Cognitive Theory
The
cognitive theory is the way in which people process information – it looks at how we process information we
receive and how the treatment of this information leads to our responses.
Jean Piaget
(1936)
described his work as genetic epistemology – for example the origins of
thinking and was the first psychologist to make a methodical study of cognitive
development. He includes a theory of child cognitive development, a series of
simple and creative tests to reveal different cognitive abilities and detailed
observational studies of the mental process of gaining knowledge in children.
The
common theory in psychology was that children are simply less capable thinkers
than adults; this was all before Piaget conducted his work. However, in his
work, Piaget showed that children think in very different ways compared to
adults. He also believed that children are born with a very basic mental
structure, which is how later knowledge and learning is based.
Comments on the article
This article written by Marie Woolf is about how broken homes damage brains of young
children. My opinion of this article is that it is a biased article as it only
focuses on one side. Broken homes may be a factor to damaging young children’s brains but it it isn’t
the only factor; there may be others reasons to why children’s brains are
damaged or struggle at school – i.e. they have a learning disability that is not
because of their family background. Some students may have a healthy family
background, but may naturally be behind at school. Within this article, the MP has only based his comments on the research by the Child Trauma Academy in
Houston, Texas. In this article, Duncan Smith says that ‘family breakdown meant
that in many cases the children never caught up on their education and tended
to become drug addicts, criminals or alcoholics’; this statement is just one
opinion and is not backed up by any evidence. In my opinion, I believe this may be
true to some extent; however sometimes it
is not known why people turn to alcohol and drugs or they turn to them for different reasons meaning that his opinion is entirely
inaccurate and again has no evidence to back it up.
Context
– this article about how children from neglected backgrounds
struggle with education and have less developed brains. Within this article, it
is stated by Duncan Smith (the former Tory leader) that these children from
neglected backgrounds have a mental age of one year olds.
Audience
– the audience of this text is adults but can be narrowed down to parents.
Purpose
– the purpose of this text is to inform people about the effects that broken
homes have only children’s brains but also to persuade as Duncan Smith is
giving his opinion which may in turn persuade others to think in the same way
that he does or have the same opinions. However other may disagree with him.
Register
and tone – the tone of this article is formal by the use of the high
register lexis. Within the article, there aren’t any words that are
difficult to understand and it has a mixture of monosyllabic, polysyllabic and
disyllabic lexis.
Mode
– the mode of this text is in the form of a newspaper article (printed text)