Life Span Development II: School age and Adolescence 3 (2+1)
Lesson 4 : Cognitive development during Late childhood
Cognitive development
Cognitive development refers to the qualitative and quantitative changes in thinking, organizing, perceiving, reasoning and problem solving. Cognitive process deals with the perception of receiving information about the environment through the sensory system.
According to Piaget, the children from 7-11 years fall into third stage of cognitive development i.e. concrete operations. School age children no longer depend upon immediate visual and sensory circumstances as they were in the preoperational period. They are able to classify, understand inclusion, reverse thought, go from centration to decentration and develop skills of conservation of thought.
Children show remarkable advances in thinking and problem solving strategies. For the first time, they can apply logic to solve problems in an adult like manner. School age children’s thinking is more flexible and reversible and less egocentric than preschoolers. The child considers multiple dimensions of a problem. These advances allow for more sophisticated and systematic methods of problem solving. But they can apply these only to concrete and familiar situations.
Participants