Cognititve and Linguistic Development - Chapter 2

This was a pretty good chapter that went over students cognitive development which is the developmental changes in thinking and reasoning. This chapter goes over two philosophies of cognitive development. Piaget and Vygotsky. Piaget has four distinct stages of cognitive development. 1. Sensorimotor (Birth to age 2) 2. Preoperational stage (age 2 until 6 or 7) 3. Concrete Operational stage (6 or 7 until about 11 or12 years old) 4. Formal Operational State (11 or 12 until adulthood). The chapter obviously goes into much detail of all these stages. It is very important that we have these stages in our mind as teachers do we can assess what stage the student is functioning at and adjust, if necessary, our teaching strategies to help the student. Piaget thought that children were largely in control of their own cognitive development. Vygotsky says that adults in society foster children's cognitive development. This is an interesting view to have and I think that the most important thing that I learned about Vygotsky's theory was the Zone of Proximal Development. Each student has this zone and to effectively instruct each student they need to be operating within their zone of development. If you teach at to difficult a level the students will not understand the material and if you teach under the zone the students will thing it is too easy and will not get everything out of the lesson that they should. It is huge for us to teach within the zone, but it is really hard to teach in the zone because every student could be at different stages of development. This is the challenge that faces teachers!