial Crisis - A ‘turning point’, where individuals experience a
temporary state of conflict and disequilibrium
Identity Achievement - Occurs when adolescents explore several identity roles,
but resolve conflicts and feel comfortable with who they are and who they hope
to be
Identity Foreclosure - describes adolescents who typically form their identity
by adopting the occupational and ideological goals of significant others, often
their parents
Identity Diffusion - Occurs when young people have little direction, their life
and career goals are unclear, and they do not know who they are who they want
to be
Moratorium - refers to the state of adolescents who postpone making a
definitive commitment to a single identity or set of values

4.2 Understanding others

Morality - The fundamental questions of right and wrong, justice, fairness and
basic human rights
Moral dilemma - a moral problem requiring individual judgments and moral
reasoning
Heteronomous Morality - moral decisions based on the rules of authority
figures such as parents
Autonomous Morality - moral reasoning that appreciates the perspectives of
others and the motives behind their words and actions
Preconventional Morality - morality is seen as a set of rules handed down by
adults
Conventional Morality - being a good member of society and helping those
close to you is priority
Postconventional Morality - individuals move beyond the conventional rules of
their community to focus more broadly on what is best for society at large, and
on ways of promoting justice in society
Emotion - a mental or physiological state associated with thoughts, feelings and
behaviors
Basic emotions - the emotions that babies are born with, such as happiness,
sadness, anger and fear
Functionalist perspective - an approach that views emotions as shaping and
organising thoughts and behaviors
Social Constructivist Perspective - an approach that emphasises the role of the
social context in shaping the development of emotional understanding
Emotional Competence - The skills needed to negotiate the demands of the
immediate social context
Social Referencing - Taking cues from another person’s emotional reaction to
interpret situation
Perspective Taking - The ability to imagine the self in another’s position and to
understand other’s feelings
Prosocial Behavior - Positive social behaviours, such as helpfulness, intended
to benefit others
Emotional self-regulation - awareness of and ability to control or alter our
emotional state as necessary
4.3 Understanding relations with others
Terms:
Social Development - The development of skills and understanding necessary
for forming relationships and participating in the social context
Interaction - a first-order (or superficial) social exchange between two or more
individuals, with little emotional commitment
Relationship - an exchange between two or more people, resulting from several
interactions and taking on emotional significance
Group - an exchange involving several interacting individuals who have
formed a relationship and who have some degree of reciprocal influence over
one another
Peer acceptance - The likeability and acceptance of a person by their peer
group
Sociometric Assessment - The measurement of social networks and
connections between people by assessing people’s ratings of one another
Loneliness - A cognitive and affective state of feeling disconnected and lacking
in supportive relationships
Social Cognition - a cognitive capacity to think about and process social
information
Friendship - a close relationship between two people who mutually agree on
the importance of this relationship
Dyadic - Characterised by two elements, or two people, as in the case of
friendship
Bullying - Repeated verbal and/or non-verbal aggression by individuals or
groups and directed towards particular victims who find it difficult to defend
themselves