Chapter 4 Flashcards
Assimilation
The translation of incoming information into a form that child can understand
Constructivist approach
Children construct knowledge through experience
Accommodation
Adaptation of current knowledge in response to new experiences
Equilibration
Process by which children balance assimilation and accommodation to create stable understanding
Qualitative change
Children of different stages think in qualitatively different ways
Broad applicability
Type of thinking of each developmental stage influences children’s thinking across diverse topics & contexts
Brief transitions
Before entering the next stage, children pass through “transitional period” in which they fluctuate between 2 types of thinking
Invariant sequence
Everyone progresses through stages in same order & never skips
Sensorimotor
- birth to 2 years
* intelligence expressed through sensory & motor abilities
Preoperational
- 2-7 years
* begin to represent experiences in language, mental imagery, & symbolic thought
Concrete operational
- 7-12 years
* able to reason logically about concrete objects & events
Formal operational
- 12 & beyond
* able to think about abstractions & hypothetical situations
Symbolic representation
The use of mental symbols to represent objects
Egocentrism
Perceiving the world from one’s own point of view
Problems w/ class inclusion
Young children have difficulty with categorization problems involving part-whole relations
Centration
Tendency to focus on a single, perceptually striking feature of an object
Conservation concept
Understanding that changing appearance or arrangement of objects does not necessarily change key properties (e.g. Quantity)
Operation
Mental action that fits into a logical system
Reversible thinking
Understand that actions can be reversed
Hypothetico-deductive reasoning
Induction, testing, deduction
Reflective abstraction
Ability to rearrange & rethink information already acquired
Adolescent egocentrism
Belief that their thoughts , ideas unique to them & not understood by parents, teachers, or other adults
