cognitive
Consider applications to education (16 marks) AO2
Piaget believed in the progress of a child’s cognitive development through schooling and has an individualist approach in the way in which the child is an active participant and is responsible for their own learning.
According to Piaget, cognitive development occurs as the result of maturation. You cannot teach a child certain activities before they are biologically ready, for example trying to reach a pre-operationalized child to perform abstract mathematical calculations. If a child is not mature enough they may acquire skills superficially, but in order to truly understand them, and become competent at them, it is important to wait until they are ready. Research against this explanation was presented by Bryant and Trabasso (1971) showed that pre-operationalized children could be trained to solve certain logical tasks. They argued that children’s failure was due to memory restrictions rather than a lack of operational thinking as suggested by Piaget. When pre-operationalized children practiced solving simple problems and gradually built up to more complex tasks, they could cope showing that practice mattered more than readiness. However in contrast to this research Danner and Day (1977) found that practice made no difference. Student’s between the ages of 10 and 13 were tutored on three formal operational tasks and showed no improvement, whereas 17 year olds’ performance was improved as we would expect because they should be sufficiently more mature. However, even when practice does improve performance, it doesn’t mean that the child has understood the principles of the operation; they may just be repeating certain actions and will not be able to transfer this knowledge to a novel situation. So this suggests that readiness is more important than practice.
All of the approaches to education place the importance on the active role of the learner and have had a major influence on education. For example the
Piaget believed in the progress of a child’s cognitive development through schooling and has an individualist approach in the way in which the child is an active participant and is responsible for their own learning.
According to Piaget, cognitive development occurs as the result of maturation. You cannot teach a child certain activities before they are biologically ready, for example trying to reach a pre-operationalized child to perform abstract mathematical calculations. If a child is not mature enough they may acquire skills superficially, but in order to truly understand them, and become competent at them, it is important to wait until they are ready. Research against this explanation was presented by Bryant and Trabasso (1971) showed that pre-operationalized children could be trained to solve certain logical tasks. They argued that children’s failure was due to memory restrictions rather than a lack of operational thinking as suggested by Piaget. When pre-operationalized children practiced solving simple problems and gradually built up to more complex tasks, they could cope showing that practice mattered more than readiness. However in contrast to this research Danner and Day (1977) found that practice made no difference. Student’s between the ages of 10 and 13 were tutored on three formal operational tasks and showed no improvement, whereas 17 year olds’ performance was improved as we would expect because they should be sufficiently more mature. However, even when practice does improve performance, it doesn’t mean that the child has understood the principles of the operation; they may just be repeating certain actions and will not be able to transfer this knowledge to a novel situation. So this suggests that readiness is more important than practice.
All of the approaches to education place the importance on the active role of the learner and have had a major influence on education. For example the