Notes from Interactional Theories of Cognitive Development (Ch 7)

Notes from Interactional Theories of Cognitive Development (Ch 7)

Social and cultural context within which learning takes place. Learning as more than curriculum and instructional strategies.

Pet Monkey Example: Teacher as authority figure
Spanish Activity Example: Participants establishing mutual goals and control over task.

Theorist:
JEROME BRUNER
- the developed mind creates from experience, generic coding systems that them to go beyond data to new and potentially fruitful predictions.
- learner: autonomous and self-propelled.
- Theme 1: Sequence of representational systems children acquire in understanding their worlds.
- Theme 2: Role of culture in cognitive growth and schooling as a instrument of culture in "amplifying human intellectual powers".

MODES OF REPRESENTATION

Enactive representation
- "motor memory"
- past events represented through action memory
- remembering how to walk through an office, but not being able to draw a schematic of the office.

Iconic representation
- perception through images
- remembering a fire by see images of red hot flames

Symbolic representation
- system of symbols used to recall/understand something
- language, morphemes

SEQUENCE OF STAGES
- sequence above is normal for children (Enactive, Iconic, Symbolic)
- but anyone can be taught any of the three (in contrast to Piaget)

COURSE OF COGNITIVE GROWTH

Learning by Discovery
Collins and Steven's Model of Inquiry Teaching: Instructional Strategies Used by Inquiry Teachers

1 Selecting positive and negative exemplars
2 Varying cases systematically
3 Selecting counterexamples
4 Generating hypothetical cases
5 Forming hypotheses
6 Testing hypotheses
7 Considering alternative predictions
8 Entrapping students
9 Tracing consequences
10 Questing authority

"To instruct someone in the disciplines is not a matter of getting them to commit results to mind. Rather it is to teach him to participate in the process that makes possible the establishment of knowledge. We teach a subject not to produce living libraries on the subject, but rather to get a student to think mathmatically for themselves, to consider matters as a historian does, to take part in the process if knowledge-getting. Knowing is a process, not a product." (Bruner).

VYGOTSKY

DEVELOPMENTAL METHOD
Natural Process of Development
Phylogenetic Comparisons
Sociocultural History

SOCIAL ORIGINS OF HIGHER MENTAL PROCESSES
- Classification systems (see Australian Aborigines example)
- Internalization
- Zone of Proximal Development
- Interaction in Zone of Proximal Development