COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Cognition is the way we use our mind to understand the world. When we study cognitive development, we are acknowledging that changes occur in how we think and learn as we grow. In this section, I will focus on the cognitive development of children. As future educators, we should be able to understand how our students' minds develop and what can impact them.
Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development
Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory of Cognitive Development
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Other Theories
- Theory of Core Knowledge - modern theory based on the idea that humans are born with innate cognitive systems for understanding the world
- Information Processing - theory explaining how we take in information, how we remember it, how we control and coordinate all those activities and how we think about our thinking
Aspects of Information processing:
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Intelligence and Academic Achievement
Intelligence includes those qualities that help us adapt successfully so that we achieve our goals in life. Fluid intelligence allows us to solve novel problems for which we have little training and is measured both by how effectively we solve the problems and by how quickly we solve them. Crystallized intelligence is a measure of the knowledge we already have that we can draw on to solve problems. An intelligence quotient is originally a measure of intelligence calculated based on the ratio of a child's mental age to chronological age, but is now largely replaced by the deviation IQ (a measure of intelligence that is based on the individual's deviation from the norms for a given test).
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Howard Gardner speaking about his theory of multiple intelligences:
THIS WILL BE VERY HELPFUL IN OUR FUTURE CLASSROOMS!
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A video promoting a safe and inviting classroom/school environment:
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