It goes without saying that the Elements are provisional examples, certainly not a complete inventory of behaviors that are estimated to be representative of cognitive development.
The list of Elements lends itself to both research and the development of teaching strategies. Both require validation as representing cognitive development observed in research and teaching situations, whether one is observing cognitive development in the arts or in other academic disciplines.
Both uses of the list of Elements are demonstrated by example in the remainder of this paper. As a researcher, the author experimented with using two of the Elements to interact with children and young in several classrooms.
Elements of Behavior Associated with Cognitive Development
- Interest in expanding a single view of the world
- Active consideration of essential features of new experiences
- Conscious comparison of new experience with past experiences
- Willingness to revise and reinterpret original perceptions
- Automatic integration of new information with existing knowledge
- Conscious effort to integrate information from several new sources
- Capacity to see things from different points of view
- Capacity to look for and see the big picture
- Conscious search for new insights from new and past experiences
- Reflection on others’ learning from their important experiences
- Search for new ways to remember what has been seen and heard
- Ability to recall accurately large amounts of information
- Tendency to remember details of highly emotional or traumatic events.
- Ability to retrieve complex information from multiple sources in long term memory and to organize it in a new way.
- Selection of visual images in nature and daily life to create new art forms.
- Selection of sounds in nature and daily life to create new art forms.
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