Activities That Promote Cognitive Development Learning Is A

Activities That Promote Cognitive Development Learning is a constant process that starts at birth and ends when an individual die

Learning is a constant process that starts at birth and ends when an individual dies. The brain develops over time, enabling individuals to adopt better character traits. The environment has a significant impact on the cognitive development of children. As per Piaget's theory of cognitive development, different behaviors manifest depending on the stage of growth and development (McLeod, 2018). This paper presents three various activities useful for promoting growth and development for young children and teenagers.

Some of the characters noted in different development stages include egocentrism, centration and conservation, and deductive reasoning. Various activities can be designed and used to promote children's development and ability to cope with such behavioral traits. These activities proposed in the use of role-playing games to control and help children cope with egocentrism. According to Piaget, egocentrism affects a child’s ability to see or understand things from a different perspective other than theirs. Kids assume that other people can see, hear, and think like them (Kaltner & Jansen, 2016).

This type of behavioral trait hinders effective communication and interaction between children and other people within their surroundings. Role-playing enables children to overcome egocentric thoughts and habits by creating an opportunity through which they adopt other people's perspectives. For instance, role-playing, as the teacher, can help a child understand her teacher's point of view by practicing. For this reason, it is recommended to many types of costumes to encourage children to participate in role-playing. Such activities reduce egocentrism and prepare children for collective engagement in the pre-operational stage.

The second activity that should be included in the Community Center proposal involves modeling games and the use of weight scales. This activity targets children's centration and conservation abilities as they develop advanced cognitive skills. Centration refers to children's tendency to concentrate on one aspect of a situation, ignoring other relevant factors involuntarily. Conservation refers to children's inability to understand that objects’ quantity remains constant when size or shape changes. These cognitive development concepts hinder a child’s ability to understand the constant elements of different items within their surroundings (McLeod, 2018).

As such, modeling games are useful to enable manipulation and observation of particular objects. For instance, children can be given one half a kilogram of modeling clay shaped like a ball. The clay can then be subdivided to create different toys while playing and transformed into a ball after the activity. Engaging children in this kind of activity repetitively will enable them to understand centration and conservation. The last proposed activity involves the use of mathematical puzzles to promote teenagers’ deductive reasoning.

Deductive reasoning refers to an adolescent’s ability to make valid conclusions based on observations. This form of reasoning is essential in the formal operational stage (Casey et al., 2018). The ability to use a general principle for predicting outcomes is vital to develop deductive reasoning skills. This stage of cognitive development starts at around age thirteen and continues into adulthood.

The proposed activity is designed to provoke deductive reasoning in that adolescents will formulate thoughts and methods that yield a predetermined outcome. For instance, math puzzles promote logical reasoning in pursuit of answers. The use of mathematical puzzles promotes inferential reasoning; thus, adolescents can draw conclusions about issues they have not experienced practically. In conclusion, a child's cognitive development can be enhanced by introducing activities that counter the negative traits associated with each development stage. This paper presents a proposal to use role-play to reduce egocentrism in younger children.

Using modeling clay in art and craft activities is recommended to eliminate centration and conservation issues encountered while developing cognitive abilities. Lastly, mathematical puzzles are proposed to promote inferential reasoning, thus promoting adolescents' cognitive development.

References

• Casey, B. J., Cannonier, T., Conley, M. I., Cohen, A. O., Barch, D. M., Heitzeg, M. M., ... & Orr, C. A. (2018). The adolescent brain cognitive development (ABCD) study: Imaging acquisition across 21 sites. Developmental cognitive neuroscience, 32, 43-54.
• Kaltner, S., & Jansen, P. (2016). Developmental changes in mental rotation: A dissociation between object-based and egocentric transformations. Advances in cognitive psychology, 12(2), 67.
• McLeod, S. (2018). Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. Simply Psychology, 1-9.
• Shin, M. (2019). Exploring multisensory experiences in infants’ learning and development in the childcare classrooms. Early Child Development and Care, 1-12.
• Figueroa, R., & An, R. (2017). Motor skill competence and physical activity in preschoolers: A review. Maternal and child health journal, 21(1).
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