chapter summary:

Theories of development are important because they provide a framework for understanding important phenomena, raise major issues regarding human nature, and motivate new research. Four major theories of cognitive development are Piagetian, information-processing, sociocultural, and dynamic-systems.

Piaget’s Theory

• Among the reasons for the longevity of Piaget’s theory are that it vividly conveys the flavor of children’s thinking at different ages, extends across a broad range of ages and content areas, and provides many fascinating and surprising observations of children’s thinking.
• Piaget’s theory is often labeled “constructivist,” because it depicts children as actively constructing knowledge for themselves in response to their experience. The theory posits that children learn through two processes that are present from birth—assimilation and accommodation—and that the contribution of these processes is balanced through a third process, equilibration. These processes produce continuities across development.
• Piaget’s theory divides cognitive development into four broad stages: the sensorimotor stage (birth to age 2), the preoperational stage (ages 2 to 7), the concrete operational stage (ages 7 to 12), and the formal operational stage (age 12 and beyond). These stages reflect discontinuities in development.
• In the sensorimotor stage, infants’ intelligence is expressed primarily through motor interactions with the environment. During this period, infants gain understanding of concepts such as object permanence and become capable of deferred imitation.
• In the preoperational stage, children become able to represent their experiences in language, mental imagery, and thought, but because of cognitive limitations such as egocentrism and centration, they have difficulty solving many problems, including Piaget’s various tests of conservation and tasks related to taking the perspective of others.
• In the concrete operational stage, children become able to reason logically about concrete objects and events but have difficulty reasoning in purely abstract terms and in succeeding on tasks requiring hypothetical thinking, such as the pendulum problem.
• In the formal operational stage, children gain the cognitive capabilities of hypothetical thinking.
• Four weaknesses of Piaget’s theory are that it depicts children’s thinking as being more consistent than it is, underestimates infants’ and young children’s cognitive competence, understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development, and only vaguely describes the mechanisms that give rise to thinking and cognitive growth.

Information-Processing Theories

• Information-processing theories focus on the specific mental processes that underlie children’s thinking. Even in infancy, children are seen as actively pursuing goals, encountering processing limits, and devising strategies that allow them to surmount the processing limits and attain the goals.
• The memory system includes working memory, long-term memory, and executive functioning.
• Working memory is a system for actively attending to, gathering, maintaining, storing, and processing information.
• Long-term memory is the enduring knowledge accumulated over a lifetime.
• Executive functioning is crucial for controlling thought and action, develops greatly during the preschool and early elementary school years, and is related to later academic achievement and occupational success.
• The development of memory and learning in large part reflects improvements in basic processes, strategies, and content knowledge.
• Basic cognitive processes allow infants to learn and remember from birth onward. Among the most important basic processes are association, recognition, generalization, and encoding.
• The use of strategies enhances learning and memory beyond the level that basic processes alone could provide. Rehearsal and selective attention are two important strategies.
• Increasing content knowledge enhances memory and learning of all types of information.
• One important contributor to the growth of problem solving is the development of planning.

Sociocultural Theories

• Starting with Vygotsky’s theory, sociocultural theories have focused on the way that the social world molds development. These theories emphasize that development is shaped not only by interactions with other people and the skills learned from them, but also by the artifacts with which children interact and the beliefs, values, and traditions of the larger society.
• Sociocultural theories view humans as differing from other animals in their propensity to teach and their ability to learn from teaching.
• Establishing intersubjectivity between people through joint attention is essential to learning.
• Sociocultural theories describe people as learning through guided participation and social scaffolding, in which others who are more knowledgeable support the learner’s efforts.

Dynamic-Systems Theories

• Dynamic-systems theories view change as the one constant in development. Rather than depicting development as being organized into long periods of stability and brief periods of dramatic change, these theories propose that there is no period in which substantial change is not occurring.
• These theories also view each person as a unified system that, in order to meet goals, integrates perception, action, categorization, motivation, memory, language, conceptual understanding, and knowledge of the physical and social worlds.
• Dynamic-systems theories view development as a self-organizing process that brings together components as needed to adapt to a continuously changing environment.
• Attaining goals requires action as well as thought. Thought shapes action, but action also shapes thought.
• Just as variation and selection produce biological evolution, they also produce cognitive development.