Examples Of Cognitive Development In Childhood And Adolescence

Cognitive Development in Childhood and Adolescence
Zheng Kejia
Wenzhou-Kean University

Introduction Cognitive development refers to the development of human’s ability to conduct mental activities to think and use knowledge. Researchers and psychologists attach great importance to figure out how human’s cognition develops over time, especially during childhood and adolescence. The results and theories concluded in this area could make a great contribution to high quality education and the mental health of children and teenagers. Cognitive development highly relies on the growth and maturation of human’s brain (Paus, 2005). In childhood and adolescence, individual’s cerebral neurons and synapses develop rapidly.

This could be explained by “the experiments in which children watch someone pouring colored water back and forth between a 200 ml beaker and a 500 ml beaker”. In this experiment, a four-year-old boy might not understand the volume of the colored water does not change. Instead, he may hold the view that the beaker with a higher water level has more water. However, after the boy becomes 6 years old, he will be able to understand why the water levels of the two beakers are different (Simatwa, 2010). Therefore, in this process, children could gradually learn

His theory changed how people viewed children’s behaviors and inspired other researchers to study this field, which has increased people’s understanding of cognitive development in childhood and adolescence. More importantly, people have learned how to understand and communicate with children and adolescences based on his ideas, which greatly helps the development of education. Teachers should lead children to pay attention to the process of learning rather than the results. Children and adolescences should also be encouraged to work in individual as well as in groups. Evaluating the level of student’s cognition is also important in order to assign suitable