Piaget Flashcards
What are the key questions addressed by Piaget?
How do humans come to learn things about the world?
How did Piaget develop and test his theory?
Observing his own children and structured interview with groups of children of varying ages.
What did Piaget argue about knowledge?
Piaget argued that knowledge is constructed through experience.
What is a schema?
Organized mental representation of information about the world, events, or people, stored in memory. The continuous aspects of Piaget’s theory.
How are schemas built?
Assimilation, accommodation, equilibration
What is equilibration?
The process of aligning thought with experience.
What are the discontinuous aspects of Piaget’s theory?
Distinct hierarchical stages.
What are Piagets four stages?
- sensorimotor
- preoperational
- concrete operational
- formal operational
In the sensorimotor stage, children are limited to their ________. What does that mean?
In the sensorimotor stage, children are limited to their SENSORY EXPERIENCE. It means that they act based on current sensory information.
What is the A not B error? Who discovered it?
A not B error is the lack of object permanence in the sensorimotor stage. It was discovered by Piaget.
In what stage do children come to acquire representational throught?
Preoperational stage
What is representational thought?
One object can stand for another.
How are representations limited in the preoperational stage?
Rigid, perception bound, and centered on one dimension, lack reversibility
In what stage do children come to acquire transformations of mental representations? What does this mean?
Concrete operations stage; These children cannot apply mental operations to abstract ideas or other mental operations
What happens in the formal operations stage?
Children can reflect on their own thinking, performing operations over operations; Enables abstract thinking and hypothetical thinking.
