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Theories Of Cognitive Development And Comment On Impact On Education

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Describe and evaluate some theories of cognitive development and comment on the impact they have had on education.

This essay will describe and evaluate two of the main three theories concerning cognitive development and comment on how they have impacted education. Cognitive development is the mental process in which we think and how we remember, problem solving and decision making. There are three main theorists that have a theory on cognitive development, Piaget, Vygotsky and Bruner. Piaget and Vygotsky are the two main theorist whose theories will be described and evaluated within this essay Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who researched how people learn and how people’s knowledge grows and did many experiments to back up his research. Lev Vygotsky is another theorist who researched how a child develops and how there language develops as they get older.
Piaget’s theory for a people to cognitively develop contains three basic components. The first component is a schema, a schema is a cognitive structure that builds as we learn. He believed we develop a schema to organize the knowledge we have and the knowledge that we were learning.
His next component is how we learn, we start with a new experience which leads to assimilation, this is when we use “an existing schema to deal with a new object or situation.” (Mc Leod, S. (2015)). This will then lead to disequilibrium, this is where there is an “imbalance between what is understood and what is encountered.” (The

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