| accommodation | Modifying an existing schema to fit a new experience.
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| adaptation | Adjusting one's thinking to fit with environmental demands.
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| animistic thinking | The attribution of life to inanimate objects.
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| assimilation | Applying an existing schema to a new experience.
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| basic reflex activity | An infant's exercise of, and growing proficiency in, the use of innate reflexes.
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| centration | Focusing one's attention on only one dimension or characteristic of an object or situation.
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| cognition | The mental activity through which human beings acquire and process knowledge.
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| community of learners | An approach to classroom learning in which adults and children work together in shared activities, peers learn from each other, and the teacher serves as a guide.
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| concrete operations stage | Stage in which the child is able to reason logically about materials that are physically present.
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| conservation | The understanding that altering an object's or a substance's appearance does not change its basic attributes or properties.
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| constructivist view | The idea that children actively create their understanding of the world as they encounter new information and have new experiences.
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| coordination of secondary circular reactions | An infant's combination of different schemas to achieve a specific goal.
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| core knowledge systems | Ways of reasoning about ecologically important objects and events, such as the solidity and continuity of objects.
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| deferred imitation | Mimicry of an action some time after having observed it; requires that the child have some sort of mental representation of the action.
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| egocentric speech | According to Vygotsky, a form of self-directed dialogue by which the child instructs herself in solving problems and formulating plans; as the child matures, this becomes internalized as inner speech.
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| egocentrism | The tendency to view the world from one's own perspective and to have difficulty seeing things from another's viewpoint.
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| elementary mental functions | Psychological functions with which the child is endowed by nature, including attention, perception, and involuntary memory, that emerge spontaneously during children's interaction with the world.
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| ends over means focus | Consideration of only the end state of a problem in evaluating an event; failure to consider the means by which that end state was obtained.
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| formal operations stage | Stage in which the child becomes capable of abstract thinking, complex reasoning, and hypothesis testing.
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| guided participation | Learning that occurs as children participate in activities of their community and are guided in their participation by the actions of more experienced partners in the setting.
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| higher mental functions | Psychological functions, such as voluntary attention, complex memory processes, and problem solving, that entail the coordination of several cognitive processes and the use of mediators.
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| horizontal décalage | The term Piaget used to describe unevenness in children's thinking within a particular stage; for example, in developing an understanding of conservation, children conserve different objects or substances at different ages.
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| inner speech | Internalized egocentric speech that guides intellectual functioning.
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| intent community participation | Children's participation in the authentic activities of their community with the purpose of learning about the activity.
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| intuitive substage | The second substage of the preoperational stage during which the child begins to solve problems by using mental operations but cannot explain how she arrives at the solutions.
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| inventing new means by mental combination | Children begin to combine schemas mentally and rely less on physical trial and error.
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| mediators | Psychological tools and signs—such as language, counting, mnemonic devices, algebraic symbols, art, and writing—that facilitate and direct thinking processes.
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| microgenetic change | Changes associated with learning that occur over the time of a specific learning experience or episode.
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| object permanence | The notion that entities external to the child, such as objects and people, continue to exist independent of the child's seeing or interacting with them.
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| operations | Schemas based on internal mental activities.
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| organization | Combining simple mental structures into more complex systems, a term used by Piaget or also refers to a memory strategy that involves putting together in some organized form the information to be remembered; usually entails categorization and hierarchical relations.
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| preconceptual substage | The first substage of Piaget's preoperational period, during which the child's thought is characterized by the emergence of symbolic function, the rapid development of language, animistic thinking, and egocentricity.
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| preoperational stage | In this stage, the ability to use symbols facilitates the learning of language; this stage is also marked by semilogical reasoning, egocentricity—in which the child sees the world from her own point of view—and intuitive behavior, in which the child can solve problems using mental operations but cannot explain how she did so.
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| primary circular reactions | Behaviors focused on the infant's own body that the infant repeats and modifies because they are pleasurable and satisfying.
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| reciprocal instruction | A tutoring approach based on the ideas of the zone of proximal development and scaffolding.
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| reversibility | The understanding that the steps of a procedure or operation can be reversed and that the original state of the object or event can be obtained.
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| scaffolding | An instructional process in which the more knowledgeable partner adjusts the amount and type of support he offers to the child to fit with the child's learning needs over the course of the interaction.
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| schema (plural, schemas) | An organized unit of knowledge that the child uses to try to understand a situation; a schema forms the basis for organizing actions to respond to the environment.
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| secondary circular reactions | Behaviors focused on objects outside the infant's own body that the infant repeatedly engages in be cause they are pleasurable and satisfying.
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| sensorimotor stage | Piaget's first stage of cognitive development, during which children change from basic reflexive behavior to the beginnings of symbolic thought and goal-directed behaviors.
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| stages of development | Comprehensive, qualitative changes over time in the way a child thinks.
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| symbolic function | The ability to use symbols, such as images, words, and gestures, to represent objects and events in the world.
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| symbolic thought | The use of mental images and concepts to represent people, objects, and events.
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| tertiary circular reactions | Behaviors in which infants experiment with the properties of external objects and try to learn how objects respond to various actions.
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| theory of mind | Understanding of the mind and how it works.
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| zone of proximal development (ZPD) | The region of sensitivity for learning characterized by the difference between the developmental level of which a child is capable when working alone and the level she is capable of reaching with the aid of a more skilled partner.
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