Piaget - 1 Flashcards
Piaget’s 4 stages of development
Piaget’s “theory of cognitive development” suggests that we go through distinct stages of development. Each stage is fairly long and a change in thinking indicates when the next stage is reached.
Intuitive Thought Stage
- Part of the second stage of Piaget’s four stages of development.
- Part of the pre - operational stage.
- Intuitive thought stage is between 4- 7 and it is the start of reasoning where children realise that they know a lot and want to know more.
- Show centration when something is complex and show irreversibility.
Using Piaget’s stages in education
Can be applied to classroom practices. His theory suggest that children’s actions and interactions affect their thinking
Concrete Operational Stage
- The third stage of Piaget’s 4 stages of development.
- develops age 7 to 12 and involves development of abilities to such conservation, reversibility, seration, classification and decentration.
- Have difficulty with more abstract ideas such as morality.
Former Operational Stage
- The last stage of Piaget’s 4 stages of development.
- Develops around 12 years old and is associated with the moral reasoning and deductive reasoning.
- Have an understanding that they and others exist in the real world and separate from each other.
Pre-Operational Stage
- The second stage of Piaget’s 4 stages of development.
- 2 - 7 years old.
- Children engage in symbolic play.
- They think in pictures and use symbols, including some words (the beginning of language development). Children are egocentric and show animism.
- Later in this stage they start reasoning and show centration and irreversibility.
Sensorimotor Stage
- The first stage of Piaget’s 4 stages of development.
- Infants use their senses and movements to get information about the world. at first they live in the present.
- They develop object permanence and learn to control their movements.
Helping sensorimotor development
- Children have to be treated as individuals.
- Constantly provide them with stimulation and materials to practise skills and to build schemas.
- Stimulation helps children engage with the world
Helping pre-operational development
- Children must “do” things to learn and continue to build schemas rather than watching someone else perform actions.
- Children are encouraged to learn by discovery through interacting with their environment not by being told things.
- Acknowledge that different children are at different stages in their development.
Helping concrete operational development
Ask children to concentrate on more than one aspect of an issue.
Helping Formal Operational Development
Children can discuss abstract concepts and be asked complex questions involving mental reasoning
Implication of Piaget’s theory on Education
- There should be a focus on the child’s thinking and not what they can do.
- Discovery learning is required and children must be able to engage freely with the environment
- Teaching should accept and acknowledge that children do not think like adults
- Children are individuals and go through the stages in different ways
Piaget’s explanation of understanding the world
- Children develop through adaptation and adjust to the world as they experience new things.
- They then understand the world by forming, adapting, and assimilating schemas.
Piaget’s theory and the development of intelligence
Development of intelligence is about building knowledge and skills. Intelligence is acquired through different stages of development and building schemas via adaptation and the 4 stages of cognitive development.
Strengths of Piaget’s theory
- Has practical applications, thus strengthening the theory
- Piaget’s work has generated a great deal of research including experiments, to show the existence of the stages and how children build knowledge through creating schemes.
- Research often support his ideas however other studies found that children can do things earlier than Piaget thought which challenges his ideas.
Weaknesses of Piaget’s theory
- He did not look at the influence of social interactions or the cultural setting which can affect the development of patterns of thought. Pierre Dasen (1994) found that Aboriginal children developed the ability to conserve at a later stage than Piaget’s Swiss sample did.
- Data came from his interviews and observations with children. As a result, his interpretations of situations and events may have been subjective making it bias.
- Lack of validity in his studies.
Schema
Mental representations of the world based on one’s own experiences
Equilibrium
- When a child’s schemas can explain all that they experience
- a state of mental balance may have resulted from new accommodation.
Assimilation
Incorporating new experiences into existing schemas.
Accomodation
When a schema has to be changed to deal with a new experience.
Results of Three Mountain Task
- Children from ages 4 - 12 were participants and there were 100 children who participated
- Children from 4 to 6.5 chose pictures that showed their view and found it difficult to show the view of the mountains from other peoples view. Overall they displayed egocentrism.
- Children from 7 - 9 are able to start looking from different positions
- By 9 or 10 they are able to understand that the doll has a different view than their own
- Older children were non-egotistic while younger children showed egocentrism.
Three Mountain Task
An experiment by Piaget and Inhelder which tested egocentricism. It was used to prove Piaget’s theory of development
- A model of 3 mountains using sheets of paper were put together. There were 3 mountains that all looked different. Ten pictures of three mountain models were taken from different positions around it.
- There was a doll positioned somewhere on the model
- Children were asked to show how the mountain looked from different viewpoints. They were also asked to rearrange the shapes to show what the doll could “see”
- The child was shown 10 pictures of the model and asked to pick what they could see and what the doll could see.
Strengths of the Three Mountain Task
- Provided a great deal of detail about what was done and the results
- Wrote about individual children, giving qualitative data that was in depth
- They were able to count the number of errors and look in detail of what their errors were. e.g. they could show that a child nearing the next stage of development could achieve elements of the next stage.
- They used experimental methods so careful controls were in place. This allowed comparisons to be made between the results from different children.
- Repeated the study with many children to add reliability to the findings.
Weaknesses of the Three Mountain Task
- He uses the word “stage” to explain cognitive development which is not decisively different
- Other studies (some with more realistic scenarios) did not find the same findings. For e.g. Helen Borke (1975) repeated the experiment with younger children and simplified it using puppet character from Sesame Street. Children between 3 - 4 were able to show the viewpoint of the puppet. Borke concluded that the three mountain task was too hard for younger children and they were not egotistic.
- Willingham also criticises Piaget’s stages of development and found that children of 18 months could show non-egocentric behaviour.
Seriation
- sorting objects into an order.
2. Develops during concrete operational stage.
Conservation
The child knows that quantity, length or number are not related to shape e.g. juice test
Decentration
Ability to take on another viewpoint.
Symbolic Play
- Children play using objects (e.g. toys) and ideas to present other objects and ideas.
- This is developed at the pre-operational stage
Animism
Belief that objects can behave as if they were alive.
Reversibility
- Understanding that action can return something to its original state.
- Develops in the concrete operational stage.
Cognitive
Thinking, including problem - solving, perceiving, remembering, using language and reasoning
Operations
How we reasons and think about things
Adaptation
using assimilation and accommodation to make sense of the world
Egocentric
Unable to see the world from another’s point of view.
Morality
General principle about what is right and wrong,
Object Permanence
Knowing something exists even if it is out of sight
