Cognitive Development in Children: The Role of Adults

   

According to psychologists Lev Vygotsky and, to a lesser degree, Jean Piaget, the role of adults in the cognitive development of children is significant. Vygotsky concluded that adults model behavior, teach and communicate language skills and generally integrate children into their culture. As a teacher, this is an enormous responsibility and, of course, a privilege as well. How we interact with children can have tremendous consequences in terms of their ability to learn new concepts and develop socially. As Ormrod states, “Not only do adults teach children specific ways of interpreting experience but they also pass along specific tools that can help children tackle the various tasks and problems they’re apt to face (315)”. According to Vygotsky, one of the more significant roles adults play is through the Zone of Proximal Development. This is the “range of tasks that children can’t yet perform independently but can perform with the help and guidance of others (Ormrod, 317). Providing students with challenging tasks, and then guiding them through completion allows for cognitive development. Piaget also emphasized the importance of new and challenging schema in learning. Ormrod states that, “the process of equilibration promotes progression towards increasingly complex forms of thought” (292). Though Piaget may have contended that children construct this learning themselves, certainly the teacher plays a crucial role in providing challenging lessons to allow for growth.  I think that finding the right level of challenge (readiness) is a struggle, but this is where differentiation and modification come into play; if a task is too easy there is no point in completing it, if a task is too difficult it cannot be completed. Structuring lessons to meet that level of readiness requires planning, assessment and opportunities for revision along the way.

     An important element in terms of providing the right level of challenge is scaffolding. By providing a variety of methods for learning new concepts, we increase the students’ chances of successfully acquiring new knowledge and skills. According to Ormrod, scaffolding can include modelling, feedback, dividing up complex tasks, keeping learners focused and on task, asking questions, and providing technological assistance where appropriate (324).

     Our goal as teachers is, essentially, to prepare children to be adults. We can begin that process by allowing students opportunities to collaborate, mentor each other and learn by doing. I teach digital citizenship, including online responsibility. One of the ways I do that is by blogging with my students. I model the expected behavior by introducing the blog during class and then invite them to post when they have time. Students then interact with each other (and me) in a protected environment. Recently I had to delete inappropriate comments from the blog. I met with the students and talked about appropriateness and then invited them to try again. I hoped to guide them in the right direction, but they had to construct their own knowledge of what exactly “appropriate” means, and hopefully acquire new knowledge and skills.

Memory, Learning and Paying Attention

As a teacher, it’s not enough that I present facts and concepts to my students and hope they remember them, it’s imperative that I use strategies to help students transfer information to long term memory for later use. Strategies such as making facts meaningful, presenting them so students use chunking, ensuring they are pronounceable, concrete, etc. help students remember the material. When students can organize the information in some way they are more likely to remember it. I see this all the time in my school when teachers present information through song, repetition, mnemonics and rhyme to help students not only remember the material, but to construct meaning from it.

Perhaps the most important aspect of learning, at least according to Ormrod, is paying attention. This makes sense because how could a student remember, interpret and construct meaning from information if they didn’t pay attention to it? And what grabs their attention is of no surprise to anyone who has taught (or parented) children. According to Ormrod, things like motion, size, incongruity, social cues, and personal significance all play a role in how much a student pays attention. It’s easy to observe this on a daily basis when interacting with children. The level of attention given to an adult presenting verbal instructions versus that which is commanded by a television or computer screen is often significant. As teachers, we have to provide enough distraction and stimulation to garner the attention of our students but not so much that their attention is pulled in too many places at once. This is a daily challenge, as students are often more interested in things other than that which is being presented. I struggle sometimes to maintain the full attention of my students, but am actively working to create lessons that stimulate and allow for the construction of learning.