Chapter 6

Question 1

Describe the processes of developmental change in Piaget’s theory and give an example of each process.

Answer 1

Jean Piaget developed a theory of how children come to know their world by constructing their own schemes or cognitive structures through active exploration.

Question 2

Discuss the strengths of Piaget’s theory, noting features that remain fairly well supported by the research in this field.

Answer 2

Its considered a good theory since:
1. It stimulated much research
2. They are still relevant to understanding cognitive development
3. He showed how children are active in their own development by seeking experience (unlike passivity assumed before)
4. Showed how young people think differently from older people.
5. Many scholars believe he was right in his description of cognitive development - including the 4 stages.

Question 3

Explain the challenges to Piaget’s theory that have emerged as scientists have conducted research to test hypotheses generated from the theory.

Answer 3

1. He has been criticized for underestimating the capacities
of infants and young children by assuming lack of performance equals lack of competence and it is all/nothing
2. He failed to demonstrate that his stages have coherence - aka they are not gradual shifts with individual differences
3. He offered vague explanations of development when specific changes are warranted in development
4. He underestimated the role of language and social interaction in cognitive development.

Question 4

Indicate how culture and social interaction affect thought in Vygotsky’s theory.

Answer 4

They influence the mental tools, such as language, which are used in cognition.

Question 5

Explain how tools, especially language, influence thought.

Answer 5

Through guided participation in culturally important activities, children learn problem-solving techniques from knowledgeable partners sensitive to their zone of proximal development. Language is the most important tool that adults use to pass culturally valued thinking and problem solving to their children. Language shapes their thought and moves from social speech to private speech and later to inner speech.

Question 6

Describe the main tenets of the neuroconstructivism theory.

Answer 6

Neuroconstructivists apply a modern spin on Piaget’s constructivist theory by proposing that observed differences in cognitive skills result from experience-induced changes in the underlying neural structures supporting these skills.

Question 7

Explain Fischer’s perspective on context and performance.

Answer 7

Fischer’s dynamic skill framework states that development results from changes in skill levels. Skills reflect what a person can do on a particular task in a specific context; in this view, people operate within a developmental range, with higher levels of performance demonstrated within a supportive context and after more experience with a task.

Question 8

Compare Fischer’s model of cognitive development to Piaget’s theory.

Answer 8

It is similar in regards to the fact that it describes new concepts to account for the variability observed in actual performance for Piaget’s stages. But it also includes more on how context influences skills.

Question 9

Summarize Bjorklund’s evolutionary developmental theory.

Answer 9

Evolutionary developmental theorists argue that infants are equipped with basic cognitive abilities and behaviors that allow them to develop an understanding of their worlds. Such as playing with objects to understand them and imitating what they see to experience them; all through play - allowing them to acquire new skills.

Question 10

Explain the importance of object permanence and describe the path from lack of object permanence to full understanding of object permanence.

Answer 10

Infants progress through six substages of the sensorimotor period by perceiving and acting on the world; they progress from using their reflexes to adapt to their environment to using symbolic or representational thought to solve problems in their heads. Piaget thought that in the sensorimotor stage, children learn through action and the senses - but they therefore become reliant on them, making them not understand object permanence at first.

Question 11

Note the major cognitive achievements emerging from the period of infancy.

Answer 11

Major accomplishments of the sensorimotor stage include
the development of object permanence and the symbolic capacity. The emergence of the symbolic capacity paves the way for language and pretend play.

Question 12

Describe the typical preschool-age child’s pattern of thinking.

Answer 12

At this age, symbolic capacity emerges and is rampant. Preschool-age children are in Piaget’s preoperational stage and do not yet reason logically; instead, they rely on perceptually salient features (such as the tall glass video) of a task or object and intuition. Their prelogical set
of cognitive structures leads them to have trouble with conservation and classification tasks.

Question 13

Outline the characteristics of thought that enable (or inhibit) a child’s ability to solve conservation tasks.

Answer 13

Preoperational children lack the abilities to:
1. Decenter (the ability to focus on two or more dimensions of a problem at once; instead focusing on height alone)
2. Reverse thought (the process of mentally undoing or reversing an action - seeing the container with “more” water pour back and not overflow being suprising),
3. Understand transformations (the ability to conceptualize transformations, or processes of change from one state to another, as when water is poured from one glass to another).
4. They tend to be egocentric (viewing the world from their own perspective and not recognizing others’ points of view) however this can also be mitigated with easier tasks.

This may all be due to the fact that these functions come from development of the frontal cortex.

Question 14

Compare the elementary school child’s thinking to that of a preschool child.

Answer 14

School-age children are in Piaget’s concrete-operational stage and can reason logically about concrete information, which allows them to solve conservation and classification tasks.

Question 15

Name three ways that preoperational thought is limited relative to concrete-operational thought.

Answer 15

Concrete-operational children have acquired the abilities of decentration, reversibility of thought, and transformational thought. They can think about relations, grasping seriation (enables them to arrange items mentally along a quantifiable dimension such as length or weight) and transitivity (describes the necessary relations among elements in a series. If, for example, John is taller than Mark, and Mark is taller than Sam, who is taller -John or Sam?), and they understand the concept of class inclusion taking into account subclasses.

Question 16

Explain how adolescent thinking differs from the child’s typical pattern of thinking.

Answer 16

Adolescents may advance to Piaget’s last stage of cognitive development—formal-operational thought, in which they can think about abstract concepts and apply their logical reasoning to hypothetical problems. Formal-operational thinkers can simultaneously consider multiple task components.

Question 17

Describe the sorts of tasks that adolescents might be able to solve with their newly emerged reasoning skills.

Answer 17

Formal operations permit systematic/scientific reasoning such as the pendulum task. While before they may address the pendulum task through trial-and-error, they can now plan and carry out a hypothesis before forming a conclusion. However, these are gradual changes and not concrete - its not like you wake up one day and gain these abilities.

Question 18

Assess Piaget’s description of the adolescent as a formal-operational thinker who systematically considers hypothetical and abstract concepts.

Answer 18

Piaget considers intuition to be replaced by pre-operational thinkers with scientific thinking - but its more that they now coexist. Formal-operational thought may give rise to special forms of adolescent egocentrism (difficulty differentiating one’s own thoughts and feelings from those of other people), namely, the imaginary audience (confusing your own thoughts with those of a hypothesized audience for your behavior) and personal fable (a tendency to think that you and your thoughts and feelings are unique).

Question 19

Outline the characteristic features of adult cognition.

Answer 19

Many adults seem to function at the concrete-operational level, rather than at Piaget’s highest level of formal-operational thought. Cognition here is defined by standardised intelligence. Formal-operational thought appears to be highly dependent on formal education. It is also influenced by culture and area of expertise.

Question 20

Discuss ways that adult thought is the most advanced level of thinking and ways that adult thought is limited.

Answer 20

Formal reasoning involves applying logic to a closed set of variables and not open sets of ideas.

Question 21

Evaluate whether a stage beyond Piaget’s formal operations is warranted and outline what this stage might look like.

Answer 21

Some adults may acquire advanced levels of thought not considered by Piaget, such as relativistic thinking (understanding that knowledge is dependent on the knower’s subjective perspective) and dialectical thinking (detecting and reconciling contradictory ideas). This might warrant another stage, called postformal thought.

Question 22

Describe changes to cognitive skills in later adulthood

Answer 22

Older adults sometimes perform poorly on cognitive tasks, but the causes may not be declining abilities as much as limited education, task familiarity, and motivation. Many still do well on tasks of accumulative knowledge.

Question 23

How did Piaget come to his Constructivist theory?

Answer 23

Through the clinical method, a flexible question- and-answer technique, Piaget believed in 4 stages of cognitive development. With each stage, children construct increasingly complex “schemes” through maturation and experience.

Question 24

What is a scheme?

Answer 24

Schemes are cognitive structures - organized patterns of action or thought that people construct to interpret their experiences. The more sophisticated their schemes, the more they are able to adapt to their environment.

Question 25

How do children adapt to their environment and actively create knowledge in Piaget’s constructivist theory?

Answer 25

1. Organisation - children systematically combine existing schemes into new and more complex ones
2. Adaptation - accommodating existing understandings to new experiences through assimilation and accomodation.

Question 26

Why did Piaget think that children were active agents in their own development?

Answer 26

As they are learning about the world of people and things by observing, investigating, and experimenting

Question 27

What are the two processes of adaptation?

Answer 27

1. Assimilation - assimilating new experiences to existing understandings
2. Accommodation - the process of adjusting to the demands of the environment

Question 28

What is Piaget’s concept of equilibration?

Answer 28

When new events seriously challenge old schemes, or prove our existing understandings inadequate, we experience cognitive conflict. This cognitive conflict, or disequilibrium, then stimulates cognitive growth and the formation of more adequate understandings. This occurs because mental conflict is not pleasant; we are motivated to reduce conflict. This is why we do equilibration: the process of achieving mental stability where our internal thoughts are consistent with the evidence we are receiving from the external world

Question 29

What are the four stages in Piaget’s Constructivist Theory?

Answer 29

1. The sensorimotor stage (birth to roughly 2 years)
2. The preoperational stage (roughly 2–7 years)
3. The concrete operations stage (roughly 7–11 years)
4. The formal operations stage (roughly 11 years and beyond)

Question 30

What is the zone of proximal development?

Answer 30

The gap between what a learner can accomplish independently and what she can accomplish with the guidance and encouragement of a more-skilled partner. Skills outside the zone are either too easy and already well mastered or too difficult

Question 31

What is the difference between Vygotsky and Piaget?

Answer 31

Vygotsky emphasizes cultural and social influences on cognitive development more than Piaget’s theory does. To Piaget, the child’s level of cognitive development determines what he can learn; to Vygotsky, learning in collaboration with more knowledgeable companions drives cognitive development.

Question 32

What did Vygotsky think about private speech?

Answer 32

He believed that in the same way adults use speech to instruct their children through tasks, children talk out loud through speech to work through problems which later becomes internal thoughts

Question 33

What is object permanence?

Answer 33

The fundamental understanding that objects continue to exist—they are permanent—when they are no longer visible or otherwise detectable to the senses.

Question 34

What is symbolic capacity?

Answer 34

The ability to allow/recognise one thing to represent something else

Question 35

What is A-not-B error?

Answer 35

The tendency of 8 - 12 month old children to search for an object in the place where they last found it (A) rather than in its new hiding place (B) even if it’s new spot was shown to them.

Question 36

What are the limitations of Piaget’s idea of lack of object permanence and presence of A-not-B error in children?

Answer 36

The original A-not-B task is one of those areas where the task demands and physical limitations of infants may influence performance. By simplifying the task so infants are not handicapped by their immature physical abilities (i.e., targeted reaching), research- ers have been able to demonstrate that infants develop at least some understanding of object permanence far earlier than Piaget claimed. For example, by using an A-not-B task that could be “solved” with looking rather than reaching.

Question 37

What is the difficulty of classification with preoperational children?

Answer 37

While they can sort between simple categories, when asked to determine catergories within categories - they can struggle. They lack class inclusion, the logi- cal understanding that the parts are included within the whole. Once again, however, if the task is simplified such as experimental results can be mitigated.