Cognitive Development and General Knowledge
Cognitive development is the process that occurs as thinking and reasoning develop and become more complex over time. Early learning standards for cognitive development are based on the broad assumption put forth by the National Education Goals Panel (NEGP) that “cognition and general knowledge represent the accumulation and reorganization of experiences that result from participating in a rich learning setting with skilled and appropriate adult intervention. From these experiences children construct knowledge of patterns and relations, cause and effect, and methods of solving problems in everyday life” (Kagan, Moore, & Bredekamp, 1995, p. 4). In other words, cognition includes the various ways in which humans know and represent their understanding of the world.
According to cognitive psychologists, there are three different kinds of interrelated knowledge:
- Physical knowledge consists of concepts about physical properties observed through first-hand experience. Examples of how children might gain physical knowledge include learning about colors by mixing paints or using an ice cube tray and freezer to learn that water can change from a liquid to a solid and back again.
- Logicomathematical knowledge consists of mentally constructed relationships about comparisons and associations between and among objects, people, and events. This is the least understood and most complicated cognitive process. Examples include a child sorting a group of small cars, who must apply criteria that make sense to him, such as color, to separate them into logical groups. He may then put them back into a pile and resort them according to size, while another child might divide them into groups of cars of different sizes or by which cars go fast or slow.
- Social-conventional knowledge consists of arbitrarily agreed upon conventions that provide a means for representing or expressing physical and logicomathematical knowledge (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969). The conventions may vary by culture or group; examples include the names of numbers or letters.