Piagets stages of development Flashcards
Sensorimotor Stage
Babies have no understanding or space/time
Babies learn there senses by touching stuff
Babies learn to repeat things
Babies develop object performance
( birth - 2 years)
Pre-operational Stage
Children start using symbolic play
Children show animism
Language development
Children are still egocentric
( 2 - 7 year )
Concrete Operational stage
Children begin to use rules
Children use concrete objects to add to their understandings
Children develop - Seriation, Classification, Reversibility, Conservation, Decentration
Children have difficulty with abstract ideas like morality
( 7 - 12 years)
Formal Operational stage
Children have control over their own thoughts
Children can think about more than two thing at time
(e.g thinking about height, gender when describing)
Children having an understanding how time changes things (growning means moving out)
Children understanding events have a sequence
Children develop morality (the ability to see that their actions have consequcences)
(12+ years)
Piaget and Inhelder (1956)
Three mountain task
Aim : To study the perspective of children and investigate relationships between the child’s viewpoint and thir perception of the viewpoint of others
Sample : 100 children from 4-12 years
There were three different mountains and three viewpoints. There was a doll infront of the child and the child was asked the viewpoint of the doll
Children below 7 years old could not decentre
Weakness of Piagets theory
Piaget only used children from Switzerland in his sample. This means that he did not look at the influence of social interactioins or culture settings.
For example, Aboriginal children developed the ability to conserve at a later stage than Piagets swiss sample did
Strengths of Piagets mountain task
It was valid because the study was very detailed, they wrote about individual children, giving qualitative data
Reliable because careful controls were put in place like using the same model and questions
Used experimental methods careful controls
Weakness of Piagets mountain task
Not valid because the “three mountain” task is criticised for being unrealistic and not understood by children
Other scenarios which are more realistic did not find the same findings
Not generalisable as they only used 100 children and only 21 in the 4-6.5 age category
Aim of the mountain experiment
To study the perspectives of children of different ages and investigate relationships between the childs viewpoint and their perception of the viewpoint of others
Concultions
Chikdren up to about 7 years old were egocentric. Toward the end of the pre-operational children were more able to think about elses viewpoint
Older childern were non-egocentric. They were able to look at the mountains as objects relating to one another
What was the sample
100 children were used
21 were aged between 4 and 6 years old
30 were ages between 6 and 8 years old
33 were aged between 8 and 9 years old
16 were aged between 9 and 12 years old
How many pictures of the modles were shown
10
How did it take place
They used a doll and put it infront of the mountains. There were 3 trials
Trial 1 they were asked to arrange the boards to represent the mountains so they can see the modle
