Child Development

Child Development

1. Cognitive Development

   • Are changes in thinking
     • Children's thought gradually becomes more organized and complex

2. Piaget's Theory:

   • Constructivist View
     • People interpret their environments and experiences in light of the knowledge and experiences they already have.
       • Piaget called that a SCHEME
         • Is an organized patterns of action or thought.

3. Cognitive Structures

   • Organization:
     • The tendency to form increasingly coherent and integrated structures.
   • Adaptation:
     • The process of changing a cognitive structure or the environment (or both) in order to understand the environment.
   • Assimilation:
     • The process of bringing new objects or information into a scheme that already exists.
   • Accommodation:
     • The process of modifying old schemes or creating new ones to better fit assimilated information.
   • Equilibration:
     • The dynamic process of moving between states of cognitive disequilibrium and equilibrium.
   • Reflective Abstraction:
     • The process of thinking about information and experiences.

4. Birth to 2 Years.

   • Sensorimotor thought:
     • Thought that is based only on sensory input and physical (motor) actions.
   • Symbolic thought:
     • The ability to form symbols for mental representations that stand for objects or events in the world.
   • Object Permanence:
     • The act that objects, events, and people continue to exist even when they are out of a child's direct line of sensory input or motor action.

5. (2 to 7 Years).

   • Preoperational Thought:
     • Thought characterized by the use of mental representations (symbols) and intuitive thought.
   • Intuitive Thought:
     • Thought and logic that is based on the child's personal experience rather than on a formal system of rules.
   • Conservation:
     • The understanding that some basic properties of objects remain the same even when a transformation changes the physical appearance.