Development Flashcards
What are Piaget’s 4 stages of child development?
- Sensorimotor
- Preoperational
- Concrete operational
- Formal operations
Concrete operations stage
Piagetian stage between 7 and 12 when children can think logically about concrete situations but not engage in systematic scientific reasoning
Conservation problems
Problems pioneered by Piaget in which physical transformation of an object or set of objects changes a perceptually salient dimension but not the quantity that is being asked about
i.e. water in a short glass poured into a tall skinny glass does not gain volume, but children in the preoperational stage will likely not be able to understand this
Continuous development
Ways in which development occurs in a gradual incremental manner, rather than through sudden jumps (discontinuity)
Depth perception
The ability to actively perceive the distance from oneself of objects in the environment
depends on seeing patterned light and having normal brain activity in response to the patterned light, in infancy (Held, 1993). If no patterned light is received, for example when a baby has severe cataracts or blindness that is not surgically corrected until later in development, depth perception remains abnormal even after the surgery.
Formal operations stage
Pigetian stage starting at age 12 years and continuing for the rest of life, in which adolescent may (through education) gain the reasoning powers of educated adults
Information processing theories
Theories that focus on describing the cognitive processes that underlie thinking at any one age and cognitive growth over time.
Object permanence task
The Piagetian task in which infants below about 9 months of age fail to search for an object that is removed from their sight and, if not allowed to search immediately for the object, act as if they do not know that it continues to exist
Phonemic awareness
Awareness of the component sound within words
Piaget’s theory
Theory that development occurs through a sequence of discontinuous, qualitative stages: the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational stages.
Preoperational reasoning stage
Period within Piagetian theory from age 2 to 7 years, in which children can represent object through drawing and language but cannot solve logical reasoning problems, such as the conservation problem
Qualitative change
Large, fundamental change, as when a caterpillar changes into a butterfly; stage theories such as Piaget’s posit that each stage reflects qualitative change relative to previous stages.
Quantitative changes
Gradual, incremental change, as in the growth of a pine tree’s girth
Sensorimotor stage
Period within Piagetian theory from birth to age 2 years, during which children come to represent the enduring reality of objects
Sociocultural theories
Founded by Lev Vygotsky that emphasizes how other people and the attitudes, values and beliefs of the surrounding culture influence children’s development
