Cognition And Development: Piaget's Stages Of Intellectual Development

Question 1

Overview: The Stages Of Intellectual Development?

Answer 1

• Piaget identified four stages of intellectual development.
• Each stage is characterised by a different level of reasoning ability.
• Although the exact ages vary between children, all children develop through the same sequence of stages.

Question 2

What Is Object Permanance?

Answer 2

• The ability to realise that an object still exists when it passes out of the visual field.

Question 3

What Is Conservation?

Answer 3

• The ability to realise that quantity remains the same even when the appearance of an object or group of objects changes.

Question 4

What Is Ego Centrism?

Answer 4

• The child’s tendency to only be able to see the world from their own point of view.

Question 5

What Is Class Inclusion?

Answer 5

• An advanced classification skill in which we recognise that classes of objects have subsets and are themselves subsets of larger classes.

Question 6

What Happens During The Sensorimotor Stage?

Answer 6

• Occurs during the ages 0-2 years.
• Babies focus on physical sensations and basic co-ordidination between what they see and their body movement.
• Object permanence develops after 8 months.

Question 7

What Happens During The Pre-Operational Stage?

Answer 7

• Occurs during ages 2-7 years.
• Child can’t conserve.
• Children are egocentric (the child’s tendency to only be able to see the world from their own point of view), also applies to physical objects and arguments in which a child can only appreciate their perspective.
• Children find class inclusion difficult.

Question 8

What Happens During The Concrete Operations Stage?

Answer 8

• Occurs during ages 7-11 years.
• From age of 7, most children can conserve and perform much better on taks of ego centrism and class inclusion.
• Children still have reasoning problems as they are only able reason on physical operations in their presence.
• They struggle to reason about abstract ideas and to imagine objects/situations they can not see.

Question 9

What Happens During The Formal Operations Stage?

Answer 9

• 11 years onwards.
• Abstract reasoninig develops as children can think beyond the here and now in a scientific way.
• Children can focus on angrument and not be distracted by its content.
• This formal reasoning can be tested using syllogisms.

Question 10

Supporting Research: Sensorimotor Stage - Object Permanence.

Answer 10

• Piaget found that object permanence develops around 8 months.
• He hid an object under a cloth and observed whether children would continue to reach for the object.
• Before 8 months, children immediately switched their attention away but after 8 months, they continued to reach for it suggesting they understood it still existed.

Question 11

Supporting Research: Pre-Operational Stage - Conservation.

Answer 11

• Piaget showed children two rows of counters and asked them to confirm they were the same.
• He then spaced out one row of counters and asked if they were still the same or if there were more in one row than the other.
• Pre-operational children said they were no longer the same, therefore shows how they couldn’t conserve.

Question 12

Supporting Research: Pre-Operational Stage - Ego-Centric.

Answer 12

• Piaget showed children a model of three mountains and placed a doll at different viewing angle to the child.
• They then asked children to identify the dolls’ view from a set of pictures.
• Pre-operational children were not able to do this.

Question 13

Supporting Research: Pre-Operational Stage - Class Inclusion.

Answer 13

• Piaget showed 7-8 year olds pictures of 5 dogs and 2 cats and asked whether there was more dogs or animals in the picture.
• Children at this stage tended to say that there was more dogs suggesting they could not stimultaneously see a dog as a member of the dog class and the animal class.

Question 14

Limitation: Object Permance At An Earlier Age.

Answer 14

• Object permanence may occur at much younger age than Piaget theoriesd.
• Bower and Wishart found that infants aged 1 to 4 months continued to reach for an object for up to 90 secs after lights were turned out.
• The baby may have been distracted by the cloth in Piaget’s orignial study, meaning that they did not continue to search from the object when it went out of sight.
• This reduces the validity of Piaget’s work.

Question 15

Limitation: Underestimate Child Abilitity Pre-Operational Stage.

Answer 15

• Piaget underestimated the ability of children in the pre-opertaional stage.
• McGarrigle and Donaldson found that children aged 4-6 could conserve, if they were not put off by the way they were questioned.
• If the counters were moved accidently by a ‘naughty teddy’ then 72% of children under 7 correctly said the number was the same as before.
• The reason that the children performed poorly in Piaget’s study was because hearing two questions from the researcher prompted them to change their orignial answer.
• Piaget’s tests of conservation therefore lacked validity.

Question 16

Limitation: Ego-Centrism At An Earlier Age.

Answer 16

• There is evidence to suggest egocentrism can occur before 7 years old.
• Hughes (1975) showed children a model with 4 walls in a cross layout.
• The model contained two dolls – a boy and a policeman.
• The policeman doll was placed at different locations and the children were asked to say whether the policeman could see the boy doll.
• It was found that 90% of 3½ to 5-year-olds could understand two viewpoints at the same time.
• This contradicts Piaget’s claim that children could not understand another person’s viewpoint at this age.

Question 17

Limitation: Class Inclusion At An Earlier Age.

Answer 17

• There is evidence to suggest class inclusion can occur before 7 years old.
• Siegler and Svetina (2006) found that children of 5 could successfully complete a similar type of task to what was done in Piaget’s original study if they were given an accurate explanation of class inclusion at the start of the experiment.
• The difficulty of Piaget’s tasks meant the children could not show that they understood class inclusion.
• They can show this ability on tasks that are easier to understand.

Question 18

Limitation: Over-Estimated Abilities Of Adolescents.

Answer 18

• Piaget over-estimated the abilities of adolescents.
• Bradmetz showed that out of 62 children tested at age 15, only one could reliably show formal reasoning, whereas Piaget said this developed at age 15.
• It is clear now that children at 11-year-old cannot think in an adult way.

Question 19

Limitation: Domain-General View.

Answer 19

• Piaget took a ‘domain-general’ view (that intellectual development is a single process and that all cognition develops together) of cognitive development that not all psychologists agree with.
• Studies of children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) suggest that intellectual abilities develop independently to social cognition abilities.
• This suggests that Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is not valid and that a ‘domain-specific’ theory is more appropriate for some examples of development.