EDUCATIONAL

PSYCHOLOGY
LEARNING
LEARNING
 Learning is the acquisition of new behaviour or
strengthening of old behaviour as result of experience. –
Kingsley and Garrey.
 The term learning covers every modification in behaviour to
meet environmental requirements. – Gardner Murphy.
 Learning is the process by which behaviour is originated or
changes through practice and learning. – Kingsley and
Garrey.
COGNITIVE AND LEARNING
DEVELOPMENT
CONSTRUCTIVISM

What is meant by constructivism?

Constructivism refers to the idea that
learners construct knowledge for themselves
each learner individually (and socially)
constructs meaning as he or she learns.
Constructivist Principles of Learning
•Learning is an active process in which the learner uses
sensory input and constructs meaning out of it.
•People learn to learn as they learn
•The crucial action of constructing meaning is mental
•Learning involves language
•Learning is a social activity
•Learning is contextual
Constructivist Approach to Learning
Constructivism is a new approach in education that claims
humans are better able to understand the information they
have constructed by themselves. According to constructivist
theories, learning is a social advancement that involves
language, real world situations, and interaction and
collaboration among learners. The learners are considered
to be central in the learning process. Learning is affected by
our prejudices, experiences, the time in which we live, and
both physical and mental maturity.
Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky are two eminent
figures in the development of constructivist
theories. They share the common belief that
classrooms must be constructivist
environments; however, there are differences in
terms of their theories and variations as to how
constructivism should be carried out in
classrooms.
 THEORIES OF COGNITIVE
DEVELOPMENT

According to Piaget, human beings inherit

two essential intellectual functions which he
called organization and adaptation.
1. Organization is inborn and automatic, and it refers to the child’s
tendency to arrange available schemata into coherent systems or
body of knowledge. Children are constantly rearranging their
existing knowledge to produce new and more complex cognitive
structures (Gines, et al., 1998).

2. Adaptation is the child’s tendency to adjust to the demands of the

environment.
This occurs in two ways:
a. Assimilation is interpreting or understanding environment events
in terms of one’s existing cognitive structures and ways of thinking.
b. Accommodation is changing one’s existing cognitive structures and
ways of thinking to apprehend environment events.
 STAGES OF COGNITIVE
DEVELOPMENT
Piaget divided cognitive development into four stages:
sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational
and formal operational. He outlined this theory that
follows an increasingly adaptive behavior mechanism
from diffused to generalized responses of the patterns
of behavior. He said that all children pass through
these stages in this order and that no child can skip a
stage.
1. SENSORIMOTOR STAGE (Birth to 2
years).

During this stage, children acquire knowledge through

sensory experiences and performing actions
accordingly. This is entirely unconscious, self-
unaware, and non-symbolic cognition.

There are six divisions of this stage:

a. Reflexes (0 to 1 month). These refer to the behavioral
foundation upon which more complex behaviors are based. They
develop when applied to a wider variety of stimuli and events.

b. Schemes (1 to 4 months). These refer to an organized pattern

of behavior which the child interacts and comes to know his
world. This substage coordinates and integrates previously
independent schemes such as visual and auditory.

c. Procedure (4 to 8 months). The schemes are directed outward

and develop into procedures of interesting behaviors that
produce interesting effects in the world. Procedure gets
repeated.
d. Intentional Behavior (8-12 months). Prior to this substage, child
produces some outcome from his behavior and repeats it. Now, the
child wants to produce a particular result then figures out the
action.

e. Experimentation (12-18 months). Experimentation is the child’s

trial-and-error exploration of the world to discover new and
different ways of acting on it. Here the child produces new actions
and observes the effects.

f. Representation (18-24 months). Before this substage, all actions

and results occur externally. In this substage, the child begins to
think about and acting on the world internally. This is called
deferred imitation.
2. PREOPERATIONAL STAGE (2 to 6 years).
During this stage, children develop their capacity to
employ symbol, particularly language. Because of
symbols, they are no longer limited to the stimuli that
are immediately present and they use these symbols
to portray the external world internally. In this stage,
children also develop their ability to conserve the
qualitative and quantitative identify of objects even
when they change perceptually.
3. CONCRETE OPERATIONAL STAGE
(6-12 years).
Children are more logical and able to complete task not able to
perform in preoperational period. Thinking is still with real or
concrete objects and actions, and not yet abstract thinking. This is
the beginning of rational activity in children. They come to master
various logical operations including arithmetic, class and set
relationships, measurement, and conceptions of hierarchical
structures (Gines, et al., 1998). Child mastered by age 6 the
Conservation of Number and he mastered by age 8 or 9 the
Conservation of Length and Weight.
4. FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGE (12
years and over).

Children develop their abstract thinking. It is

their ability to think logically about things
that are only possible and not necessarily
real or concrete. They also develop their
hypothetical-deductive reasoning.
 VYGOTSKY’S SOCIO-CULTURAL
THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Lev S. Vygotsky’s theory emphasizes that social
interaction plays a vital role in cognitive
development. His theory basically means that
development depends on interaction with people
and the tools that the culture provides to help form
their own view of the world (Gallagher , 1999).
These cultural tools can be transmitted to three
ways. These are:
1. Imitative Learning- a person tries to imitate or copy
another person.

2. Instructed Learning- a person remembers the instructions

of the teacher and then uses them to self-regulate.

3. Collaborative Learning- a group of person who strive to

understand each other and they work together to learn a
specific skills. He believed that children are born with
elementary mental abilities such as perception, attention
and memory. His theory also states that language plays a
vital role in cognitive development. Within his theory, he
identified three stages in children’s use of language:
1. Social speech- speech used by children for purpose
of communication to other people.

2. Egocentric speech- speech that is more intellectual

and children use this by verbalizing their ideas.

3. Inner speech- speech used by children to think in

their minds about their problem or task, instead of
verbalizing their ideas in order to solve their problem or
to decide what to do next.
His Socio-Cultural Theory also refers to the
difference between what a learner can do
independently and what can be done with other’s
guidance. He called this as Zone of Proximal
Development (ZPD). He assumed that interactions
with adults or peers in the zone of proximal
development help children move to higher levels of
mental functioning within the classroom (Meece,
2002).
ZPD is associated with scaffolding. The concept of
scaffolding was introduced by Wood and
Middleton. It is defined as a learner to
concentrate on those elements of the task that
are initially beyond his capacity and complete
only those elements that are within his range of
competence. According to Wood and Middleton,
scaffolding becomes most effective when the
assistance is correlated to the needs of the
learner (McLeod, 2012).