| accommodation | A term used by Piaget to describe how children change existing schemes by altering old ways of thinking or acting to fit new information in their environment; contrast with assimilation.
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| adaptation | One of two basic principles referred to by Piaget as invariant functions; the ability of all organisms to adapt their mental representations or behavior to fit environmental demands; contrast with organization.
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| animism | According to Piaget, children's inclination during the preoperational stage to attribute intentional states and human characteristics to inanimate objects.
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| assimilation | A term used by Piaget to describe how children mold new information to fit their existing schemes in order to better adapt to their environment; contrast with accommodation.
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| circular reactions | Piaget's term for patterns of behavior during the sensorimotor stage that are repeated over and over again as goal-directed actions.
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| centration | A developmental limitation present during the preoperational stage that makes young children focus their attention on only one aspect, usually the most salient, of a stimulus.
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| cognitive behavior modification | Meichenbaum's developmental program that helps children control and regulate their behavior; children are taught self-regulatory strategies to use as a verbal tool to inhibit impulses, control impulses and frustration, and promote reflection.
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| collective monologue | A characteristic conversational pattern of preschoolers who are unable to take the perspective of others and thus make little effort to modify their speech for their listener so that remarks to each other seem unrelated.
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| concrete operational stage | The period of life from 7 to 11 years old when, Piaget believed, children's thinking becomes less rigid, and they begin to use mental operations, such as classification, conservation, and seriation to think about events and objects in their environment.
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| conservation | A mental operation in the concrete operational stage that involves the understanding that an entity remains the same despite superficial changes in its form or physical appearance.
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| constructivist approach | An approach to learning which purports that children must construct their own understandings of the world in which they live. Teachers guide this process through focusing attention, posing questions, and stretching children's thinking; information must be mentally acted on, manipulated, and transformed by learners in order to have meaning.
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| egocentrism | The tendency to think about, see, and understand the world from one's own perspective; an inability to see objects or situations from another's perspective.
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| egocentric speech | One of three stages of children's use of language identified by Vygotsky during which children begin to use speech to regulate their behavior and thinking through spoken aloud self-verbalizations; contrast with social speech and inner speech.
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| equilibration | Piaget's concept that refers to our innate tendency of self-regulation to keep our mental representations in balance by adjusting them to maintain organization and stability in our environment through the processes of accommodation and*assimilation.
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| formal operational stage | During the period of life between 11 and 12 years of age and onward during which, Piaget believed, children begin to apply formal rules of logic and to gain the ability to think abstractly and reflectively; thinking shifts from the real to the possible; see formal logic.
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| guided participation | Rogoff's term used to describe transferring responsibility for a task from the skilled partner to the child in a mutual involvement between the child and the partner in a collective activity. Steps include choosing and structuring activities to fit the child's skills and interests; supporting and monitoring the child's participation; and adjusting the level of support provided as the child begins to perform the activity independently.
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| hierarchial classification | A mental operation learned during the concrete operational stage that allows children to organize concepts and objects according to how they relate to one another in a building-block fashion. For example, all matter is composed of molecules and molecules are made up of atoms, which in turn are made up of protons, electrons, and neutrons.
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| horizontal decalage | Piaget's term for children's inconsistency in thinking within a developmental stage; explains why, for instance, children do not learn conservation tasks about numbers and volume at the same time.
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| hypothetico-deductive thinking | A form of formal logic achieved during the formal operational stage Piaget identified as the ability to generate and test hypotheses in a logical and systematic matter.
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| internalization | Vygotsky's term for the process of constructing a mental representation of external physical actions or cognitive operations that first occur through social interaction.
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| Logico-mathematical knowledge | In Piaget's theory, the type of knowledge as the mental construction of relationships involved in the concrete operations of seriation, classification, and conservation, as well as various formal operations that emerge in adolescence.
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| matrix classification | In Piaget's theory, a concept achieved during the concrete operational stage that involves ordering items by two or more attributes, such as by both size and color.
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| metacognition | Knowledge about one's own thinking; involves an understanding of how memory works, what tasks require more cognitive effort, and what strategies facilitate learning; plays an important role in children's cognitive development during the middle childhood years and in the development of self-regulated learning.
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| object permanence | Piaget's term for an infant's understanding during the sensorimotor stage that objects continue to exist even when they can no longer be seen or acted on.
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| physical knowledge | One of three types of knowledge as described by Piaget; knowing the attributes of objects such as their number, color, size, and shape; knowledge is acquired by acting on objects, experimenting, and observing reactions.
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| preoperational stage | The period of life from 2 to 7 years old when, Piaget believed, children demonstrate an increased ability to use symbols (gestures, words, numbers) to represent real objects in their environment.
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| propositional logic | A form of formal logic achieved during the formal operational stage that Piaget identified as the ability to draw a logical inference between two statements or premises in an "if-then" relationship.
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| realism | According to Piaget, children's inclination during the preoperational stage to confuse physical and psychological events in their attempts to develop theories of the internal world of the mind.
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| reflective abstraction | A concept which allows children to use information they already have acquired to form new knowledge that begins to emerge during the concrete operational stage but more characteristic of adolescent thinking.
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| representational thinking | A Piagetian concept that develops during the preoperational stage in which children gain the ability to use words to stand for real objects.
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| scheme | Also referred to as schema (pl. schemata) in some research areas; in Piaget's theory, the physical actions, mental operations, concepts, or theories people use to organize and acquire information about their world.
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| sensorimotor stage | The period of life from birth to 2 years old when children acquire what Piaget believed are the building blocks of symbolic thinking and human intelligence-schemes for two basic competencies, goal-directed behavior and object permanence.
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| seriation | In Piaget's theory, the understanding which develops during the concrete operational stage that involves the ability to order objects in a logical progression, such as from shortest to tallest; important for understanding the concepts of number, time, and measurement.
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| social knowledge | In Piaget's theory, this type of knowledge is derived in part through interactions with others.*Examples of this knowledge include mathematical words and signs, languages, musical notations, as well as social and moral conventions.
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| social speech | One of three stages of children's use of language identified by Vygotsky that is used primarily for communicative purposes in which thought and language have separate functions; contrast with egocentric speech and inner speech.
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| zone of proximal development | A concept in Vygotsky's theory regarding children's potential for intellectual growth rather than their actual level of development; the gap between what children can do on their own and what they can do with the assistance of others.
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2002 McGraw-Hill Higher Education