Child and Adolescent Learners and Learning Principles This course deals with the study of the patterns of human development especially focusing on the cognitive, biological, social, moral and emotional development of the child and adolescent learners.

1. Piaget's Theory of
Cognitive Development

2. Jean Piaget (1936)
 the first psychologist to make a systematic study
of cognitive development
 disagreed with the idea that intelligence was a
fixed trait, and regarded cognitive development
as a process which occurs due to biological
maturation and interaction with the environment.
 children are born with a very basic mental
structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on
which all subsequent learning and knowledge are
based.

3. Basic Cognitive Concepts
Schema
Assimilation
Accommodation
Equilibrium

4. Basic Cognitive Concepts
Schema
• Basic building blocks of such cognitive models, and enable us to
form a mental representation of the world.
• Piaget called the schema the basic building block of intelligent
behavior – a way of organizing knowledge.

5. Basic Cognitive Concepts
Assimilation
– process of fitting new experience into a existing or previously
created cognitive structure or schema.
Accommodation
– process of creating a new schema.
Equilibration
-achieving proper balance between assimilation and accommodation
.
• Cognitive disequilibrium – discrepancy between what is
perceived and what is understood.

7. Stages of Cognitive Development
 1. Sensorimotor stage (birth to age 2)
 2. Pre-operational stage (from age 2 to age 7)
 3. Concrete operational stage (from age 7 to age 11)
 4. Formal operational stage
(age 11+ - adolescence and adulthood).

8. Sensorimotor Stage (Birth-2 yrs.)
Focuses on the prominence of the senses and muscle
movements through which the infant comes to learn
about himself and the world.
Object permanence – ability of the child to know that
an object still exist even when out of sight.

9. Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)
A child can now make mental representations and is
able to pretend, the child is now ever closer to the
symbols.

10. Preoperational Stage highlighted by the following:
• Symbolic Function – ability to represent objects and events.
• Egocentrism – tendency of the child to only see his point of view and
to assume the everyone also has his same point of view.
• Centration – tendency of the child to only focus on one aspect of a
thing or event and exclude other aspects.
• Irreversibility – pre-operational children still have the inability to
reverse their thinking.
• Animism – tendency of children to attribute humans like traits or
characteristics to inanimate objects.
• Transductive reasoning – refers to the pre-operational child’s type of
reasoning that is neither inductive nor deductive.

11. Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years)
Characterized by the ability of the child to think
logically but only in terms of concrete objects.

12. Concrete-Operational Stage marked by the following:
• Decentering – refers to the ability of the child to perceive the different
features of objects and situations.
• Reversibility – a child can now follow that certain operations can be
done in reverse.
• Conservation – ability to know that certain properties of object like
number, mass, volume, or area do not change even if there is a change
in appearance.
• Seriation – ability to order or arrange things in a series based on one
dimension such a weight, volume or size.

13. Formal Operational Stage (11 years and over)
A child can now solve abstract problems and can
hypothesize

14. Formal-Operational Stage marked by the following:
• Hypothetical Reasoning – ability to come up with different
hypothesis about a problem and to gather and weigh data in
order to make a final decision or judgment.
• Analogical Reasoning – ability to perceive the relationship in
one instance and then use that relationship to narrow down
possible answer in another similar situation or problem.
• Deductive Reasoning – ability to think logically by applying a
general a general rule to a particular instance or situation.

15. References
• Brenda Corpuz, Ma. Rita Lucas, Heidi Grace Borabado,
Paz Lucido. Child and Adolescent Development: Looking
at Learners at Different Life Stages, 2015
Internet Sources
• https://www.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html