Lecture 2: Piaget Flashcards
Structure of Lecture
Learning Outcomes
Part 1: An overview of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and schemas.
Part 2: Piaget’s methods and his proposed stages of cognitive development.
Part 3: Influence and limitations of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.
- Explain what a schema is and be able to describe examples of how schemas are developed.
- Describe Piaget’s stage theory of cognitive development and the milestones achieved in each stage.
- Evaluate Piaget’s theory considering key limitations of his work.
Piaget’s Theory: Overview
What kind of theory of cognitive development did Piaget propose?
A constructivist theory…
Believed kids are active learners - they CONSTRUCT their own knowledge through interacting with their environment - make hypotheses and test them
Piaget’s Theory: Overview
4 proposed stages of cognitive development
What needs to happen in order for kids to move through the stages?
- Sensorimotor
- Pre-operational
- Concrete operational
- Formal operational
To move through the stages children must learn to organise schemas better and better. Kids are motivated to do this in order to adapt to their environment. This is done through the dual process of assimilation and accommodation.
What are schemas?
Schemas are mental representations or sets of rules that enable children to interact with their world through defining a particular category of behaviour; they develop through experience and become more complex with development.
What are the processes by which schemas are continually changed and developed?
2 processes…
Schemas change and become more complex through experience, they change through the dual process of:
Assimilation – the integration of new information into existing schemas, leading to more consolidated knowledge.
Accommodation – the adjustment of schemas to new information, leading to growing and changing knowledge. This can happen when we want to avoid disequilibrium.
Development of language schema example…
One schema children may develop when learning language is that if words describe the past, you add “ed” at the end.
For example: “walk” becomes “walked”
Assimilation - children are integrating this new vocabulary into existing knowledge.
They might then hear the word “eat” – so say “eated.”
If they say “eated”, and adults correct them or they hear the word “ate”, this would cause disequilibrium, which is an imbalance between existing knowledge and new input. This would lead to accommodation: children would change their schema leading to a growing of knowledge.
Example of schemas in development:
Learning to crawl
Without ever seeing a demonstration, infants learn to crawl through other movements such as rolling themselves over, leaning forward to reach objects, and kicking.
Assimilation - while learning to crawl both pulling and kicking might be equally effective. Thus, infants can alternate between them without their locomotion being too affected
Accomodation - when encountering stairs neither kicking or pulling is effective, thus they need to employ a new strategy to move up the stairs
Example of schemas in development:
Learning to grasp
Children like to grasp everything within their reach – but grasping is only a meaningful action when children learn to hold and let go of objects, too!
Assimilation - Children encounter many things that require a firm grip – dummies, bottles, rattles – so they learn it’s a good idea to grasp tightly.
Accomodation - there are many ways in which a firm grip could go wrong and children will need to adjust their approach to grasping as a consequence e.g. when grasping something alive, dont hold too tight
Piaget’s Four Stages of Cognitive Development
Background
He believed there were different levels of cognitive understanding - take the child from activity based sensory-motor functions in infancy to abstract thought found in adolescence
Each child moves through four stages of cognitive development that are characterised by qualitatively different ways of thinking.
Children pass through these stages in the same order.
The theory proposes a tragectory of DICONTINUOUS development as it occurs in a series of distinct stages
Piaget’s Four Stages of Cognitive Development
The Stages
- Sensorimotor Stage
- Pre-operational Stage
- Concrete Operational Stage
- Formal Operational Stage
Sensorimotor stage in detail
Stage 1: Sensorimotor Stage
- 0-2 years
- Increasingly able to explore the environment - conquer their sensory motor system
Found that roots of intelligence are present in infants earliest behaviours e.g. sucking, crawling and grasping.
Key Milestones in detail:
- Object permanence
- Mental Representations
- Self-awareness
Object permentance - develops at the end of their first year - may explain why this is the perfect age to do peek-a-boo and also children are so bad at hiding when they’re young
Object permentance –> mental representations - by knowing that things exist when hidden this allows for the development of mental representations, which are the building blocks of pretend play and memory.
Mental representations - near the end of the sensorimotor stage, infants begin to show deferred imitation – the repetition of other people’s behaviour after it has occurred, marks an important milestone as it demonstrates that infants are forming mental representations and can recall these.
Self awareness - begin to develop self-recognition e.g., know their legs and arms are theirs.
The Rouge Test: If a red dot is drawn on a child’s forehead and they are put in front of a mirror, do they try and touch the red dot on their own face (i.e., see it as part of them) or do they interact with the person in the mirror like they are someone else entirely?
Pre-operational stage in detail
***more on sub-stages later
Stage 2: Pre-operational Stage
- 2-7 years
- Develop symbolic thinking – the idea that one object can represent something else or an idea.
- Children are egocentric.
- Conservation of number is mastered.
- Reduction in animism
There are two sub-stages in this stage of development:
- pre-conceptual sub-stage (ages 2-4)
- intuitive thought sub-stage (ages 4-7)
Key milestones in…
… pre-conceptual substage:
- Egocentrism occurs – seeing the world from just their point of view e.g. three mountain task
- Children are able to mental represent ideas and objects: this enables simple pretend play
- There is a reduction in animism – the idea that if it moves it’s alive!
… intuitive thought sub-stage:
- Children develop symbolic thought.
- They understand the same object can be of different sizes (see Deloache’s work on scale models).
- Children are able to systematically order and classify items.
General:
- children are unable to conserve liquids or solids - realise that while the appearance of items may change, the number or amount stays the same.
Concrete operational stage in detail
Stage 3: Concrete Operational Stage
- 7-12 years
- Logical mental operations are possible with visual aids.
- Conservation of mass, length, weight, and volume is mastered.
- Metacognition develops
- Understand cause-effect relations
Children become more flexible, and are able to focus on more than one thing at a time. However, their thinking is still “concrete”.
Key milestones:
- Metacognition begins to develop: the ability to think about thinking.
- Children can conserve, classify and categorise in multiple domains such as number, weight and height using strategies like compensation. They also understand reversibility.
- Children now start grasping cause-effect relations e.g., if ask “why does the sun go down?” they are less likely to say “because it’s when I go to sleep!”
- But their thinking is still “concrete” – not abstract. They can solve problems based on objects that are present.
Compensation - refers to the observation, for example, that a narrower glass needs to be filled higher to include the same amount of water as a wider glass
Reversibility - “since only the appearance of items has changed, this change can be made undone”. Therefore, in any transformation on these tasks, the number/mass must have remained constant.
Formal operational stage in detail
Stage 4: Formal Operational Stage
- 12+ years
- Abstract reasoning develops enabling children to speculate and reason.
- Children begin to formulate and test their hypotheses in the world.
Key Milestones:
- This is when children become able to reason hypothetically (without objects present). They can reason with verbal hypotheses and deduce conclusions from abstract statements.
For example:
Children can engage in hypothetical reasoning: “if I do X, Y could happen”
They can solve more complex reasoning problems that have logical conclusions: “All fish can fly. My friend Tom has a pet fish. Can it fly?”
Influence, Implications and Limitations of Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development:
Strengths of the theory
+ Piaget set the groundwork for developmental Psychology as a sub-discipline. He gave us some of the first insights into children’s minds, developing new methods and spurning research into cognitive development.
+ His work has had a huge impact on education: it supported ‘child centred learning’, led educators to focus on play and see children as active learners.
+ Many of his findings have been replicated with new methods. For example, the order in which children master conservation with different materials (number, weight, volume) has been separately replicated Tomlinson-Keasey (1978).
