Piagets Theory Of Intellectual Development Flashcards
Stags of intellectual development
Piaget identifies four stages of intellectual development. Each stage is characterised by a different level of reasoning ability. Although the exact ages vary between children, all children develop through the same sequence of stages.
Object Permanence
The ability to realise that an object still exists when it passes out of the visual field.
Conservation
The ability to realise that quantity remains the same even when the appearance of an object or group of objects changes.
Ego centrism
The child’s tendency to only able to see the world from their own point of view.
Class Inclusion
An advanced classification skill in which we recognise that classes of objects have subsets and are themselves subsets of larger classes.
Mnemonic
Some People Can’t Focus
Sensorimotor Preoperational Concrete Formal
Sensorimotor stage
-0-2 years
-focus on physical sensations and basic co-ordination between what they see and their body movement.
-come to understand other people are separate objects and acquire some basic language.
-object permanence develops after around 8 months. This is the belief that an object still exists when it goes out of view.
Pre-operational - conservation
-children can’t conserve
-conservation is the ability to realise that quantity remains the same even when the appearance of an object or group of objects changes.
Supporting Evidence - Object Permanence
-Piaget found that OP develops at around 8 months
-he hid an object under a cloth and observed whether children would continue to reach for the objects.
-b4 8 months the children immediately switched their attention away but after 8 months, they continued to reach for it suggesting they understood it still existed.
Supporting Research - Conservation
-Piaget showed children two rows of counters and asked them to confirm they were the same.
-he then spaced out one row of counters and asked if they were still the same or if there were more in one row than the other.
-pre-operational children often said they were no longer the same which demonstrated that they couldn’t conserve.
-this study was also conducted with playdough to test mass and liquid to test volume. The results were the same.
Pre-operational - Egocentric
-2-7 years
-children are egocentric
-egocentrism is a child’s tendency to only see the world from their own POV
-this applies to physical objects and arguments in which a child can only appreciate their own perspective.
Pre-operational - Class Inclusion
-children find class inclusion different
-class inclusion is the idea that classifications have subsets.
Concrete operational stage
-7-11 years
-from the age of around 7 most children can conserve and perform much better on tasks of egocentrism and class inclusion.
-children still have reasoning problems - they are only able to reason or operate on physical operations in their presence.
-they struggle to reason about abstract ideas and to imagine objects/situations they can’t see.
Formal operational stages 11+
-abstract reasoning develops - children can think beyond the here and now in a scientific way.
-children can focus on an argument and not be distracted by its content. This formal reasoning can be tested using syllogism.
Supporting Research - Formal operational stage
-smith et al (1998) found that children younger than this stage struggled with syllogistic reasoning tasks such as working out
-‘how many heads a yellow cat has if all yellow cats have two heads?’
-children answered with ‘one’ when the answer to this abstract task is two. They were too distracted by the content to think in a logical way.
