Active Learning

Improved Essays
Practitioners in the Early Years setting must support children as active learners in order for them to develop to their fullest potential. Active learning covers a wide range of aspects, however, it is not possible to cover them all as the subject is very extensive. Nevertheless, the following aspects of active learning will be covered: neuroscience, metacognition, schema development, social cognition, the influences of adult intervention and how children learn through play. As well as exploring the aspects of active learning, this essay will consider the challenges practitioners face when working with children under three years old.

Active learning involves basing all learning around the child in real life or imaginary situations. Children
…show more content…
Through a range of activities such as: checking current knowledge, self-testing, asking questions, revising and reflecting children will be able to boost their metacognitive skills and strategies in order to assist them to reach their highest level of learning. Children can then use their knowledge and problem-solving abilities in everyday life, for example making rules for a game. From practice this was observed when ____________ (Appendix 2). Fisher, (1995) states that there are specific practices which will assist in the development of metacognitive skills and strategies - planning, monitoring, and assessing. He believed that the planning stage was vital and should involve and include children. Through the child’s involvement, they will be able to solve problems and learn on their own, showing independence. This then links in with the guidelines for education in Scottish schools, which is called a Curriculum for Excellence (Scottish Executive, 2004). The curriculum has four capacities - successful learner, confident individual, responsible citizen and effective contributor, which are there to make sure and young people can develop the relevant skills, qualities, and knowledge needed to excel in life. One of the four capacities that relate well to metacognition is successful learners. This links as the …show more content…
Schemas are repetitive and children learn more when they are actively involved in play experiences, with a more hands on approach to learning. Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was one of the first cognitive psychologists who was interested in how cognitive structures are created and how they are linked to observed behaviors. More recently theorists Worthington and Carruthers (2003) have carried out work relating to schemas. They observed children aged four to six within a class setting and schemas were commonly detected, including enveloping, enclosing, transporting, connecting, rotating, connecting, spirals, trajectories and transformation. They found that there were patterns in the child’s schemas, with the youngest of children’s schemas bases upon their knowledge and ideas. The children were able to show they could put numbers to objects, however, this may not have been in the typical way expected. Children made symbols in a number of ways, with mark-makings showing repetitive patterns – lines, circles, triangles, arrows and crosses – which are seen in their everyday life’s. These basic marks will, therefore, become the foundation for more intricate representations as they develop. Worthington and Carruthers (2003) stated that Schematic patterns will not always develop naturally, and practitioners in

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Overtime, there have been several theorists who have made valuable contributions in how play impacts young children (“The Importance of Play,” n.d.). One theorist, Jean Piaget felt that play is the assimilation product of a child making new information fit into an existing structure that they already know and can relate to. Because Piaget felt that children cannot find a connection to new information without having to change their mental structure, he did not feel that play provides children with learning. Instead, Piaget suggested that play was a way in which a child could practice what they have learned (“The Importance of Play,”…

    • 1014 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    [ ] In clip one, the children are engaged through discussion about their prior knowledge. For example, the children are asked what they already know about predictions and are able to learn from others through discussion. Then the children are given the opportunity to identify what they already know about predictions within a small group in clip two. My instruction linked the children’s development by providing opportunities for the children to use their prior knowledge of predictions and verbally communicate their understanding as well as record through writing on a chart within a small group. After the children identified their prior knowledge, I created a bridge to the new learning by building on their understanding through using a anchor chart with new ideas for the children to learn as well.…

    • 415 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In this paper I will be exploring Piaget’s theory of cognitive development within the classroom setting. Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, theorized that, “our thinking processes change radically, though slowly, from birth to maturity because we constantly strive to make sense of the world” (Woolfolk, Winne, & Perry, 2015, p. 37). For this reason, each interaction and experience has an impact on development in early childhood. Additionally, there are three basic components to his cognitive theory that include: organization (schema), adaptations (assimilations, accommodations, equilibrium), and stages of development (Woolfolk, et al., 2015, pp.…

    • 334 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Piaget believes that children vigorously obtain information and adapt it to their prior knowledge and notions about the world they know. Therefore, children create their comprehension of actuality from their individual experiences. Piaget separated intellectual development into four separate periods that investigative the changes in child’s cognitive make up. The first stage is Sensorimotor where a child develops coordination of their senses with motor response and occurs within the first two years of life. Between the ages of two through seven the Precoperational stage takes place and children develop symbolic thinking, how to accurately use syntax, and fully use grammar to communicate complete ideas.…

    • 162 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Jean Piaget, a well-known Swiss scientist, philosopher and developmental psychologist dedicated to understanding how individuals gain knowledge. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development claims that individuals cannot be given information, which they immediately comprehend and use; instead, individuals must establish their own knowledge (Piaget,1953). He studied about cognitive development of children and adolescents and concluded that each of us are born with certain tendencies: organizing, thinking, into their own psychological schemas. He argued that children build conceptual structures in memory to store information and then they use that information to make sense of their world (Smith, Cowie, and Blades, 2015). Piaget thought in term of children becoming "little scientists" gathering data, processing, and making sense of the information (Powell, 2006).…

    • 1500 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Mark making is significance to children’s learning through imagination, symbolic play, meaning making, drawing, early writing and maps. Children that are engaged in symbolic play make meanings and show potential of the children’s understanding of symbolic language such as writing and written notation of mathematics (Vygotsky, 1978; Van Oers 2005 & Worthington, 2010). Van Oers (2005) stated that the word imagination means ‘image formation’ which means by making and using signs, where people make images from their reality. However, Pramling (2009) argued that human knowledge contains a large extent of representations and that children’s images and signs includes a more diverse range of gestures, actions, sounds, words, artefacts and graphicacy.…

    • 320 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The thinking patterns of a three-year-old preschooler vary drastically from the thinking patterns of a nine-year-old student. This comes to no surprise if you follow Piaget’s stages of cognitive thinking, it becomes obvious as to why there would be such an apparent difference between the two thinking styles. What is Piaget’s theory of cognitive development? Well, Piaget believed, based on observations that children tend to form mental concepts, or schemes, as they experience new situations. Piaget also believed that children then tried to understand the unknown in a process known as assimilation.…

    • 768 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Ideally, an educator seeks the best teaching method for his or her students; however, the debate remains, what theory is universal for teachers to use? The solution is not singular, for several theories offer exceptional suggestions on how to apply certain material that best suits the development of students. Such suggestions may come from the theories of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. Despite their differing views in cognitive development, both have contributed to the improvement of teaching methods and as a future educator, I plan to use both elements as resources to my teaching methods. Lev Vygotsky introduced what is known as Social Development Theory.…

    • 829 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Scientists and psychologists are working together on creating a robot that can be raised and taught like a baby. Children learn about the world around them by testing things out and observing the people around them. This is how they form their own opinions of our world and learn important lessons as well as experience things. The only commands and knowledge a robot has are the ones that they are programmed to know. This team’s objective is to program a baby robot to learn in the same way that human babies do.…

    • 950 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Human development is an intriguing as well as complex process that compiles what happens genetically as well as what one experiences through the aging process. Biological, cognitive, and psychosocial perspectives are each vital to our development, and each are specialized towards our individual personalities. University of Utah(2016) states that some traits are genetic and passed down from our parents, and others through experience and learning. In this essay, we will be looking at how biological, cognitive, and psychosocial perspectives have shaped my development from birth up till now. Biological perspective is how one is genetically influenced by our parents.…

    • 1717 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Essay synopsis Essay question: Jean Piaget proposed a step-wise sequence of mental development during childhood. Provide an overview of Piaget’s core ideas, discussing evidence for and against these ideas. Jean Piaget (1869-1980) started to investigate children’s development after two years of working with children in Binet’s lab (Eddy, 2010).He found that children of younger aged gave different answers than those of alder age not because they have less knowledge but because they thought differently. He describes development as sequence of stages and each of these stages represents different type of thinking occurs in variable ages in different background (Vidal, 2000)…

    • 650 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Higher education institutions are now more than ever being pushed to provide large amounts of data and information to accrediting bodies and governing boards. This push for continuous evaluation and improvement has increased the need for new ways to measure student learning and development (Kuh, Pace, and Vesper, 1997). Institutions have turned to student surveys as a convenient avenue for assessing outcomes that would be impractical or difficult to measure with existing tools (Astin, 1993). Astin (1993) also notes that survey data can assess a greater bandwidth of content in comparison to objective measures, and that in many cases objective measures can be costly and potentially biased across special populations. With these benefits in mind,…

    • 2138 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Ann’s teaching methods illustrate Piaget’s theories through… active development Cognitive development is defined by Duchesne and McMaugh (2016) as a person’s capability to consider, comprehend and evoke the environment that we live in. This is impacted by experiences with physical item and actions, and also though social interaction with people around you. This concept of the capability within children interested Piaget and he sought to identify a universal process of cognitive development through questioning how their thought processes change and evolve from birth through maturation, activity and social transformation (Duchesne & McMaugh, 2016). He focused not just on what the children know, but the particular errors that children make in…

    • 1119 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Piaget’s Developmental Theory Case Study Piaget is one of the most well-known theorists in psychology. While he was working with Alfred Binet he noticed that children of the same age got many of the same questions incorrect. It was during this time that Piaget theorized that humans develop cognitively in four stages; sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. As infants we begin in the sensorimotor stage, and chronologically proceed through the stages as we grow and develop with age. Piaget also presented the concept of schemas, which is a way in which we organize information.…

    • 1533 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Piaget was a major influence on cognitive learning theory. His theory is based on five important aspects surrounding children’s learning and development (see appendix 1). He focuses on a child’s intellectual development and created his own word ‘schemas’ (see appendix 2). Piaget suggested that a child acts their own environment “the (child’s) Solo mind taking…

    • 1165 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays