Developmental Lecture Five - Piaget/Vygotsky Flashcards
- Describe Piaget’s methodological approach
How did Piaget generate his findings of children’s cognitive development?
Psychometric tests (questionnaires, but limitations with very young children).
Naturalistic observations (limitations: unstructured, little insight into child’s reasoning).
Clinical observations
Unite the best of psychometrics and naturalistic observation.
Provide structure: give children tasks/problems to solve
Observe the child’s progress
Ask the child how they solved the problem, using a learned interview style.
Methodology = primarily qualitative in nature
- Describe the difference between continuous and discontinuous development
Continuous development:
- Development occurs throughout the lifespan
(= continuous).
Discontinuous development: There are distinct qualitative stages of development. Once a stage has been achieved, the learning process is complete. The individual moves on to next stage.
Piaget is best known for his stage-theory (discontinuous development), but acknowledges some continuous developmental processes.
Continious development - Schemas (sometimes called Schemes) – Internal mental representations; a way of organising knowledge into a more complex knowledge system.
Piaget considered the development of schemas as a continuous process.
- Explain the process of schema development
Schemas are developed via an Adaptation process.
ADAPTATION is the process by which children’s schemas develop in line with their experience of the world.
Adaptation takes place through two processes: assimilation and accommodation
ASSIMILATION is the process of taking in new information and changing it (if necessary) to fit an existing schema.
New information is made to fit the already known schema. E.g. First encounter of a Pear may
best fit the child’s ‘Apple’ Schema.
Child uses existing schemas to interpret and interact with the world.
During assimilation, the schema, in essence, doesn’t change.
ACCOMMODATION is the process of changing a schema, or developing a new schema in order to deal effectively with new information.
The already known schema is adjusted to fit with new experience.
- Summarise Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development
Discontinuous development - Piaget proposes four stages of cognitive development.
Each child passes through the four stages in the same order (the sequence of stages is invariant).
The stages are universal, the same for children from all cultures.
At each stage the child’s understanding of the world is qualitatively different – each stage is marked by a new way of cognitive processing of the world.
STAGE AGE IN YEARS (approx)
Sensorimotor 0 – 2 - Cognitive growth is based on the child’s own sensory experience and motor actions.
Sensory modalities are also still developing.
The child acquires knowledge (constructs sensory-motor schemas) by direct motoric contact and manipulation of objects sensed in the immediate environment.
Trial-and-error learning. Substage 3: (4 – 8 months) - Stage 3 error - no object permenance
Pre-Operational 2 – 7 - Rapid increase in language and symbolic thought
Limitations of cognitive ability due to
Egocentrism
Lack of ‘conservation’
Lack of logical reasoning
Unusual or difficult questions. Egocentrism - The inability to take another person’s perspective.
According to Piaget, PO children believe that other people’s experience of the world is exactly the same as their own.
Egocentrism is an outcome of a lack of logic.
Piaget came up with the ‘three mountains task’ to assess egocentrism. Three Mountains Task
(Piaget & Inhelder, 1956) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4oYOjVDgo0 - e.g. Conservation Tasks - conservation of volume - ‘Do they have the same amount of water or does one have more than the other?’ PO child answers, ‘Same’ - when both in the same size glass
PO child answers, ‘This one (tallest) has more’ - when poured into a larger glass
Concrete Operational 7 – 11 - When they reach this stage children are no longer dominated by how things look to them. They can now perform mental operations (think logically).
They lose their egocentrism; can pass three mountains test.
They now have the mental operations to enable them to pass conservation tests.
According to Piaget, CO children have the operational processes needed to pass conservation tasks, including: Reversibility – they can mentally reverse the transformation.
Compensation – they understand one feature can compensate for another (e.g., although the transformed item is taller, it’s compensated for by its reduced width).
Transitivity – the ability to recognize relationships among various things in a serial and logical order (if A = B and B = C, then A = C).
BUT……
CO children can only perform these logical operations with concrete objects, actions and situations that they have experienced. They are not able to think abstractly or hypothetically until they reach the next stage of formal operations.
Formal Operational 12 + - FO children can apply mental operations to:
Abstract concepts
Hypothetical thinking: hypothetico-deductive reasoning - making predictions and deducing logical, testable inferences.
Symbols in reasoning
Evaluating Piaget’s Stage Theory
PRO
The most comprehensive account of children’s cognitive development.
Attractive perspective about children’s intrinsic constructive knowledge acquisition.
Sound evidence through numerous clinical observations.
Huge influence on education policy
CONTRA
Stage-like development in children’s thinking not always as consistent as described by Piaget.
Piaget underestimated children’s competence at early stages (infancy) and overestimated competence in late childhood (formal operations).
Does not consider contributions of social environment to children’s cognitive development.
Does not explain the processes that enable children’s cognitive development.
- Discuss Piaget’s Stage theory and its application to education
Piaget advocates a readiness approach:
Teaching should be in line with the child’s current developmental stage (e.g., concrete materials in CO stage)
Constructivist approach emphasises experiential/discovery learning:
Children learn best by interacting with their environment. Schools to provide rich classroom environments and activities for exploration.
Piaget and Education: Potential Problems - If a child is not yet ready, what is a teacher supposed to do?
How do we know if a child is ready?
Is Piaget correct in maintaining that adult support cannot accelerate the process of cognitive development?
