This column deals with cognitive development. The material is
drawn heavily from the work of Jean Piaget, who was a biologist, a
psychologist, a child development researcher and a father.
This column deals with cognitive development. The material is drawn heavily from the work of Jean Piaget, who was a biologist, a psychologist, a child development researcher and a father.
Jean Piaget was born in a small village outside Lausanne, Switzerland. At 10, he observed an albino sparrow, and published a note about it in a scientific journal. As a young adolescent, he helped the curator of a local museum, who encouraged him to begin collecting and observing mollusks. Piaget published a series of articles on his observations, earning international acclaim and the offer of a position as curator of a museum in Geneva, which offer he turned down on the grounds that he was only 16 and had yet to complete high school.
He majored in biology at the University of Lausanne. He worked in a psychiatric clinic, then in an experimental school in Paris, standardizing the results of reasoning tests. He found the work boring, until he noticed interesting patterns of errors in the wrong answers the children gave. It seemed to him that the wrong answers were not random, but systematic, as though the children had ways of thinking that differed from those of adults.
Piaget decided to study children’s thought processes for a year or two. He didn’t know that he had found his life’s work.
Piaget studied children in schools, as well as his own three children as infants. The theories he formulated about cognitive development are extremely powerful and helpful in deciding what to teach, when to teach and how to teach students.
Piaget found that children’s cognitive development does not proceed in a smooth line, like a ramp, from birth to adulthood, but in a series of stair steps. He called ages 0 to 2 the Sensory-Motor Stage, ages 2 through 7 the Pre-Operational Stage, ages 7 to 12 the Concrete Operations Stage and ages 12 and up the Logical Operations Stage.
A slight digression: whenever Piaget lectured in America, someone would invariably ask, “How can children be accelerated through these stages?” Piaget began to call this, wryly, “the American question.”
The answer is that, if you try, you may frustrate the child, or even deprive her of critical learning experiences appropriate to her age and stage. For example, with a lot of work, you can teach a 1-year-old baby to recognize the shape of the word CAT on a flashcard, and say “cat'” or more likely “tat'” when you hold up the card.
But few 1-year-old babies are ready to learn that C makes a kuh sound and A makes an a sound and T makes a tuh sound, and when you put those sounds together, blend them, they make CAT. A 1-year-old would have to devote an enormous amount of energy to memorizing the shape of the word CAT, and in the meantime would not be figuring out that Cheerios continue to exist even when she drops them off her high chair tray, ie developing her sense of object permanence.
Worse, she would have to develop coping strategies to memorize the flashcard, which, in addition to being inefficient, take up neurons and may interfere with subsequent learning. Furthermore, the idea that C makes a kuh sound, though enormously difficult for most children to learn at age 1, will be much easier at age 5, and even easier at age 7.
Some modern day researchers dispute the ages that Piaget claims. But not many dispute that stages occur, nor that a baby develops a sense of object permanence.
A few kids are hyper-literate and will force you to teach them how to read when they are 2 or 3. Before Robbie P. reached his second birthday, he would carry his alphabet blocks to his parents and demand, “What wetter dis?” They would tell him, patiently. And after he dragged out of them that S made a sss sound, N an nnn, and O an oh, he lined up S-N-O and told them that it spelled snow.
Most 3-year-olds are not hyper-literate and are better off building with their blocks instead of learning to read with them. Next week we will look more closely at what cognitive development theory implies for school-aged children.
Cynthia Anne Walker is a
homeschooling mother of three and former engineer. She is a published independent author. Her column is published in
The Dispatch every Friday.
