The Cognitive-Developmental Model

THE COGNITIVE APPROACH TO LEARNING

The fundamental difference between behavioral and cognitive approaches to learn­ing is the role that thinking plays. Thinking plays no role whatsoever in behavioral theories. In cognitive theories, however, thinking plays the central role.

Cognition is a term used to describe all of our mental processes, such as per­ception, memory, and judgment. The most important mental process is thinking, and cognitivists focus most of their attention on studying how people think. There are two major approaches to the study of thinking: the cognitive-developmental model and the information-processing model. A brief overview of these two ap­proaches should help you grasp more clearly the theoretical contrast between cogni­tive and behavioral approaches to the study of learning.

The cognitive-developmental model focuses on changes that occur in how people think as they progress from infancy though childhood and adolescence and ulti­mately into adulthood. The best-known cognitive-developmental psychologist is Jean Piaget, who revolutionized our understanding of how children think and con­struct knowledge.

Piaget viewed children as active learners who behave like "little scientists" who develop their own "theories" about how the world works and set out to con­firm these hunches. Such a view of the fundamental nature of children contrasts markedly with the view of behaviorists, who see the child as a passive learner who merely reacts to environmental stimuli.

Piaget's primary concern was to discover how people acquire knowledge, which is often called the "epistemological question." Piaget considered himself less a psychologist than a "genetic epistemologist," studying the source, or genesis, of knowledge. His studies have shown that throughout the lifespan, people go through a sequence of four qualitatively different stages of thinking.

Briefly, infants acquire knowledge based on the sensory experiences of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Preschoolers progress to the stage of acquiring knowledge of the world though their perceptions of their own experiences in the world. Older children begin to apply the rules of logic to understand how the world works. And, finally, adolescents and adults progress to the stage where they can apply logic to hypothetical as well as to real situations.

Piaget believed that people are constantly trying to make sense of the world by comparing their internal understanding of how the world works with external evi­dence. Learning occurs when people periodically alter their internal understanding of the world as they encounter evidence that conflicts with their previous under­standing. According to Piaget, even young students constantly create their own knowledge of the world by comparing external evidence with internal understand­ings. Given Piaget's theory, it seems clear that an important role of a teacher is to provide students with experiences that will help them develop a more accurate un­derstanding of how the world works.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-29