Jean Piaget came up with his stages of development theory based on the idea of assimilation and accommodation Sensorimotor stage birth 18 months is where children only use their senses to navigate the world As a result objects that are out of sight are out of mind object permanence or a lack thereof a They are conducting experiments or what Piaget calls schemes Preoperational stage 18 months 7 years of age is where children are learning language and no longer relying on their senses as much They can understand symbols and communicate more elegantly but they can t usually apply those symbols themselves a They are egocentric they literally can t comprehend a larger world beyond what b Children are flabbergasted when things change because they are so focused on how they are in the present which Piaget calls centration c Conservation tests pouring water into different containers and asking children they re seeing which is bigger Concrete operational stage 7 11 years is where children can solve conservation tests because they can picture the reversibility of the situation They can apply but they can t see the larger picture Formal operational stage 11 years adulthood is where children can imagine complex hypothetical situations Finally they see how things are connected Piaget was describing the 10 year process of becoming an expert on life While Piaget was mostly right there were some things he got wrong He thought that each stage was a mental reorganization of the brain but children can be taught different behaviors from each stage without drastically altering their thought patterns Older children sometimes revert if they are tired or distracted Children know more than what he thought Sometimes children can do one version of a task but not other versions Assimilation and Accommodation are really vague mechanisms Lev Vygotsky discussed the importance of social and cultural factors on development Specifically he discussed the zone of proximal development which refers to tasks that children can do but only with the help of an adult that help is called scaffolding these tasks push us to grow develop our skills and apply them In Jermone Bruner s Social Cognitive Theory anyone can learn anything if the proper teaching method is applied and there aren t strict stages we operate in Children progress from Enactive learning moving through the world without understanding Iconic learning moving through the world with internal icons about different things Symbolic learning understanding the full meaning of the world Benjamin Bloom s taxonomy of education 1 Knowledge of basic terms and concepts recognize 2 Comprehension 3 Application 4 Analysis which can include definition and calculation 5 Synthesize their own theories of the world with what they already know 6 Evaluate their theories The peak shift effect describes how we can recognize caricatures as people our minds average out the extremes