Cypop 22

Cognitive Theories

Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget was a cognitive theorist in 1896 – 1980. He had a way of how children learned, which was that they go through stages and sequences throughout their lives and they are active learners. He used firsthand experience to learn he also learned how to change what they learned into using behaviour.

He did not clearly state the importance of social and emotional aspects of learning and did not focus the attention on social relationships as much as other social constructivists. He took the social and emotional development for granted, and he also did not write it to detail, he wrote the importance of intellectual development. Piaget’s theory is called constructivist.

A Schema is a structured group of concepts, it can be used to point out objects, scenarios or sequences of events or relations. The original idea was proposed by philosopher Immanuel Kant as innate structures used to help us become aware of the world.

He had ideas like:

Assimilation - the process by which a person takes material into their mind from the environment, which may mean changing the evidence of their senses to make it fit.

Accommodation - The difference made to one's mind or concepts by the process of assimilation. Note that assimilation and accommodation go together: you can't have one without the other.

Conversation - The realisation that objects or sets of objects stay the same even when they are changed about or made to look different.

Reference http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/piaget.htm#ixzz1YnoPkTen Jerome Bruner

Jerome Bruner was born in 1915 and is 95yrs old and is also a cognitive theorist. The essence of Bruner’s theory is that children learn through:

➢ Doing (act out modes of learning) ➢ Imaging things that they done(iconic mode of learning) ➢ Making what they know into using codes for example talking, writing or drawing(this is called symbolic code of learning.)

The older generation can teach children and help them to learn. They can do this by using scaffolding what the child is learning in order to make it suitable for the child. This means that the child can learn anything at any age. They need the right support in order to do this. E.g. if a child drops pencil on the floor then the child is learning about gravity if the adult says you’ve dropped straight down on the floor, didn’t it let’s see if we both drop a pencil on the floor I wonder if they will both be on the floor. This would be Bruner theory.

Watson and Skinner

B.F Skinner was born in 1904 and died in 1990. He became one of the leaders of behaviourism and his work contributed immensely to experimental psychology.

John B Watson was born in 1878 and died in 1958

Operant Conditioning - Operant conditioning (sometimes referred to as instrumental conditioning) is a method of learning that occurs through rewards and punishments for behaviour. We can find examples of operant conditioning at work all around us. Consider the case of children completing homework to earn a reward from a parent or teacher, or employees finishing projects to receive praise or promotions.

Classical Conditioning- is a learning process that occurs through a group of people between an environmental activity and is used again and other assumption of this theory are that the environment shapes behaviour and that taking internal mental states such as thoughts, feelings and emotions into consideration is useless in explaining behaviour.