Chapter 7 Flashcards
What did Piaget devote his life to?
To studying how children think, not just what they know
Why did Piaget use the clinical method?
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.
How did Piaget define intelligence?
A basic life function that helps an organism adapt to its environment
What is a scheme?
Cognitive Structures! Organized patterns of action or thought that people construct to interpret their experiences.
What is organization?
children systematically combine existing schemes into new and more complex ones
What is adaptation?
process of adjusting to the demands of environment
What is equilibration?
process of achieving mental stability where our internal thoughts are consistent with the evidence we are receiving from the external world
What is assimilation?
process by which we interpret new experiences in terms of existing schemes or cognitive structures
What is accommodation?
process of modifying existing schemes to better fit new experiences
What determines a child’s stage of cognitive development?
Reasoning processes (not their age!) determines a child’s stage of cognitive development.
What are the four lasting insights Piaget left the field with?
- 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.
List the 4 challenges to Piaget
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.
What is a competence-performance distinction?
There is an important difference between understanding a concept (competence) and passing a test designed to measure it (performance).
What is constructivism?
Maintaining that children actively create or build their own understandings of the world based on their experiences
What is neuro-constructivism theory?
New knowledge is constructed through changes in the neural structures of the brain in response to experiences.
How did Vygotsky think culture and social experiences affects our thinking?
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.
What differences did Luria see between remote and urban children’s thought?
Remote children gave similar responses and urban children gave more distinctly individual answers.
How do children acquire their society’s mental tools?
By interacting with parents and other more experienced members of the culture and by adopting their language and knowledge.
What is the zone of proximal development?
Gap between what a learner can accomplish independently and what she can accomplish with the guidance and encouragement of a more-skilled partner.
What is guided participation?
Actively participating in culturally relevant activities with the aid and support of their parents and other knowledgeable guides
Bruner’s scaffolding?
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.
What is private speech?
Speech to oneself that guides one’s thought and behavior
what role did Vygotsky think private speech played in cognitive development?
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
What did Piaget think of Americans attempts to speed up cognitive development?
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.
Briefly describe the substages of the sensorimotor period.
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]
Define object permanence or concept.
Fundamental understanding that objects continue to exist - they are permanent - when they are no longer visible or otherwise detectable to the senses
Describe the A-not-B error.
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)
According to Piaget when is object permanence?
By the end of the sensorimotor period. (18-24 months)
According to Aguiar and Baillargeon (2002) when do infants understand that objects should be visible when nothing is obstructing them?
3 months old
What happens in each substage of the sensorimotor period?
- 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
What ability emerges in the final substage of the sensorimotor period?
Symbolic capacity, where one object can be used to represent another
What is the problem with perceptual salience?
They have difficulty with tasks that require them to use logic to arrive at the right answer.
Understand conservation and the tasks used to assess it.
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
What is centration?
tendency to center attention on a single aspect of the problem
How does centration affect performance on conservation tasks?
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
What is decentration?
ability to focus on 2 or more dimensions of a problem at once
What is reversibility?
process of mentally undoing or reversing an action
How does reversibility affect performance on conservation tasks?
suggesting that the water be poured back into its original container to prove that it is still the same amount
What is transformational thought?
ability to conceptualize transformations, or processes of change from one state to another, as when water is poured from one glass to another
What is static thought?
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
How might egocentrism affect social interaction?
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.
What is class inclusion?
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.)
What is seriation?
Enables children to arrange items mentally along a quantifiable dimension such as length or weight
What is transitivity?
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?)
How do the mental actions of concrete operations differ from the mental actions of formal operations?
Concrete operators think hypothetical, whereas formal operators think abstractly.
How is formal operational thought more abstract than concrete operational thought?
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.
What is hypothetical-deductive reasoning?
Reasoning from general ideas or rules to their specific implications
How does decontextualizing help?
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.
What is adolescent egocentrism?
difficulty differentiating one’s own thoughts and feelings from those of other people
What is imaginary audience?
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!)
What is personal fable?
tendency to think that you and your thoughts and feelings are unique
Has research supported Elkind and Piaget’s hypothesis that adolescent egocentrism rises at the onset of formal operations?
Nope!
What did Bell and Bromick (2003) find?
Adolescents are preoccupied with how they present themselves in public not because of an imaginary audience but because of a real audience.
Piaget’s 4 Stages
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.
