About Real Life Parenting
Hope Presbyterian Church
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This week's lesson focused on understanding how children think and learn and applied it to the development of a home management system.  Click Here for details.

Bonus -- Essay on Adolescent Development -- Click Here.

How Children's thinking Develops

Cognitive Development

Cognitive development is the process of how thinking changes with time. It is more than just learning new facts. It includes how the facts are used and integrated into a person's understanding of the world. Discussing cognitive development in children generally ends up examining Jean Piaget's model. 

In this model, Piaget claims learning occurs as people adapt to changes in their perception of the world around us through two mechanisms. Assimilation occurs when new information about the world is fit into existing information and beliefs. Accommodation occurs when current organizations of information must be shifted to incorporate the new information. Over time, thought is organized into some smoothly functioning cognitive system. 
 
 

Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development
The Sensorimotor Stage Birth to about Age 2 During this time, infants develop the ability to organize and coordinate their sensations and perceptions with their physical movements and actions. This stage ends when elementary use of symbols develops such as imagining how to manipulate a toy before touching it or use of simple sentences as symbols of some event.
Preoperational Thought Approximately Age 2 to Age 7 Preoperational thought is the beginning of the ability to reconstruct in thought what has been experienced. It also involves the development of more sophisticated use of symbols.
Concrete Operational Thought Approximately Age 7 to between 11 and 15 Concrete operations allow children to coordinate several characteristics rather than focus on a single property of an object. Children with this ability have the ability to classify or divide things into sets or subsets and to consider interrelationships.
Formal Operational Thought From between age of 11 and 15 into adulthood  Much more abstract. They have the ability to develop hypothesis about problems. They can systematically deduce or conclude. The presence of introspection first appears.

Because most elementary school aged children are in the two middle stages, it is useful to more closely examine the characteristics of those two stages. 

Characteristics of Preoperational and Concrete Operational Thought
Preoperational Thought More symbolic than sensorimotor thought.
Can't make mental reversals.
Lacks conservation skills.
Can't distinguish between own perspective and someone else's.
Intuitive rather than logical.
Deals with language literally.
Imaginative thinking begins.
Concrete Operational Thought Can make classifications related to concrete characteristics.
Has developed a sense of conservation and reversibility.
Can see things from other's perspective when dealing with concrete.
Lacks logical ability.
Lacks the ability to handle abstractions.
Deals with language somewhat more figuratively, but still more literal than not.
Experimentation is replaced with a desire for simplicity, rules, and order.

Cognitive Development in Formal Operational Thought

In adolescents, at the same time the body is changing, the mind is changing too. "The child who could reason logically about real world problems becomes the adolescent who can think systematically and abstractly about worlds that do not even exist or propositions that flatly contradict reality" (Sigelman & Shaffer, 1991, p 574). It is during the period of adolescence that Piaget's formal operational thought stage is reached. One primary difference between formal operational thought and concrete operational thought (the stage that Piaget places before formal operational thought) is the degree of abstractness the adolescent can handle (Muuss, 1996).

The presence of this higher level of think is in part indicated by increases in verbal problem solving ability. Where before, in concrete operational stage, it would be necessary to see concrete examples to solve certain problems, the formal operational thinker can solve them merely by hear the verbal presentation. The abstract nature of adolescent thought also points to the presence of formal operational thinking. There is also a tendency to think about the process of thought itself (Santrock, 1998).

Adolescents are no longer limited to concrete experiences as basis of their thought. They can deal with hypothetical cases, "what if's," and make-believe (Santrock, 1998). They develop the capacity to systematically form and test hypotheses. They learn to understand abstract theories and can grasp philosophy (Sigelman & Shaffer, 1991). As they develop this ability, the complexity of their abstractions increases. In the end, when the process has reached completion the young adult has developed some means of organizing systems of abstractions (Newton, 1995).