| Subject: Cognitive Development |
Author:
Carolyn Brown
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Date Posted: 20:52:08 02/03/08 Sun
I thought about Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development and how those stages apply to my fourteen year old students. My students are generally not learning disabled; some actually are honors students, and most are typical teens. Based on the Piagetian principle my students should be approaching the formal operational stage of cognitive development. Why is there a seeming cognitive delay?
I thought of my own childhood, my children’s experiences, and my students’ world to search for answers. For me, the radio, books in the library, classes at school, and conversations with immediate relatives and neighbors informed my world. Television was a late arrival in my household, and I was twelve when I saw the screen in color.
My children were the first in the neighborhood to have a computer, and they could not maneuver the ancient advertisement laden portal to the web. But my children mastered gaming, such as Pac man and Atari, and came back to the computer and learned something along the way.
My current students live in an explosive environment; they are bombarded by information from all over the universe. How they respond to the stimuli really depends on how equipped they are to encode information, process it automatically, and apply the knowledge in problem-solving responses to their environment. My students have no difficulty relating to the latest newsflash on Chris Brown but struggle with reading and discussing a newspaper editorial. Their cognitive development, their decision making process, and their responses to their environment are uneven and interconnected, somewhat like hair that grows longer on one side of the head than on the other. Struggling with basic skills and functioning on varying levels of proficiency in content areas, these same students take mandated tests and assessments that have little bearing on their interests and everyday world. Shaped by family members, peers, teachers, and the media, these students need more practice thinking critically in an academically challenging, creative, and productive environment.
I find that no one theory accounts for the complexity of cognitive responses in my adolescent students. Vygotsky, Sternberg, and other psychologists add missing parts of the puzzle that Piaget assembled. To be successful, my students must work harder to assimilate and accommodate elements of a twenty-first century socio-cultural environment, but they must reach their developmental milestones at a pace and in a fashion consistent with their personal and cultural needs.
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