Module 3 Flashcards
what are mental operations
the mental process of combining, separating, or transforming information in a logical manner
What is the preoperational stage
the stage of thinking between infancy and middle childhood in which children are unable to decenter their thinking or to think through the consequences of an action
What is centration
young children’s tendency to only focus on one feature of an object to the exclusion of all other features
What is decentration
the cognitive ability to pull away from focusing on just one feature of an object in order to consider multiple features
What is objectivity
the mental distancing made possible by decentration; Piaget believed the attainment of objectivity to be the major achievement in cognitive development
What are the three most common errors in early childhood reasoning
egocentrism, confusing appearance & reality, and precausal reasoning
What is egocentrism
the tendency to “center on oneself–that is, to consider the world entirely in terms of one’s own point of view
How do children confuse appearance an reality
explains why children become frightened when someone puts on a scary halloween mask
What is precausal thinking
piaget’s description of reasoning of young children that does not follow the procedures of either deductive or inductive reasoning; children don’t always understand that causes precede their effects
What is assimilation
it involves using current schemes to interpret the external world
What is accomodation
it involves creating new schemes or adjusting old ones to produce a better fit within the environmen t
What is adaptation
refers to using newly acquired info to revise and redevelop an existing schema
What is organization
an internal process of rearranging and linking together schemes to form a strongly interconnected cognitive system
What are schemes (schema)
patterns of repeated behavior which allow children to explore and express developing ideas and thoughts through their play and exploration
What is disequilibrium
refers to our inability to fit new information into our schema
What did Piaget believe about preoperational thinking
that young children fall into error and confusion because they are unable to engage in true mental operations
what are concrete operations
Piaget’s term for coordinated mental actions that allow children to mentally combine, separate, order, and transform concrete objects and events that the children experience directly
What are the key characteristics of pre-operational, concrete-operational and formal thinking?
pre-operational thinking involves centration as it relates to egocentrism, confusing appearance & reality, and precausal thinking
concrete-operational thinking involves conservation, classification, planning, and metacognition
Formal thinking involves reasoning by systematically manipulating variables, using hypothetical-deductive reasoning, and judging argument based on logical form alone
What is conservation
an example of a concrete operation; the understanding that the amount of a liquid remains unchanged when poured from one container into another that has different dimensions
What is logical necessity
Children have acquired the conviction that
it is logically necessary for certain qualities to be conserved despite changes in appearance.
What is identity
Children realize that if nothing has been added or
subtracted, the amount must remain the same.
What is reversability
Children realize that certain operations can
negate, or reverse, the effects of others.
What is identity
Children realize that if nothing has been added or
subtracted, the amount must remain the same.
What is classification
a change associated with concrete operations in the ability to understand the relationship between a subordinate class and its subclasses
What is planning
Forming mental representations of actions needed to achieve a goal
What is metacognition
the ability to think one’s own thinking; it increases ability to track goal success and modify strategies
What are formal operations
In Piaget’s terms, mental operations in which all possible combinations are considered when solving a problem. Consequently, each partial link is grouped in relationship to the whole; in other words, reasoning moves continually as a function of a structured whole
What is hypothetical deductive reasoning
reasoning that involves the ability to judge an argument entirely on the basis of its logical form, regardless of whether the argument is true; a central part of scientific thinking within formal operations
What is distributed cognition
the interaction of people, tools, and artifacts situated in a sociocultural context; processes distributed across time, space, society, artifacts, tools
What are scripts
event schemas that specify who participates, what social roles they play, what objects they are to use, and the sequence of actions that make up the event (ex: what happens when you sit down at a restaurant)
What is general cognition
how children use the same operations (logic) across different tasks or activities
What is situated cognition
the knowledge that a person has as a result of their context and culture; children performed well with familiar versus unfamiliar material
What is a material cultural tool
Focus on physical objects or on observable patterns of behavior
What is a symbolic cultural tool
Focus on abstract knowledge, beliefs, and values affecting development; vary from culture to culture
What is mediation
Process through which tools organize children’s activities and ways of relating to their environments
What is the zone of proximal development
is the range of abilities that an individual can perform with assistance but cannot yet perform independently.
What is culture
Materials and symbolic tools that accumulate through time, are passed on through social processes, and provide resources for the developing child
