Chapter 8 Student Resources

Flashcards

Key Terms

Accommodation

the child changes their cognitive organisation in order to adjust to the outside world.

Assimilation

the child adjusts their interpretation of the outside world in order to fit or be consistent with their existing cognitive organisation.

Equilibration

responding to cognitive conflicts by using the proceses of accommodation and assimilation to re-establish equilibrium.

Clinical method

an informal question-based approach used to assess children’s understanding of problems.

Constructivism

the assumption that children’s cognitive development occurs because they actively construct new mental structures which allow them to think.

Object permanence

the belief that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen.

Centration

the tendency of young children to attend selectively to only certain aspects of a situation.

Conservation

the understanding that some properties of an object (e.g., quantity; number) are conserved or unchanged following physical transformation of that object.

Reversibility

the ability to undo mentally (reverse) some operation previously carried out (e.g., changing an object’s shape).

Egocentrism

a failure to distinguish between one’s own point of view and that of others.

Decentration

the ability to focus on several aspects of a problem at once and make coherent sense of them.

Group

the structure formed from the organisation of various related cognitive processes or operations.

Zone of proximal development

the gap between a child’s current or actual problem-solving ability and his/her potential when provided with suitable guidance.

Microgenetic method

an approach to studying changes in children’s cognitive strategies by means of short-term longitudinal studies.

Executive functions

processes that organise and co-cordinate the workings of the cognitive system to achieve current goals.

Theory of mind

the understanding by children and adults that other people may have different beliefs, emotions, and intentions than their own.

Autism

a severe disorder involving very poor communication skills, deficient social and language development, and repetitive behaviour.

Central coherence

the ability to interpret information taking account of the context; the ability to “see the big picture”.