Piaget Flashcards
Who did Piaget begin his career working with?
Alfred Binet
What type of theory was Piaget’s theory of child development?
Constructivist
What did Piaget believe?
That children are active learners who construct their own knowledge through interacting with their environment
What are the stages of Piaget’s theory of child development?
Sensorimotor
Pre-operational
Concrete operational
Formal operational
What is a schema?
Mental representation or sets of rules that enable children to interact with their world through defining a particular category of behaviour; they develop through experience and become more complex with development
Assimilation
The integration of new input into existing schemas, leading to more consolidated knowledge
Accommodation
The adjustment of schemas to new input, leading to growing and changing knowledge. This can happen when we want to avoid disequilibrium
Sensorimotor age
0 - 2 years
Sensorimotor milestones
Increasingly able to explore
Dependence on presence of object reduces, begin to develop mental representations
Object permanence
Awareness of being distinct from the environment
Pre-operaitional age
2 - 7 years
Pre-operational milestones
Develop symbolic thinking (an object can represent something else or an idea)
Egocentrism is reduced
Conservation of number is mastered
Reduction in animism
Concrete operational age
7 - 12 years
Concrete operational milestones
Logical mental operations are possible with visual aids
Conservation of mass, length, weight and volume is mastered
Metacognition develops
Understand cause-effect relations
Formal operational age
12+ years
Formal operational milestones
Abstract reasoning develops enabling children to speculate and reason
Children begin to formulate and test their hypotheses in the world
What is the rouge test?
If a red dot is drawn on a child’s forehead and they are put in front of a mirror, do they interact with the person in the mirror as if they are someone else?
Tests self-awareness
Pre-conceptual sub-stage
Ages 2 - 4
Egocentrism reduces
Children are able to mentally represent ideas and objects (enables pretend play)
Reduction in animism
Intuitive thought sub-stage
Ages 4 - 7
Children develop symbolic thought
They understand the same object can be of different sizes
Can systematically order and classify items
What does compensation mean?
The observation that a narrower glass needs to be filled higher to include the same amount of water as a wider glass
What is reversibility?
Since only the appearance of items has changed, this change can be undone, therefore in any transformation, the number/mass must have remained constant
Impacts of Piaget’s work
Laid the groundwork for developmental psychology as a sub-discipline
Gave some of the first insights into children’s minds
Huge impact on education, supports child centred learning, let educators see children as active learners
Many of his findings have been replicated with new methods
Limitations of Piaget’s theory
Piaget’s stages and ages children master them in are not all accurate
Some of Piaget’s tasks were too advanced and not child friendly and therefore may have underestimated children’s skills
The idea that a child cannot and should not be taught something if they are not yet at that stage has been disputed
Young infants may have object permanence in some situations
Bower (1972) - young children show surprise when an object disappears from behind a screen
Baillargeon, Spelke and Wasserman (1975) - adopted eye movement paradigms to measure infant looking time
Infants may be able to form mental representations
Infants can imitate actions they saw previously - suggests they may be able to form mental representations
Meltzoff & Moore (1994) - 6 week old infants could repeat tongue protrusion after 24 hours
Children can pass egocentrism tasks earlier when the materials change
Borke (1975) found that when the three mountains task was modified to be about the perspective of a sesame street character looking at a fire engine, 3 - 5 year olds could do this task
Hughes (1975) found that 60% of 3-year olds can hide a doll so a policeman can’t see it
Conservation can be achieved earlier when the task instructions are simplified
McGarringle & Donaldson (1974) found that when a naughty teddy got muddled and changed the materials, 4 year olds answered better to the questions is this the same height/weight/length as before
Light et al. (1979) found that 70% of 4 year olds demonstrate conservation skills if the change of container is explained (the container was damaged etc)
