European and Western Theory

Theory of cognitive development has historically been European or European-American, as presented in textbooks used in Canadian universities (e.g., Flavell, Miller & Miller, 2002; Gauvain, 2022; Siegler & Alibali, 2019). From a cultural perspective, it is no more appropriate to subsume entire cultures under the continental framework of Europe alone than it is to do so on any other continent. So, as we consider theoretical perspectives, we differentiate between Eastern and Western European models and from which countries they emerge.

Cognitive development textbooks typically cover European and European-American psychology-based approaches such as:

• Constructivist (Jean Piaget)
• Information processing
• Theory Theory
• Dynamic Systems
• Socioculturalist theories (Lev Vygotsky)

If you are interested in these theoretical approaches, any of these texts will provide you with more detail. But for the goals of this text, I am highlighting Piaget and information processing as central psychology-based theories due to their particular impact on Western models of education.

I have already indicated the centrality of sociocultural theory as the predominant lens for this text, so I turn to that perspective in a section of its own and as an example of an Eastern European theory.

Piaget and Constructivism

Perhaps the most often referred to theory of Western Europe is that of Jean Piaget. As you have all read in your introductory courses in both psychology and developmental psychology, he was a Swiss biologist who took a great interest in stages of development that seemed to mirror physical developmental stages.

He was largely critiqued on two key aspects of his perspective: first, he did little empirical work (i.e., studies), and those he did were on his own middle-class Swiss children; and second, he relied very heavily on stages and proposed that they were universal.

So, this theory is firmly rooted in Western European culture, developed by an upper-middle-class scholar whose own training was first in the biological sciences. Piagetian constructivism provides new insights and methodologies to understand children’s thinking; but like all theories, this approach has its limitations.

For students in education, Piaget is a theorist who is covered in all developmental psychology textbooks, and, for some yet again, in introduction to psychology. Therefore, I do not dwell in tremendous detail here, but I wish to outline some key contributions of his model and some limitations that might be helpful as we consider constructivism as one of many theories about how children think.

Contributions of Piaget

As previously noted and outlined in the three main textbooks (Siegler & Alibali, 2019; Flavell, Miller & Miller, 2002; Gauvain, 2022), Piaget’s theory began with ideas of the stages of development as seen in Darwin’s theory of evolution. This led him to theorize that children undergo four stages of development that are qualitatively different from one another and largely driven by biological changes with some necessary interaction with the environment (more on this later).

The stages (as you may have learned from previous courses) were the sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational. Looking at childhood in this way identified some important developmental differences in thinking.

It is important to note that Piaget’s theory does not encompass child development but rather cognition. As we consider the theory’s limitations, it’s important to keep in mind the goals and scope of the theory.

Another contribution of Piaget’s theory was its constructivist nature. That is, he proposed that we “construct” our own cognitive development using two integrated systems: one that is internal or biologically determined (although he did his work at a time when brain science was in its infancy, it is presumed that much of what he was thinking was inherited or developed according to a timeframe that was indeed related to brain development) and another that is environmental.

The environmental piece was then further differentiated into two sources: stimuli in the environment and interactions with others. Piaget did not emphasize interaction with others; rather, he emphasized interaction with objects in the environment. In this way, he saw children as “little scientists” experimenting with materials that enabled them to learn about their world and how it works from their own sort of empirical testing. He acknowledged that other people played a role, but this was largely restricted to facilitating the child’s exploration or their own construction of understandings and, consequently, of the development of their own thinking.

Pause here and think about what cultural assumptions such a model is making, or perhaps how it “views the child” or what values it seems to embody.

In his theory, Piaget also identified mechanisms of how this development was constructed and how it was also based on Darwin’s theory of evolution. He used Darwin’s term adaptation to describe how our minds change when they encounter something new in the environment in order to “fit” better with the environment. We can encounter some information similar to what we already know, which means we can assimilate it into our existing systems of understanding; or if we don’t have a system for understanding this new information, we can only compare it to what we have. Suppose there is a difference between what we observe and what we currently understand; we have to change or adapt our thinking to achieve a better “fit” with the environment, just as organisms change over time in Darwin’s theory to better fit their environment.

When we make such a change, it is called accommodation — we have to change to accommodate the difference between what we know and the new information we see. This construct may be useful when we think of how young children learn and encounter so many new things in a day. Perhaps there is, in a broad sense, a sort of matching up of familiar and unfamiliar information to form a growing body of knowledge and understanding.

Finally, a contribution many refer to of Piaget is his scientific method. He developed a way of talking to children that actually came from therapy, whereby he gave space and time for children to respond to stimuli, prompts, and questions. He developed many interesting experiments with children to measure their thinking, and we will revisit those in subsequent chapters.

Limitations of Piaget’s Constructivism

A lot of what limits the ability to use this theory of thinking fully for all children’s thinking, as Piaget had intended, is precisely the topic of this book: culture. Above, I asked you to reflect on how you understood the values of the theory. I will now suggest that the values are the cultural underpinnings, and they are highly specific:

• Individualism
• Objects and materials
• Science
• End-states

Let’s start with individualism. Western values have long centered on individuals, dating back to Ancient Greece, when Aristotle developed a method of teaching that centred on debate and the teacher engaging a student to determine their own perspective and opinion (Sunday Greve, 2015). This approach is very much individual-based, with the assumption that every person brings unique thoughts to a topic, and that that topic can then be argued about from competing perspectives. These cultural values of individualism and competition have formed the cornerstone of Western thought for so long that it can be difficult to identify the many ways in which it underlies theory and other constructs. I would argue that even the children’s rights movement is largely driven by individualist values (Myers, 2001) and can therefore be difficult for people from collectivist cultures to understand.

[*] Asian and African countries comprise a significant majority of the world’s population. Think about the impact of using a Piagetian model of thinking in the development of learning materials for collectivist cultures.

Consider the other values listed above (i.e., objects and materials, science, end-states) with reference to what you wrote in your first reflection. We will revisit this topic in discussion. We will also continue to explore how culturally specific theories may resonate within the culture in which they were developed — but they may not be applicable in the same way to children outside of that culture. If we avoid categorizing theories as useful or not (unless they espouse dangerous ideas that may be harmful to others), we can learn from a broad range of perspectives on children’s thinking in a dynamic and applied way.

Information Processing (IP)

The information processing (IP) approach is another Western theory that has had a very strong impact on schooling and how we support children’s thinking in the Western world. It will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5, but I’ll briefly highlight it here.

The IP approach is characterized by an analogy that imagines the human mind operating like a computer, as depicted in the interactive diagram below.

You may immediately think this is a narrow way of viewing children’s thinking, and you’d be correct! The theory focuses on the actual processing that is going on and does not purport to explain all that there is to know about children’s thinking. However, some details about how it explains our processing provide useful distinctions about information and the role of memory.

The Role of Memory in IP

The focus on memory is perhaps one of the most important aspects of this Western theory of children’s thinking. In the computer model, you will note that as information comes in through the senses, or the “keyboard,” it must be held in memory to be processed by the “computer.”

But what if you have to remember what you just saw and then remember what you already know in order to learn?

For example, when you read a word on a page (like “cat”), you have to:

• Identify each letter
• Sound out the word
• Recall from your long-term storage of ideas just what a “cat” is (i.e., a small, furry, domesticated animal)

Therefore, IP identifies different kinds of memory and different ways of processing that memory. For example, the letters and sounds are part of long-term memory but are not necessarily linked to early childhood. So, a child has to recognize a given letter from long-term memory and match it with a sound they have experienced auditorily. For an adult, this is automatized, but for a child, it requires a lot of working memory. We will discuss working memory and other types of memory in Chapter 5.

Cultural Limitations of IP

The Western value of using decontextualized scientific approaches to understand complex behaviour is very evident in this approach. You can probably generate other specific cultural values evident in such a theory.

The theory does not consider the role that people play, that child interest plays, or that many other environmental features play. It is a theory that is highly focused on memory — sometimes referred to as a “memory model,” — so its limitations may be partly cultural but also intentional in the sense that it is, as was mentioned before, not purporting to cover all children’s thinking.

Sociocultural and Anthropological Perspectives

There are several theories of human development that take into account social and cultural factors, but not all of them are focused on cognition or thinking.

Bronfenbrenner and Vygotsky

Urie Bronfenbrenner was a developmental psychologist whose theory of lifespan development was much broader and intended to look at all aspects of development, unlike the Western theories on thinking discussed above. Bronfenbrenner was Russian, which is very important from a cultural perspective. His theory embodies a complex interaction of social, biological, and individual factors that work in a complex way together to impact a person’s development. The social and cultural embeddedness of the individual among others — and within political, historical, familial, and institutional constructs — starkly contrasts with Piaget’s theory, which focuses on an individual child engaging in concentrated mental activity. While Bronfenbrenner is not directly part of the cognitive development story for our textbook, he is indirectly very important as a counter-narrative to Western thinking rooted in individualism.

Around the same time (the turn of the 19th century), Lev Vygotsky developed his sociocultural theory. Like Bronfenbrenner, he was of Russian heritage, and Eastern European collectivist values permeated his theory. Both theorists emphasized complex social (e.g., interaction with others) and cultural (e.g., environments, objects, practices) factors in how children’s thinking developed. Unlike Bronfenbrenner, Vygotsky did not seek to understand the full nature of human development — he, like Piaget, was focused on children’s thinking. So, while Brofenbrenner and Vygotsky were both white European men, they brought very different cultural values to their theoretical models of child development  than many other Western theorists, such as Piaget.

Vygotsky’s (1978) theory is built around two key assumptions: that children’s thinking develops in a cultural context and for a social purpose. This is extremely important, and in no previous textbook have I found this two-fold conceptual structure to be adequately spelled out or emphasized.

Many students, therefore, believe Vygotsky thought that culture was important when studying children’s thinking or that it is important to consider social interactions. For Vygotsky, the very mechanism of cognitive development was through social interaction and could never be separated from it, and the very tools through which it occurred were cultural. Specifically, Vygotsky emphasized language as a central means through which children gained abstract understandings, but that fundamentally, children’s thinking developed as they interacted with older, more experienced children or adults around them.

You may recall from studying his theory in the past the following terms:

• Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD): This is defined as the distance between what a child can do on their own and what they can do when supported by a more experienced person.
• Scaffolding: This is not Vygotsky’s term but was coined by Jerome Bruner (another socioculturalist), who explained it as the support needed in the ZPD; i.e., the process by which more experienced people adjust a difficult task so that it is only just attainable by a less experienced person through some support.
• Cultural tools: These are instruments that are created within a particular culture and are used in social interactions to support children’s development. They may include concrete items such as blocks or abstract items such as an alphabet.
• Attention, sensation, perception and memory: These are what we inherit at birth, but they must be used in interaction with more knowledgeable partners for a child to develop cognitively.

Therefore, in Vygotsky’s theory, any given child will have different cultural tools at their disposal — perhaps they are related to farming, or perhaps they are related to an emphasis on literacy. Then, that child would be supported in their use and understanding of the world through social interactions around culturally valued practices and phenomena using such cultural tools.

As Vygotsky would say, we are born with four core mental abilities., But it is only through the highly specific cultural context in which we grow up that we develop such abilities that enable us to thrive within that specific culture. In all cases, the development occurs in social interaction with others who are more experienced. However, one thing was for certain: Vygotsky was not a universalist, which is in stark contrast to Piaget.

Barbara Rogoff

But like Piaget and many theorists of his generation, Vygotsky was not known for having done research. Instead, he constructed ideas that would then need to be applied in real-life situations and across different cultures to assess their validity and to also reveal the kinds of culture-specific understandings he wrote which are critical to understanding children’s thinking.

A newer generation of socioculturalists, such as Barbara Rogoff and Jerome Bruner, did, however, advance Vygotsky’s ideas and carry out research using his ideas. Because this book situates itself most centrally in sociocultural theory, I now turn to ideas that help to flesh out theory that emerges not only from continued thought but from actual studies of diverse cultures. In particular, I turn to Barbara Rogoff, a socioculturalist who has worked in child development in collaboration with many colleagues and students of a diverse range of cultures. I have already indicated her centrality to my thinking in the previous chapter, but here I highlight some key concepts that help us to understand the ideas of Vygotsky and beyond.

Barbara Rogoff’s Apprenticeship in Thinking (1990) outlines examples and a description of how thinking develops in the kinds of social interactions rooted in cultural contexts that Vygotsky conceptualized. Specifically, she identifies the “apprenticeship model” in which young children learn by observing older children and adults.

Just as Vygotsky had proposed, children engage in adult-like activities as novices under the supervision and guidance of the “expert” (or older peer or adult). In this way, children are engaged in social interactions that act as a mechanism for cognitive development, and their development is, therefore, rooted in the goals of a given community. This means that from culture to culture, there are different emphases on different kinds of thinking and tasks, so the model for children’s thinking will not be the same across cultures.

Indeed, Rogoff has found such differences in many cultures over the years through her many collaborations, and we will explore some of those studies in this volume. But for your secondary reading for this topic, you will get a chance to read Rogoff’s work as a framing chapter for the current volume. In her work here, she collaborates with several authors to address more nuanced ways of understanding what the interactional mechanisms of cognitive development are, and she and her colleagues do so through looking at Indigenous cultures of the Americas (Mejı ́a-Arauz, Rogoff, Dayton, & Henne-Ochoa, 2018).