Deck 6: A: Theories of Cognitive Development

Question 1

A weakness of Piaget's theory is that it undervalues the influence of the sociocultural environment on cognitive development.

Answer 1

True

Question 2

Common symbols used by children in the preoperational stage include words, gestures, graphs, maps, and models.

Answer 2

True

Question 3

Concrete operational thinking is identical to adult thinking in that children are able to think abstractly and hypothetically for the first time.

Answer 3

False

Question 4

Educational applications of Piaget's theory include facilitating rather than directing children's learning, sensitivity to children's readiness to learn, and emphasis on discovery learning.

Question 5

Preoperational children typically believe that others see the world, both literally and figuratively, exactly as they do, a concept known as egocentrism.

Question 6

Scaffolding matches the amount of assistance to the learner's needs.

Question 7

According to Piaget, infants are born with object permanence, the ability to understand that objects exist independently.

Question 8

Some children move through the stages more rapidly than others, depending on their ability and experiences.

Question 9

Concrete operational children are able to reverse their thinking, which allows them to perform conservation tasks that preoperational children cannot.

Question 10

According to Piaget, cognitive development occurs in eight stages.

Question 11

According to Piaget, adolescents and adults acquire more knowledge as they grow older, but their fundamental way of thinking remains unchanged.

Question 12

The first indication of purposeful, goal-directed behaviour occurs during infancy at around eight months of age.

Question 13

Assimilation and accommodation are usually in balance, or equilibrium.

Question 14

Preoperational children are able to juggle multiple aspects of a problem at the same time, thus correcting the centration that is seen in the sensorimotor stage.

Question 15

For Piaget, children at all ages are like scientists in that they create theories about how the world works.

Question 16

Formal operational thinkers can envision alternate realities and examine their consequences. They can create hypotheses and test them.

Question 17

One of the weaknesses of Piaget's theory is that it overestimates cognitive competence in infants and young children and underestimates cognitive competence in adolescents.

Question 18

One of Piaget's greatest contributions to teaching was constructivism, the view that children are active participants in their own development.

Question 19

Smart children can skip one of Piaget's stages.

Question 20

According to Vygotsky, the difference between what a child can do independently and what a child can do with assistance defines the zone of proximal development.

Question 21

Core-knowledge theories propose distinctive domains of development, some of which are acquired early in life.

Question 22

Sensory memory holds information the longest of the three types of memory.

Question 23

Infants could reasonably be described as "accomplished naïve physicists."

Question 24

Comments that are not intended for others but are used by children to regulate their own behaviour are known as private speech.

Question 25

According to information-processing, as children grow, they develop better strategies, increased capacity of working memory, and more effective executive function.

Question 26

Unlike adults, four-year-old children do not understand that animals grow (get physically bigger and more complex) but that inanimate objects do not change in this way.

Question 27

Adults' theories of living things begin in infancy when babies first distinguish animate objects from inanimate objects.

Question 28

A four-year-old is not capable of realizing that a baby pig that is adopted by a cow would grow up to look and behave like a pig.

Question 29

Inhibitory processes prevent relevant information from entering working memory.

Question 30

Long-term memory is like a computer's hard drive, a fairly permanent storehouse of programs and data.

Question 31

Children's naïve theories of biology are composed of six elements: movement, growth, internal parts, inheritance, illness, and healing.

Question 32

When a skill has been mastered, individual steps are no longer stored in working memory, which means that more capacity is available for other activities.

Question 33

Cross-cultural studies have shown that scaffolding occurs only in industrialized nations.

Question 34

Piaget claimed that understanding of objects develops slowly, however, modern researchers have shown that babies understand objects much earlier than Piaget claimed.

Question 35

Research has shown that infants as young as one year do not have an understanding of intentionality, but by age two, children understand that people's behaviour is often intentional.

Question 36

Infants are incapable of realizing that objects in mid-air should fall or that objects cannot move through other objects.

Question 37

Preschoolers' naïve theories of biology are complex but incomplete. For instance they believe that plants are not living things.

Question 38

According to core-knowledge theorists, some forms of knowledge, such as language, are so important for survival that specialized systems have evolved to simplify their learning.

Question 39

Baillargeon found that infants as young as four and a half months showed object permanence in that they consistently looked longer at an unrealistic event than a realistic one.

Question 40

Executive functioning is synonymous with skilled problem solving in that it involves a plan, often requires flexibility, and the ability to inhibit irrelevant responses.