ABSTRACT

This chapter describes the study of how thinking, or what psychologists term cognition, develops and changes over time. Therefore, theories of cognitive development deal with how we learn to think and reason. In this chapter we will be looking both at how we learn and specifically at concepts such as stages of development and maturational readiness. This might seem like a dry academic pursuit carried out by wizened professors in dusty libraries, but it has enormous consequences in the real world, particularly in the field of teaching. How theorists explain the process of learning in part determines teaching methods.