ABSTRACT
The final chapter of the ideal book on the development and acquisition of cognition in childhood might contain one or more of the following components: a recapitulation of the most important points made earlier; an overview of the field that provides a clear and comprehensive synthesis of work to date; an exciting new theory indicating where future research should be done; an inspired and practicable pedagogy and curriculum. This chapter contains none of these components. I would like to be able to provide them, but I cannot. There is little to be gained from summarising earlier chapters when they are themselves all too summary accounts of much more material. The field is too heterogeneous and in parts uncertain to allow a synthesis, though there are more signs of researchers considering issues outside their own immediate interests than there were when I worked on the first edition of this book. I do have theoretical ideas about cognitive development, but not an exciting new theory; indeed, I have learned from examining the theories of cognitive development that I discuss in this book that theoretical progress is more likely to be made at a level where behaviour is carefully specified (as in the analysis of what ‘phonological awareness’ is and how it relates to reading) than at the level of behaviour so general and all-pervasive that it is abstract and untestable (as, for example, assimilation and accommodation). I have tried to present material on cognitive development that is relevant to the concerns of teachers, but again the research literature suggests that there will never be universally appropriate curriculum and pedagogy (and there remains a substantial discrepancy between the practices that the developmental psychologist who has studied children's cognitive development might suggest and the practices that an under-resourced and over-stressed school system can implement).
