Piaget Flashcards
Outline of Piaget’s theory
Constructivist theory
Knowledge constructed through schemas
Fixed sequence of four developmental stages
Adaptation
Constructivist theory
Children are active agents that develop through interacting and adapting to their world. They do not just passively absorb information.
Schemas
Units of knowledge that are built upon through adaptation either by assimilation or accommodation to create an equilibrium.
Equilibrium
An equilibrium between the what the child understands and the environment the child needs to understand. Achieved through adaptation.
Assimilation
The cognitive process by which children incorporate information into their existing schemas. Starling into a bird schema.
Accommodation
The cognitive process in which children adapt to new experiences by modifying existing schemes. Penguin into a bird schema.
The four developmental stages
Sensorimotor
Pre-operational stage
Concrete operational stage
Formal operational stage
Sensorimotor stage
0-2 years.
Infant is equipped with reflex movements and perceptual systems and learns about the world through these sensory and motor skills.
Infant discovers the relationship between their actions and the consequences of their actions.
Key development - object permanence.
Object permanence
The ability for a child to understand that an object still exists, even when they cannot see it.
Infant before 8-9 months will not search for a hidden object.
Covering a toy with a box, child does not try and grab.
Development of object permanence
1) Infant will retrieve a visible object, will search for a partially hidden object, but not a fully hidden object.
2) Infant will attempt to retrieve a hidden object, but when object is moved to another hidden area (in the infants view), they will still search in the original hiding place.
3) Infant will search for the object wherever it is hidden as long as they saw it being hidden. Infant has achieved object permanence at around 12 months of age.
Why is object permanence important in the development of language.
One characteristic of human language - displacement - is the ability to communicate about things that do not exist in the here and now. This could not be developed without object permanence.
Pre-operational stage
2 - 7 years.
Mentally represent objects that are not present and reconstruct in thought what has been established through behaviour.
Child understands the world through symbols, including words and mental images which represent things in the world.
Symbolic play - one object can be used to represent another - banana for a telephone.
Start to form stable concepts and begin reasoning.
Limitations of pre-operational cognition
Cannot use operations.
Egocentrism
Centration
Animism
Operations
Mental acts or schemas in which objects are manipulated and returned to their original stage. ?
Egocentrism
Inability to take the point of view of another person.
Limitation on the pre-operational stage, 2-7 years.
Evidenced in the 3 mountains task.
Centration
Focusing on one salient dimension to the exclusion of other dimensions.
Limitation of the pre-operational stage, 2-7 years.
Evidenced in conservation tasks.
Animism
Attributing lifelike qualities to objects.
Feature of the pre-operational stage, 2-7 years.
Conservation
The ability to keep in mind what stays the same and what changes in an object after in changes in form.
Limitation of the pre-operational stage, 2-7 years.
Number, length and volume tasks. Children in pre-operational stage will fail to reason that there has been no change.
Vocab - salient
A striking, prominent feature.
Vocab - reasoning
Using logical thought to arrive at a conclusion
Concrete operational stage
7 - 11 years.
Start to use concrete operations.
Become more logical, but still think in concrete terms - mental operations that apply to tangible, concrete objects or ideas, rather than abstract propositions.
Types of concrete operations
Conservation
Seriation
Transitivity
Class inclusion
Seriation
Concrete operation, 7 - 11 years.
The ability to sort objects or situations according to any characteristic, such as size, colour, shape, or type.
Transitivity
Concrete operation, 7 - 11 years.
The ability to infer the relationship between two objects, via knowledge of their relationship to a third object.
E.g. A is bigger than B, B is bigger than C, therefor A is bigger than C.
Class inclusion
Concrete operation, 7 - 11 years.
Understanding the hierarchical relationship between superordinate and subordinate classes.
E.g. Are there more flowers or more blue flowers?
Formal operational stage
11 years +
Hypothetico-deductive reasoning.
Adolescents can come up with theories and generate hypotheses, and devise ways of testing them.
Can think in abstract ways.
Realms of possibility.
May have multiple theories about one thing.
Evidenced in the pendulum problem.
Pendulum problem
Way of testing hyprothetico-deductive reasoning.
Evident in the Formal operational stage.
Various weight and lengths of pendulum given, subjects have to work out what determines the speed of the swing.
Formal operational thinkers will produce hypotheses - weight? length? - and test them by varying that factor systematically.
Pre formal operational thinkers will test variables at random.
Realms of possibility
Feature of Formal operational stage, 11+
Reasoning no longer limited to what can be directly seen or heard.
Concrete operational thinkers are bound by reality, formal operational thinkers can consider realms of possibility.
What if we had no thumbs?
Educational applications of Piaget’s ideas
Formal methods of instruction - worksheets and text books - are unsuitable for young children’s ways of learning.
Progressive education - how to learn rather than what to teach.
Notion of readiness - educational experiences must be matched to a child’s level of understanding.
Notion of discovery learning - learner draws on their own past experience and existing knowledge to discover new knowledge.
Discovery learning
Guided learning
Problem based learning
Simulation based learning
Case based learning
Incidental learning
Teacher as facilitator of children’s own constructive endeavours, not transmitter of knowledge.
Criticisms of Piaget’s theory
Underestimates the competence of children
Age norms are disconfirmed by the data
Characterises development negatively
Neglects to role of social factors in development
Evidence against - Conservation
McGarrigle and Donaldson showed that through their ‘naughty teddy’ conservation experiment, that 4 - 6 year olds (pre-operational stage) displayed an ability for conservation.
Their hypotheses was that in the original test, the non-verbal behaviour of the experimenters influenced the child’s understanding of the questions.
Evidence against - Object permanence
Baillargeon showed that 3 1/2 and 4 1/2 month old infants can display object permanence.
The experiment used a rotating screen to trick infants into thinking the screen would be passing through an object, and measured the infants gaze as this happened.
The original experiment relied on the infants coordinating a series of motor movements to reveal the hidden object, an ability they struggle with and therefor do not peruse the goal of revealing the object.
Vocab - Abstract
Existing in thought or as an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence.
