-
Period: to
Theorist Timeline
-
Lev Vygotsky
- University of Moscow: 1913-1917
- The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)
- Socio-cultural levels of interaction: individual, social, cultural
- Play connected to cognitive growth
-
Edward Chace Tolman
- Earned PhD in 1915, spent career teaching psychology at Berkeley in California (1918-1959)
- Psychological work - studying rats in mazes, animal cognition (experiments conducted in 1920s).
- Founded concept of latent learning
-
Jean Piaget
- Genetic epistemologist
- Schemata: "building blocks of knowledge"
- Assimilation and Accommodation: methods of processing new information
- 4 Stages of Cogntive Development 1/ Sensorimotor (0-2 yrs of age) 2/ Preoperational (2-7 yrs of age) 3/ Concrete Operational (7-11 yrs of age) 4/ Formal Operational (11+ yrs of age)
-
Roger Sperry
- American Psychobiologist
- 1937 - receives MA in Psychology from Oberlin; PhD in Zoology 1941 from University of Chicago
- Discovered human brain composed of two parts - left & right - findings
- 1981 - won Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine: split-brain research
-
Jerome Bruner
- 1939 - received PhD in Psychology from Harvard University.
- Emphasizes the social nature of learning and importance of scaffolding (link to Vygotsky).
- Believes ultimate goal of education should be to create autonomous learners - Cognitive Constructivist Theory.
-
George A. Miller
- One of the founders of cognitive psychology - goal is to bring the mind and consciousness back into the experimental aspect of psychology.
- 1946 - Received PhD from Harvard (work in Psycho Acoustic Lab - tied to WWII)
- Believed that the human mind can be understood by using an information processing model.
- Research into short term memory and connection with linguistics.
-
Noam Chomsky
- 1928 - earned PhD in linguistics from University of Pennsylvania.
- MIT professor (1955 to present) - linguistics and psychology background.
- Theory that languages are innate - the differences we see in languages are parameters developed by our own brains as we age. (Explains why children pick up languages much faster than adults.)
- “Chomsky hierarchy” - examines classes of formal grammar.
- Theories have raised questions about how human beings process information.
-
Elizabeth Bates
- Emergentist
- Lanuage Acquistion: Nativist vs Emergenist approach
- 3 Stages of Language Acquisition: Pronominal skills, Contrastive reference, Paradigmatic state
- The Competition Model
-
John Sweller
- Australian educational psychologist.
- 1972 - earned PhD in psychology from University of Adelaide.
- Authored 80+ academic papers - research emphasis placed on cognitive factors in instructional design.
- Best know as inventor of Cognitive Load Theory.
