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5 - Cognitive change as strategy change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

By
Joke Torbeyns ,
Laurence Arnaud ,
Patrick Lemaire  and
Lieven Verschaffel
Edited by
Andreas Demetriou  and
Athanassios Raftopoulos
Joke Torbeyns
Affiliation:
Catholic University of Leuven, Center for Instructional Psychology and Technology, Belgium
Laurence Arnaud
Affiliation:
LPC-CNRS and Université de Provence, France
Patrick Lemaire
Affiliation:
LPC-CNRS and Université de Provence, France
Lieven Verschaffel
Affiliation:
Catholic University of Leuven, Center for Instructional Psychology and Technology, Leuven
Andreas Demetriou
Affiliation:
University of Cyprus
Athanassios Raftopoulos
Affiliation:
University of Cyprus
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Summary

The goal of this chapter is to epitomize the contribution of the information-processing perspective to cognitive development. A key feature of this perspective is its focus on (changes in) mental structures and processes that help us understand (changes in) cognitive performance. In the first section of the chapter we examine several theoretical and methodological issues that the information-processing perspective of cognitive development has made important to address. We begin with a brief discussion of the conceptual framework of Siegler and collaborators as a prototypical example of this perspective. The overlapping waves theory (Siegler 1996, 2000), the model of strategy change (Lemaire and Siegler 1995) and the strategy choice and discovery simulation (Shrager and Siegler 1998) are presented. In the second part of the first section we discuss two research methods and tools that are typical for the information-processing perspective on human learning and development, namely the microgenetic method (Siegler and Crowley 1991), and the choice/no-choice method (Siegler and Lemaire 1997). In the second section the above-mentioned theoretical and methodological approaches are exemplified by means of two recent studies. The first study (Chen and Siegler 2000) illustrates how the microgenetic method can be applied successfully to study changes in toddlers' strategy use in the domain of problem solving. The second study (Lemaire and Lecacheur 2002a) deals with changes in children's and adults' strategy characteristics in the domain of computational estimation, using the choice/no-choice method.

Type
Chapter
Information
Cognitive Developmental Change
Theories, Models and Measurement
 , pp. 186 - 216
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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