Development is the process of quantitative and qualitative growth of the child and the emergence and differentiation capabilities over time. It is the function of maturity besides interaction with the environment.

Meaning of Cognitive and Cognitive Development Cognitive can be interpreted as to perceiver, comprehend, conceive or sum| to know. Cognitive development means the growth and capability of knower

comprehending, or understanding over time, facilitated both by maturity and interaction with its environment. If cognition can be included, the ability to construct mental images involving thought reasoning, memory and language of person constructs mental images as the world around is observed, understood and internalized as a mental process. Thus every individual has a unique model lased on a unique process of observation.

Process:

ADVERTISEMENTS:

According to Burner, cognitive development occurs in three phases: Enactive (doing)

Iconic (object models of pictures)

Symbolic (signs and symbols)

or instance, for a young child cognizing what an orange means would do as under:

ADVERTISEMENTS:

(1) Touching or holding or tasting it (enactive model)

2) Later seeing pictures of it as model of it (iconic model)

3) Still later gradually deciphering the word “orange” (symbolic mode)

First theory of cognitive development we will consider was developed by a biologist turned psychologist, Jean Piaget.

ADVERTISEMENTS:

Piaget’s Theory of cognitive Development

During the past half-century, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget devised a model describing how humans go about making sense of their world by gathering and organizing information.

According to Piaget (1954), certain ways of thinking that are quite simple for adult are not so simple for a child. Four Stages of Cognitive Development. The Four Stages of Cognitive Development are called sensor motor, ire operational, concrete operational, and formal operational.

Infancy:

ADVERTISEMENTS:

The Sensor motor Stage:

The earliest period is called the sensor motor stage, tasting, and so on. Druitt this period, the infant develops object permanence, the understanding the objects in the environment exist whether the baby perceives them or not. A second major accomplishment in the sensor motor period is the beginner of logical, goal-directed actions. «

The child is soon able to reverse this action by refilling the container. Learning to reverse actions is a basic accomplishment of the sensor motor stage.

Early Childhood to the Early Elementary Years:

ADVERTISEMENTS:

The Preoperational Stage. B the end of the sensor motor stage, the child can use many action scheme; Called operations, or actions that are carried out and reversed mentally rat than physically. The stage after sensor motor is called preoperational, because the child has not yet mastered these mortal operations but is moving town mastery.

The first step from action to thinking is the internalization of action performing an action mentally rather than physically. Between the ages of! and 4, most children enlarge their vocabulary from about 200 to 2,000 words Piaget, are very egocentric: they tend to see the world and the experiences o other from their own viewpoint. Egocentric, as Piaget intended it, does no

33mean selfish; it simply means children often assume that everyone else shares their feeling, reactions, and perspectives.

Later Elementary to the Middle School Years:

ADVERTISEMENTS:

The Concrete-Operational Stage:

Piaget coined the term concrete operations to describe this stage of “hands-on” thinking. The basic characteristics of the stage are the recognition of the logical stability of the physical word, the realization that elements can be changed or transformed and still conserve many of their original characteristics, and the understanding that these changes can be reversed.

According to Piaget, a student’s ability to solve conservation problems depends on an understanding of three basic aspects of reasoning: identity, compensation, and reversibility. The student can mentally cancel out the change that has been made.

Another important operation mastered at this stage is classification. Classification depends on a student’s abilities to focus on a single characteristic of objects in a set and group the objects according to that characteristic. Link conservation, classification, and serration, the student at the concrete-operational stage has finally developed a complete and veil logical system of thinking.

This system of thinking, however, is still tied to physical reality. The logic is based on concrete situations that can be organized, classified, or manipulated. Thus, children at this stage can imagine several different arrangements for the furniture in their rooms before they act.

They do not have to solve the problem strictly though trial and error by actually making the arrangements. But the concrete- operational child is not yet able to reason about hypothetical, abstract problems that involve the coordination of many factors at once.

Junior and Senior High School Students:

Formal Operations. Some students remain at the concrete-operational stage throughout their school years, even throughout life. However, new experience, usually those that take place in school, eventually present most students with problems that they cannot solve using concrete operations.

What happens when a number of variables interact, as in a laboratory experiment? Then a mental system for controlling sets of variables and working through a set of possibilities is needed. These are the abilities Piaget called for operations.

At the level of formal operations, all the earlier operations and abilities continue in force; that is, formal thinking is reversible, internal, and organized in a system of interdependent elements. The focus of thinking shifts, however, from what is to what might be. The adolescent who has mastered formal operations can contrary-to-fact questions.

In answer, the adolescent demonstrates the hallmark of formal operations-hypothetic- deductive reasoning. The formal thinker can consider a hypothetical situation (people do not sleep) and reason deductively (from the general assumption to specific implications, such as longer workdays, more money spent on lighting or new entertainment industries).

Formal operations also include inductive reasoning, or using specific observations to identify general principles. For example, the economist observes many specific changes in the stock market and attempts to identify general principles about economic cycles. Formal- operational thinkers can form hypotheses, set up mental experiments to test them, and isolate or control variables in order to complete a valid test of the hypotheses.