Chapter 7

Question 1

What did Piaget devote his life to?

Answer 1

To studying how children think, not just what they know

Question 2

Why did Piaget use the clinical method?

Answer 2

Because it is a flexible question and answer technique used to discover an individual child’s line of reasoning. He felt that investigator should use it to fully understand that child’s mind.

Question 3

How did Piaget define intelligence?

Answer 3

A basic life function that helps an organism adapt to its environment

Question 4

What is a scheme?

Answer 4

Cognitive Structures! Organized patterns of action or thought that people construct to interpret their experiences.

Question 5

What is organization?

Answer 5

children systematically combine existing schemes into new and more complex ones

Question 6

What is adaptation?

Answer 6

process of adjusting to the demands of environment

Question 7

What is equilibration?

Answer 7

process of achieving mental stability where our internal thoughts are consistent with the evidence we are receiving from the external world

Question 8

What is assimilation?

Answer 8

process by which we interpret new experiences in terms of existing schemes or cognitive structures

Question 9

What is accommodation?

Answer 9

process of modifying existing schemes to better fit new experiences

Question 10

What determines a child’s stage of cognitive development?

Answer 10

Reasoning processes (not their age!) determines a child’s stage of cognitive development.

Question 11

What are the four lasting insights Piaget left the field with?

Answer 11

• Infants and children are active in their own development
• Infants seek to master problems and understand them using assimilation/accommodation
• Young people think differently than older people do
• His stages describe development for children from hundreds of cultures that have been studied.

Question 12

List the 4 challenges to Piaget

Answer 12

1) Understanding Young Minds
2) Wrongly claiming that broad stages of development exist
3) Failing to adequately explain development
4) Giving limited attention to social influences on cognitive development.

Question 13

What is a competence-performance distinction?

Answer 13

There is an important difference between understanding a concept (competence) and passing a test designed to measure it (performance).

Question 14

What is constructivism?

Answer 14

Maintaining that children actively create or build their own understandings of the world based on their experiences

Question 15

What is neuro-constructivism theory?

Answer 15

New knowledge is constructed through changes in the neural structures of the brain in response to experiences.

Question 16

How did Vygotsky think culture and social experiences affects our thinking?

Answer 16

Culture and social experiences affect HOW we think, not just what we think. He expected cognitive development to vary from society to society depending on the mental tools such as the language that the culture values and makes available.

Question 17

What differences did Luria see between remote and urban children’s thought?

Answer 17

Remote children gave similar responses and urban children gave more distinctly individual answers.

Question 18

How do children acquire their society’s mental tools?

Answer 18

By interacting with parents and other more experienced members of the culture and by adopting their language and knowledge.

Question 19

What is the zone of proximal development?

Answer 19

Gap between what a learner can accomplish independently and what she can accomplish with the guidance and encouragement of a more-skilled partner.

Question 20

What is guided participation?

Answer 20

Actively participating in culturally relevant activities with the aid and support of their parents and other knowledgeable guides

Question 21

Bruner’s scaffolding?

Answer 21

The more-skilled person gives structured help to a less-skilled learner but gradually reduces the help as the less-skilled learned becomes more competent.

Question 22

What is private speech?

Answer 22

Speech to oneself that guides one’s thought and behavior

Question 23

what role did Vygotsky think private speech played in cognitive development?

Answer 23

he saw it as a critical step in the development of mature thought and as the forerunner of the silent thinking-in-words that adults engage in everyday

Question 24

What did Piaget think of Americans attempts to speed up cognitive development?

Answer 24

He disapproved of attempts by Americans to speed children’s progress through his stages. He believed parents should provide young children with opportunities to explore their world and teachers should use a discovery approach in the classroom that allows children to learn by doing.

Question 25

Briefly describe the substages of the sensorimotor period.

Answer 25

1) Reflex Activity (birth-1 month) [exercising reflexes]
2) Primary Circular Reactions (1-4 months) [repeats behaviors focused on own body]
3) Secondary Circular Reactions (4-8 months) [Repeats behaviors that affect the environment]
4) Coordination of Secondary Schemes (8-12 months) [Shows intentionality. Combo of actions to solve simple problems or achieve goals]
5) Tertiary Circular Reactions (12-18 months) [Find new ways to solve problems or produce interesting outcomes. Experimentation AKA “little scientist”]
6) Beginning of Thought (18-24 months) [Can mentally solve problems and use symbols to stand for objects and actions]

Question 26

Define object permanence or concept.

Answer 26

Fundamental understanding that objects continue to exist - they are permanent - when they are no longer visible or otherwise detectable to the senses

Question 27

Describe the A-not-B error.

Answer 27

The surprising tendency of 8- to 12-month-olds to search for an object in the place where they last found it (A) rather than its new hiding place (B)

Question 28

According to Piaget when is object permanence?

Answer 28

By the end of the sensorimotor period. (18-24 months)

Question 29

According to Aguiar and Baillargeon (2002) when do infants understand that objects should be visible when nothing is obstructing them?

Answer 29

3 months old

Question 30

What happens in each substage of the sensorimotor period?

Answer 30

1. Change sucking patterns to fit the shapes of different objects; 2. Repeatedly suck a thumb, kick legs, or blow bubbles; 3. Repeatedly shake a rattle to make an interesting sound or bat a mobile to make it wiggle; 4. Push aside a barrier to grasp an object, using the scheme as a mean to an end; 5. Explore bathwater by gently patting it, then hitting it vigorously and watching the results, stroke, pinch, squeeze, and pat a cat to see how it responds to various actions; 6. Move an out-of-reach toy closer

Question 31

What ability emerges in the final substage of the sensorimotor period?

Answer 31

Symbolic capacity, where one object can be used to represent another

Question 32

What is the problem with perceptual salience?

Answer 32

They have difficulty with tasks that require them to use logic to arrive at the right answer.

Question 33

Understand conservation and the tasks used to assess it.

Answer 33

The idea that certain properties of an object or substance do not change when its appearance is altered in some superficial way; conservation-of-liquid-quantity task

Question 34

What is centration?

Answer 34

tendency to center attention on a single aspect of the problem

Question 35

How does centration affect performance on conservation tasks?

Answer 35

hey focus on height alone and conclude that the taller glass has more liquid, or on the width and conclude the wider glass has more liquid

Question 36

What is decentration?

Answer 36

ability to focus on 2 or more dimensions of a problem at once

Question 37

What is reversibility?

Answer 37

process of mentally undoing or reversing an action

Question 38

How does reversibility affect performance on conservation tasks?

Answer 38

suggesting that the water be poured back into its original container to prove that it is still the same amount

Question 39

What is transformational thought?

Answer 39

ability to conceptualize transformations, or processes of change from one state to another, as when water is poured from one glass to another

Question 40

What is static thought?

Answer 40

thought that is fixed on end states rather than the changes that transform one state into another, as when the water is sitting in the 2 glasses, not being poured or manipulated

Question 41

How might egocentrism affect social interaction?

Answer 41

Young children often chose the view that corresponded to their own position. Similarly, young children often assume that if they know something, other people do, too.

Question 42

What is class inclusion?

Answer 42

Whether or not the children can understand that logically, parts are included in the whole. (Ex: Are there more dogs or animals? A dog IS an animal.)

Question 43

What is seriation?

Answer 43

Enables children to arrange items mentally along a quantifiable dimension such as length or weight

Question 44

What is transitivity?

Answer 44

Describes the necessary relations among elements in a series. (John is taller than Mark, Mark is taller than Sam, who is taller, John or Sam?)

Question 45

How do the mental actions of concrete operations differ from the mental actions of formal operations?

Answer 45

Concrete operators think hypothetical, whereas formal operators think abstractly.

Question 46

How is formal operational thought more abstract than concrete operational thought?

Answer 46

The school-age child may define the justice system in terms of police and judges; the adolescent may definite it more abstractly as a branch of government concerned with balancing the rights of different interests in society.

Question 47

What is hypothetical-deductive reasoning?

Answer 47

Reasoning from general ideas or rules to their specific implications

Question 48

How does decontextualizing help?

Answer 48

Decontextualizing increases the likelihood of using reasoning to analyze a problem logically. Decontextualizing is separating prior knowledge and beliefs from the demands of the task at hand.

Question 49

What is adolescent egocentrism?

Answer 49

difficulty differentiating one’s own thoughts and feelings from those of other people

Question 50

What is imaginary audience?

Answer 50

confusing your own thoughts with those of a hypothesized audience for your behavior. (Ex: Spilled juice on my shirt, everyone is thinking I’m such a clutz!)

Question 51

What is personal fable?

Answer 51

tendency to think that you and your thoughts and feelings are unique

Question 52

Has research supported Elkind and Piaget’s hypothesis that adolescent egocentrism rises at the onset of formal operations?

Answer 52

Nope!

Question 53

What did Bell and Bromick (2003) find?

Answer 53

Adolescents are preoccupied with how they present themselves in public not because of an imaginary audience but because of a real audience.

Question 54

Piaget’s 4 Stages

Answer 54

1) Sensorimotor - Learns through senses and motor behaviors. Limited to physical problem solving.
2) Preoperational - Can mentally problem solve but without operations.
3) Concrete operational - Mental problem solving with operations, but can’t mentally manipulate abstract ideas.
4) Formal Operational - Mental problem solving with operations and can problem solve with abstract ideas.