#CSAM18 Day 11: Cognitive Development & Why It Matters

So, cognitive development. I have talked about Baxter Magolda, Piaget, and Kolb. I’ve left out quite a few, like Vygotsky and Bloom. And most of these don’t actually fall into a student affairs group of development theories, not in what we might consider typical college student development. It’s not like they’re developing their identities or anything (they are, but shhhh).

But it matters because they’re in college to learn. Learning is the primary goal. We should be adding to the learning going on. And in order to do that, we need to understand how learning happens. We should be building programs based on how learning happens. We should be aware of what the light-hearted, socialization, play, trial-and-error programming teaches our students and how it teaches them. We should be able to articulate what and how the students are learning from us.

Here is where we could discuss a co-curricular transcript - because it should document the learning happening outside of the classroom. But, I’m not going to.

To the fair, I kind of neglected cognitive development even as I worked with faculty in an academic department. It’s ok to need refreshers - it’s how we learn and relearn, too!