Chapter 5 Flashcards
What do grand theories do?
Explain how people develop.
What is Piaget’s genetic epistemology?
What is the origin of and how does human knowledge develop?
According to Piaget, what happens to infant reflexes?
The infant interacts with the environment and changes and adapts.
Why is Piaget’s theory called constructivism?
Because the infant constructs their own understanding of the world through interactions with the environment.
What are schemes?
Psychological structures which represent how children understand the world (mental representations). Start as coordinated motor sequences (e.g. Grasping an object) and gradually gets internalized.
What happens to schemas?
They coordinate with and build on each other.
Through what two processes do schemas adapt?
Assimilation and accommodation.
What is assimilation?
When you use the same schema in a different context.
What is accommodation?
Adapt the schema to a new experience (e.g. Grasp larger or heavier object).
What is disequilibrium? What does this do?
Cognitive conflict from a new situation. This drives change.
Accommodation and assimilation work together in what process?
Equilibration.
What are the four stages that Piaget believes that every child goes through?
Sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal operational.
Why is play important according to constructivism?
Because children interact with their environment during play and adapt their schemas.
In one study, what was the difference between how Hong Kong teachers and German kindergarten teachers perceived free play?
German teachers generally believe that free play is good for independent thinking. Hong Kong teachers believed that knowledge is transmitted.
Why has Piaget’s ideas about single, discontinuous stages of cognitive development been criticized?
Because a single child can have different abilities across domains (e.g. Science versus maths).
Hat kind of children’s answers was Piaget interested in?
Incorrect ones.
What did Piaget believe that incorrect answers showed?
How reasoning abilities changed with age.
What kind of methodology didn’t Piaget like? What was his new method?
Using adult language to try and understand children’s thinking. New method was: not too much questioning, let child talk freely, center on a specific task.
What is the three mountains task? Who is this difficult for?
What is the doll’s view in relation to three mountains? This is difficult for 4-5 year olds who are pre-operational and too egocentric.
What is an understanding of conservation and when is this mastered?
Quantity stays the same in spite of changes to the shape. Mastered in concrete operational stage.
What happens generally as children enter the concrete operations stage?
More and more free from per full limitations and thinking becomes more abstract.
What are some good things about Piaget? Bad things?
Explained how and why children’s thinking is different to adults’ but underestimated the impact of the social aspects of the research situation.
What did Donaldson show?
The results of experiments were different if done in different ways.
Why were the results for Donaldson’s hiding from the policeman different to the three mountains task in terms of perspective-taking?
The task made ‘human sense’ to them.
For conservation tasks, what were alternatives which made human sense?
A naughty teddy bear moves a line of counters and move contents to another beaker because of a chipped beaker.
