Cognitive Development: Piaget and Beyond Flashcards
What are the basic theoretical features of Piaget’s theory?
Involves a combination of nature and nurture coming together. Key word is constructivism (the child in Piaget’s theory is an active constructor of his/her own knowledge). How the child understand the world is based on an active process. Is an element of maturation: however, maturation doesn’t give the content of development, but opens up new possibilities for development. Distinguished between two types of knowledge (physical properties of object lead to physical knowledge & our action upon the objects lead to logical mathematical knowledge). Children progress through discrete stages of thinking.
What are the mechanisms of Piaget’s theory?
Children’s knowledge is organised into cognitive structures or ‘schemas’. Early schemes involve internalised action (e.g. sucking, grasping). Later schemes can involve intellectual activity (abstract reasoning).
What are the principles in Piaget’s theory?
- Principle of Adaption: assimilation (take new info from environment and are able to incorporate it into an existing schema) accommodation (modifying or re-organisng mental structures in response to a new object/event)
- Equilibration: a sequential pattern of self-regulation, achieving balance between maintaining existing schemas and modifying them to deal with new information from the environment.
- Principle of Organisation: what we incorporate all of different schemas in order to makes sense of them/use them to help us understand our environment/complete activities.
What is the first stage of Piaget’s theory?
Sensorimotor Stage (0-2 years). Move from reflexes to reflecting (have a mental representation of things learnt). Can use learnt skills to deal with new situations (teritary circular reactions). An object can exist independently from own perception/experience of viewing the object (understanding fragile). Can hold on to a mental representation.
What is the second stage of Piaget’s theory?
Preoperational stage (2-7 years). Increase in mental representation, but difficulty in manipulation of mental representations. Key principles of this stage: Invariance (appearance has changed but essence of material has not), Identity (nothing added/subtracted so must be the same), Compensation (consider the lack of width makes up for extra height), Reversibility (consider the possibility can revert back to earlier state). Children in this stage has egocentrism - unable to see the world from someone else’s perspective.
What is the third stage of Piaget’s theory?
Concrete operations (7-11 years). Applying operations to concrete objects - classification can take place among multiple dimensions. Understanding of compensation, reversibility etc. But physical presence of objects are often still needed in order for operations to be applied to them. Limited ability to reason with abstract representations.
What is the final stage of Piaget’s theory?
Formal Operations: Applying logical operations to abstract, intangible entities. Can take something (e.g. set of statements) and see the logic independent from the truth of the statements. Able to systematically work through a problem, holding individual elements at constant and in the abstract to be able to arrive at a solution.
What are implications of Piaget’s work for other areas of development?
- Moral development: makes them able to weigh up many different consequences to be able to make a correct moral judgement.
- Social development: can see the world from others perspective, which can enhance experience of childhood.
- Education: should take how children think into account to be able to come up with the best way of working with them - move away from them being a passive absorber of knowledge to an active absorber of knowledge.
What are challenges from other empirical work?
Piaget’s use of observation and unstructured interviews: asking question again after just asking it makes the child assume something has changed. Different methodology: child sees a stage with cartoon carrots: babies looked when a carrot disappeared, showing that they know it should reappear.
Egocentrism: given contextually meaningful task. Child knows only one location where the boy could successfully hide from the policemen. If egocentric then would fail this task, however even 3/4 year olds passed this task.
What are information-processing approaches?
Emerged alongside developments in computer technology: human minds as information-processor with specifiable limits. Fundamental processes: acquisition, storage and retrieval, attention to objects, encoding objects, storage, retrieval.
