Main Points To Note About Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development Piaget, one of the most influential cognitive theorists, believed that Understanding is motivated by trying to balance what we sense in the world and what we know in our minds. Understanding is organized through creating categories of knowledge. When presented with new knowledge we may add new schema or modify existing ones. Children’s understanding of the world of the world changes are their cognitive skills mature through four stages: sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concreate operational stage, and formal operational stage.

A reinforcer is something that encourages or promotes a behavior. Some things are natural rewards. They are considered intrinsic or primary because their value is easily understood. Think of what kinds of things babies or animals such as puppies find rewarding. Extrinsic or secondary reinforcers are things that have a value not immediately understood. Their value is indirect. They can be traded in for what is ultimately desired. The use of positive reinforcement involves adding something to a situation in order to encourage a behavior. For example, if I give a child a cookie for cleaning a room, the addition of the cookie makes cleaning more likely in the future. Think of ways in which you positively reinforce others. Negative reinforcement occurs when taking something unpleasant away from a situation encourages behavior. For example, I have an alarm clock that makes a very unpleasant, loud sound when it goes off in the morning. As a result, I get up and turn it off. By removing the noise, I am reinforced for getting up. How do you negatively reinforce others?

Erikson was a student of Freud but focused on conscious thought. His stages of psychosocial development address the entire lifespan and suggest primary psychosocial crisis in some cultures that adults can use to understand how to support children’s social and emotional development. The stages include: trust vs. mistrust, autonomy vs. shame and doubt, initiative vs. guilt, industry vs. inferiority, identity vs. role confusion, intimacy vs. isolation, generativity vs. stagnation, and integrity vs. despair.

Main Points to Note About Freud’s Psychosexual Theory Freud believed that: Development in the early years has a lasting impact. There are three parts of the self: the id, the ego, and the superego People go through five stages of psychosexual development: the oral stage, the anal stage, the phallic stage, latency, and the genital stage We study Freud because his assumptions the importance of early childhood experience provide a framework for later theories (the both elaborated and contradicted/challenged