• ![[DDS course part two cognitive development 20250206.m4a]]

This section explores cognitive development through a Neo-Piagetian lens. Using Piaget’s foundational experiments, it examines how children acquire knowledge and develop reasoning skills. Later extensions, such as Lectica’s assessment framework, provide a more nuanced view of cognitive complexity across domains. Understanding these developmental stages is essential for effective teaching and assessment. However, cognitive complexity does not guarantee performance, highlighting the gap between reasoning and action.

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So this is regarding the DDS course and trying the DDS course. And trying to think through my ideas and structure for the Neo-Piagetian story today. And I think I could start by asking people how familiar they are with this, whether they know who Piaget is, whether they know about child developmental theory, yeah, how knowledgeable or familiar what they are with these topics. and then I could look at maybe I had the example of Alifaha who is a baby and she's obviously going to develop physically but maybe more interestingly cognitively, and we could look at the different ways that she's going to develop cognitively. She's going to acquire language. She's going to learn how to perceive things. But most interestingly, that's even more interesting. She's going to learn concepts. She's going to learn ways of knowing. She's going to have an epistemology. and often as adults we've kind of take that for granted we don't really reflect on how it came about and part of the genius of Piaget was that he started to inquire into how this came about so he start to actually look at how did what did children know and maybe also how did they know not just what they knew which is quite kind of the epistemological question how do we acquire knowledge what constitutes knowledge where does it come from does it come from authority God, our parents, does it come from some methodology? Does it come just simply from my experience? How do we resolve conflicts between different claims? And there's much you could say, I mean, just to illustrate, if you're not familiar, a couple of classic kind of experiments, of Piaget was one was to look at young children and ask when did they discover volume in a set so you take versus length so you take equal volumes of water and put them in different sized containers and ask the children if they were the same amount or different. And what you find with younger children is that basically taller containers are bigger, even if you've just demonstrated that the volume of water is the same. Are you taking the same glass and poured it into different? So they don really have a sense of volume as the suggestion whereas later on they do and that volume is conserved. Or take the very basic capacity it might seem of perspective taking, of physical perspective taking, being in the same position as you. And this is a classic, it's very. of Piaget to and his colleagues who look at children who are set up in it with a mountain asked to think what the for example the experimenter can see who's sitting on the opposite side from them and again turns out children around three or four can't do this and children who are about five six seven care and so we start to think that you know you know moaning many children most children go through these kind of gain these kind of skills or capacities and what emerged out of this which we have to skip a lot of is a general theory of in vicious terms skills skill acquisition general theory of skills you know hierarchical complexity of concepts. It's also an idea of like this conceptual knowledge. And it informs how we, kind of important because it informs how we reason about the world, our ability to reason about, about, something to make sense of reality in crucial ways so Yeah, I think I want to talk about lectica here. Deuthorso and colleagues, Dawson is Fisher's student. By the way, if you're into your integral metamolome, and much to process stuff. Zach Stein is basically Dawson student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. And there's, you know, in fact, he along with Dawson teach the Fola course. And that we, there we go. So I guess the question I have at the moment is I can describe it but why is it important Why is it useful to have this map Well one is if it's actually correct that children and then potentially adults develop through, children and adults develop through these stages of cognitive complexity, it's pretty important to understanding where someone is, And therefore, what they can do next. And one is actually assessing whether there's understanding, if you teach too far ahead, before there's, if you're too far ahead of the complexity level that someone's at, they're not really going to understand what you're talking about. They're going to, it's kind of going to, end up with a kind of cargo culting. So it allows you to actually pitch your teaching, it allows you to design teaching, it allows you to know whether your teaching is being effective and whatever you're doing is affected as a teacher. So the wrong assessment is also kind of distortion. You might say have no assessment, but all the few people often have some assessment. you want to know where you are there's no point just wandering around at the dark so you want an assessment that's kind of correct it's actually assessing something useful and and rather than out kind of outputs like their math ability which are ultimately very distortionary because people teach the test so you want to try to under really be trying to assess these underlying cognitive capacities. Now I also should talk about how this assessment doesn't actually work. For example, the lexicure assessment. And essentially, you're taking people someone's basically verbal output, what they're saying or what they're saying or what they're writing, and trying, you have a big dictionary of terms and kind of contextual knowledge of how the terms is used, and then you know with that time what kind of complexity level that time is at roughly. Now one of the interesting points also is about this kind of this measures of complexity It's generalizable across domains. Whether you're talking about moral reasoning, scientific reasoning, the level of complexity here is similar. I think it's worth bringing maybe a moral, Colberg moral dilemma at this point could do. So Colberg, example of the man, his name Frank so a specific name And the point that not a right answer but it the form of reasoning about the answer Okay. Ah… Ah… I know if we're gonna have an appendix about… about will over here. So yeah, so then we end up with like this lectica scale with this scoring system that has had a, yeah, had a, the lector developed. The thing I would say is, it's not clear the complexity, we'll come to that this kind of spiritual, like how's it cash out in terms of ego development, actual ability to do things in life. Okay, so yeah, there's the electric, so we kind of have a thermometer. I think the end of this we have this example. We now have the concept of temperature, we have the concept of a thermometer, and this is going to make a lot of difference so what we can do in terms of our raft work. We can now, we now have an idea of like what we're even trying to move along. what does what does movement look like we have no idea otherwise before and we can now examine the rafts we have in a rigorous way we can look at how teaching is actually performing what's happening with students in a much more detailed rigorous way and Okay, so yeah, that's cognitive complexity. And what's also important is to suggest that there's this idea, at least that this underlying measure can be used a lot of domains. Now, it is a measure of reasoning or cognitive complexity, not of performance. So you might be very morally complex in your thinking, but not morally complex in your actions. Of this course, there's some sense in which without even an aware, if you don't have even awareness, you're not able to maybe act in such and such a way, and in such a morally complex way. But it doesn't guarantee performance. You know, just be able to think in a complex way doesn't mean that you're actually. in a complex way. And that's very important to emphasize here. OK, so let's now come. So that's that item. And there might be a little many more things we could say there. Probably want to say something about phase transitions and stages, I think.

Tidied Version

Cognitive Development Section Outline

This section of the DDS course focuses on Neo-Piagetian cognitive development. To begin, I could ask participants about their familiarity with Piaget, child development theory, and related topics.

To introduce cognitive development, I might use the example of Aletheya, a baby. While she will obviously develop physically, her cognitive development is perhaps even more intriguing. She will acquire language, learn to perceive the world, develop concepts, and ultimately, form an epistemology— a way of knowing. As adults, we often take for granted how we acquired our ways of thinking. One of Piaget’s key insights was to systematically investigate how cognitive abilities emerge in children.

This brings us to fundamental epistemological questions:

• How do we acquire knowledge?
• What constitutes knowledge?
• Where does it come from—authority, experience, methodology?
• How do we resolve conflicting claims?

Key Piagetian Experiments

To illustrate these concepts, we can look at classic Piagetian experiments:

1. Conservation of Volume

   • Children are shown equal volumes of water in identical containers.
   • When poured into differently shaped containers, younger children often assert that the taller container holds more water.
   • This demonstrates that early on, children lack an understanding of volume conservation.

2. Perspective-Taking

   • A child is seated opposite an experimenter with a model mountain in between them.
   • The child is asked to describe what the experimenter sees.
   • Younger children (around 3-4 years old) struggle to recognize the experimenter's perspective, whereas older children (5-7 years) can.

From these experiments, Piaget proposed a structured theory of cognitive development involving the hierarchical complexity of concepts.

Beyond Piaget: Lectica & Neo-Piagetian Theory

Later researchers, such as Fischer, Dawson and others, extended Piaget’s ideas. Theo Dawson a student of Fischer Harvard, has further developed these theories in the context of adult development

Why does this matter?
Understanding developmental stages helps in:

• Teaching effectively: If instruction is too advanced for a learner’s cognitive stage, they may not grasp the concepts and resort to rote learning.
• Assessing learning accurately: Traditional assessments often distort learning by focusing on surface-level outputs rather than deep cognitive development.

Lectica’s Approach to Assessment Lectica uses written and spoken responses to gauge cognitive complexity. By analyzing language patterns and contextual usage, the system determines a person's developmental stage.

The Generalizability of Cognitive Complexity

Cognitive complexity applies across domains, whether in:

• Moral reasoning (e.g., Kohlberg’s moral dilemmas)
• Scientific reasoning
• General problem-solving

It is crucial to note that cognitive complexity does not equate to performance. One may have highly sophisticated moral reasoning but fail to act accordingly. Awareness alone does not ensure action.

Final Reflections

By developing a structured understanding of cognitive development, we gain a conceptual framework—like a thermometer for measuring growth. This allows us to:

• Assess and refine teaching methods.
• Examine how individuals progress in reasoning.
• Apply cognitive development principles across multiple domains.

A further area to explore is the idea of phase transitions in cognitive development, which could deepen our understanding of how people shift from one stage to another.

Course Module Outline: Cognitive Development

1. Introduction

• Ask participants about their familiarity with Piaget and cognitive development.
• Discuss the relevance of cognitive development in understanding knowledge acquisition.
• 🖼️ Example: Alifaha, a baby, developing cognitive abilities.

2. Piaget’s Key Insights

• Concept of cognitive development as structured and hierarchical
• Epistemological questions:
  • How do we acquire knowledge?
  • How do we differentiate between competing claims?

3. Piagetian Experiments

• Conservation of Volume
  • Water in different containers; younger children misunderstand volume conservation.
  • 🖼️ Demonstration or video of this experiment.
• Perspective-Taking
  • Model mountain experiment; younger children struggle to adopt another’s viewpoint.
  • 🖼️ Interactive activity: Participants describe an object from different perspectives.

4. Extending Piaget: Lectica & Neo-Piagetian Theory

• Key figures: Dawson, Fisher, and Stein
• Lectica’s approach to assessing cognitive complexity
  • Analysis of language use to determine reasoning level.
  • 🖼️ Example assessment question to illustrate.

5. Applications of Cognitive Complexity

• Education & Teaching
  • Tailoring instruction to cognitive development stages.
  • Preventing rote learning (avoiding “cargo culting”).
  • 🖼️ Case study: A curriculum designed with cognitive stages in mind.
• Assessment & Measurement
  • Why traditional assessments can be misleading.
  • How developmental assessments provide deeper insights.
• Generalizability Across Domains
  • Moral reasoning (Kohlberg’s dilemmas).
  • Scientific reasoning and problem-solving.
  • 🖼️ Example: A moral dilemma story for participants to analyze.

6. Limits of Cognitive Complexity

• Reasoning vs. Action
  • High cognitive complexity ≠ moral action or effective decision-making.
  • Awareness does not guarantee transformation.
  • 🖼️ Example: A historical or contemporary figure who had deep reasoning but acted differently.

7. Phase Transitions in Development

• How shifts between stages occur
• Implications for adult learning and transformation
• Possible research directions

8. Conclusion & Reflection

• Prompt questions for participants:
  • How does this framework relate to your own learning experiences?
  • Have you encountered situations where cognitive development stages affected comprehension?
  • How might this understanding influence teaching or communication strategies?

This outline ensures a comprehensive exploration of cognitive development, integrating classic theories with contemporary extensions.