Analysis and commentary on learinng theories.

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To get started addressing this assignment, first conduct a search using any Web engine that you prefer (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Alta Vista, Dogpile, whatever) using the terms your professor supplied that you are to discuss in your eventual paper. Choose the likeliest hits to skim, and select a few on each topic to read in depth. Take notes on them, including their reference citation information of author, publication date, URL, etc. THEN, write your paper using your notes - this helps prevent plagiarism from the references. I will address comments from each topic in turn, to be sure I have addressed all of the topics you were concerned with - BUT there is more information in the cited article reference URLs that you can use besides the short synopsis I will provide here. You are expected to augment what I provide with additional information you select to include which will add your ideas, voice and personality to these beginnings.

OTA ORIGINAL COMMENTARY: Neo-Piagetian learning theory refers to a new interpretation, or a more modern interpretation of the original learning theories espoused by Piaget. Piaget conducted several experiments with flawed methodologies at the early part of the century, and deduced his learning theories based on these flawed experiments. His methods were not questioned, however, until much later, until well after these learning theories had gained wide-spread acceptance. I have copied and pasted an excerpt from a Web site which does a good job of explaining these neo- theories based on Piaget's original theories below for you to see. This portion comes from the following site: http://www.education.com/reference/article/neo-piagetian-theories-of-development/

PIAGET'S THEORY
HOW NEO-PIAGETIAN THEORIES DIFFER FROM PIAGET'S THEORY

In his 1992 review of Jean Piaget's theory, Harry Beilin compared its influence on the study of cognitive development to that of Shakespeare on English literature. Any theorist who has studied cognitive development in children from the middle of the twentieth century onward has been a neo-Piagetian in that broad sense. However, the subject of this entry is a smaller group of researchers who have called themselves neo-Piagetians. Because the neo-label directs attention back to a theory's origins, most neo-Piagetian researchers eventually chose other names that focused on their theories' new elements. Thus Kurt Fischer's neo-Piagetian theory became known as skill theory (Fischer & Pipp, 1984; Schwartz & Fischer, 2004) and Robbie Case's evolved into central conceptual structure theory (Griffin, 2004).

HOW NEO-PIAGETIAN THEORIES DIFFER FROM PIAGET'S THEORY
Neo-Piagetian theorists kept Piaget's idea that the progress of cognitive development is more like climbing a series of stairs (the stages) than walking smoothly up a ramp. They also agreed with Piaget that biological maturation sets broad upper limits on the kinds of thinking children are capable of doing at particular ages. All of the neo-Piagetians also shared Piaget's conviction that children's thinking reflects their developing internal mental structures (Case & Okamoto, 1996). However, each of the neo-Piagetians combined this general premise with ideas about the influence of experience on development that were more analytically specific and more attuned to cultural and individual differences than anything found in Piaget's theory. For example, they considered how biological maturation of the central nervous system during the first years of life increases the speed with which children process informationâ?"an idea introduced in 1970 by Pascual-Leone. The neo-Piagetians linked that maturing processing speed to increases in working memory capacity that, in turn, set upper limits on the complexity of problems a child is likely to be able to solve.

The neo-Piagetians also have drawn on information-processing and linguistic theorists' ideas about the contentdomain specificity of cognition. Piaget's theory evolved to include provisions for unevenness in the sophistication of a child's reasoning across different kinds of problems, but this domain specificity is more fundamental to neo-Piagetian theories. The influence of the information-processing paradigm also is evident in the neo-Piagetians' tendency to analyze Piaget's and other cognitive tasks in ways that highlight why one problem may be more or less difficult than another, even within the same content domain. Australian neo-Piagetian Graeme Halford ...