COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE TEENAGER

Cognitive Development of the teenager

 What I knew.

If we talked about Cognitive development before start my career, I could not express almost nothing since, I just know a little bit about this topic. I just knew that teenagers present a lot of reactions in this period. For example they feel better with their friend, instead of their parents. Probably because their friends "helps them" to feel that are secures in their groups making them try drugs, alcohol and doing certain things that are not good for them.Moreover, I knew that teens reject their parent's opinions, and this is because they believed that their parents just want to bother them. However, it is better if I present the best explanation about this Cognitive development based on the theorists.

 What I learned.

Keep talking about the changes that teens experiment in their adolescence, and one of the most interesting changes is called Cognitive Development, which is based on the ability to think, reason, and make choices. As we know children begin the process of learning from the moment they are born, but the ability for teens to think, reason, and make good choices is built on the levels of development they have formed up to this point. In this period, teenagers start to think more clearly about the things that they consider are the best, and they try to form reasons that will help them to have a successful life. Base on different videos that I could watch for my practicum 2, I could realize that, we as human have different sections in our brain that are the ones that help us to make good decisions; these parts of our brain are called Prefrontal Cortex and the Limbic area. The Prefrontal Cortex is the responsible to think very well, make good decisions and judgements about the things that we are doing well or not; however the limbic area focuses on the emotions and decisions that we make in our life.

But now, let me show you what I found about Cognitive development base on the best psychologists. According to Piaget (1947) argues that “adolescence is the stage of life in which the individual's thoughts start taking more of an abstract form and egocentric thoughts decrease”. (Inhelder and Piaget, 1947, p.343). This allows the adolescent to think and reason with a wider perspective. Furthermore, cognitive development permit teens solve their problems or implement a deductive reasoning. But what does it means? Well, in this stage teenagers are able to make decisions that are important for their life, it means that they can think more deeply about the decisions that they will do in the future and they can take advantages about their reasoning, not more as children. However, to enter a little bit more in Cognitive development for teenagers Piaget developed 5 characteristic indicators that are called:

·         Formal operations

·         Hypothetico-deductive reasoning

·         Propositional thought

·         The imaginary audience

·         The personal fable

According to Piaget (1958) states that the adolescent years are remarkable because youth move beyond the limitations of concrete mental operations and develop the ability to think in a more abstract manner. This means that, at this stage teens are able to think and make predictions more certainly, they can reason about the problems and give good answers about what they think.

On other hand, Piaget (1958) argues that, teens become more scientific and logical in the way they approach problems. This is called Hypothetico-deductive reasoning. So, we can say that if teens have a problem, or a situation that needs to be solve, they can estimate the most likely outcome if one or more variables are changed or manipulated. It is the same with Propositional thought which represents how adolescents can determine if a statement is reliable or not, they have the ability to make a good analysis about the problems or situations. As Piaget (1958) claimed that “Youth can determine whether a statement is logical based solely on the wording of the statement, rather than having to observe or re-create the actual scenario to determine if it is logical.”

However, there is a characteristic that really caught my attention and is called The Imaginary audience. This indicator permit teens become more interesting in observation and interpretation. In other words, adolescents can observe and interpret what other people say about them, the expressions and behaviors that others show them, and with this they can make reasonable judgements about what others says about them. That is why according to Piaget, these new cognitive abilities appear at the same time that younger adolescents are struggling with insecurities about their changing appearance, changing identity, and changing life experiences, and it is because teens try to do not make mistakes. Although it happens in teen’s life, also there is a characteristic that make adolescents feel that they are unique in their own environment and this is called Personal fable. According to Piaget (1977) claims that “While the ability to use abstract thought and keen observational skills enables youth to become more attuned to others and more sensitive to people's needs, it can also lead to some new social and emotional difficulties when youth use their new cognitive abilities to compare themselves to others.” This means that, teens develop a series of characteristics that make teens feel that they have unique abilities, different problems in their life that anyone else has in the world etc. For that reason, it is necessary that in this period of time adults can monitor teens since, it can result in some devastating consequences that can make adolescences have some risks in their life.  

What I will do as a Teacher.
To sum up, we could realize about the different characteristics that teenagers suffered in this stage, and Cognitive development present one of the hardest issues that affect teens. In this stage, students feel that they are unique, they present different emotional difficulties that make them believe that all the things that they do are good, such as addictions, social problems, familiar problems etc. For this reason, it is necessary to create a relationship where students can express their social and emotional feelings with the teacher in order to create a connection that allow  them to know that teacher cares about them. Nevertheless, the implementation of activities in the classroom also will allow teens feel that they can do their goals by themselves but always following teacher’s directions. An important activity to involve students in classroom and also to break the ice, is asking them their preferences about music, animals, colors, food, cloths, movies etc. This activity can be done in pairs or in groups, and the purpose is that they express their emotions and judgements by demonstrating complete understanding throughout the activity. Moreover, in this stage teens are very variable since, they experiment certain behaviors that represent insecurities. They prefer to socialize among them instead with the teacher. That is why as a teacher I need to choose the best strategies that can make students feel more confident in the classroom. One strategy that I must use is giving students the time they need to understand and absorb an activity by themselves, as I explained before, with these strategies students will feel that they can do the activities without help and they can compare each other. For this reason, it is important to develop well-done lesson plans that involve teenagers in each activity and they can feel that are cared by others.