Piaget

Question 1

What did Piaget propose?

Answer 1

A constructivist theory
That children are active learners who construct their own knowledge through interacting with the environment
They make a hypotheses and test them

Question 2

What are the four stages that all typically developing children go through?

Answer 2

1) Sensorimotor
2) Pre-operational
3) Concrete Operational
4) Formal Operational

Question 3

What do children need to do to go through the stages?

Answer 3

Organise schemas more and more proficiently

Question 4

What are schemas?

Answer 4

Mental representations of sets of rules than enable children to interact with their world through defining a particular category of behaviour, they develop through experience and become more complex with development

Question 5

How do they change their schema?

Answer 5

Through the dual process of assimilation and accommodation

Question 6

What is assimilation?

Answer 6

The integration of new input into existing schemas, leading to more consolidated knowledge

Question 7

What is accommodation?

Answer 7

The adjustment of schemas to new input, leading to growing and changing knowledge

Question 8

When does the sensorimotor stage of development take place?

Answer 8

0 - 2 years, very egocentric

Question 9

What are the key milestones of the sensorimotor stage?

Answer 9

1. Object permanence - this develops at the end of their first year, enabling the development of …
2. Mental representations - the building blocks of pretend play and memory
3. Self-awareness - can be tested in the rouge test

Question 10

When does the pre-operational stage take place (including the sub-stages)?

Answer 10

2 - 7 years
Pre-conceptual sub-stage: 2- 4 years
Intuitive thought sub-stage: 4 - 7 years

Question 11

What are the key milestones of the pre-conceptual sub-stage?

Answer 11

1. Egocentrism reduces
2. Mentally represent ideas and objects enabling simple pretend play
3. Reduction in animism - the idea that if it moves its alive

Question 12

What are the key milestones of the intuitive though sub-stage?

Answer 12

1. Children develop symbolic thought
2. They understand the same object can be different sizes
3. Able to systematically order and classify items

Question 13

What is conservation?

Answer 13

While the appearance of items may change the number or amount stay the same
Children in the pre-operational stage don’t have this skill for liquids and solids

Question 14

When does the concrete operational stage take place?

Answer 14

7 - 12 years

They become more flexible and are able to focus on more than one thing at a time

Question 15

What are the key milestones of the concrete operational stage?

Answer 15

Metacognition begins to develop
They can conserve, classify and categorise in multiple domains
They understand reversibility
Start to grasp cause-effect relations
Their thinking is still concrete not abstract

Question 16

What is reversibility?

Answer 16

Since only the appearance of items has changed, this change can be made undone.
In any transformation on these tasks, the number/mass has remained constant

Question 17

When does the formal operational stage take place?

Answer 17

12+ years

Question 18

What happens in the formal operational stage?

Answer 18

This is when children become able to reason hypothetically

They can reason with verbal hypothesis and deduce conclusions from abstract statements

Question 19

What are some influences and implications of Piaget’s research?

Answer 19

Gave us some of the first insights into children’s minds
Had a huge impact on education - supporting children centred learning which led educators to focus on play and see children as active learners
Many of his findings have been replicated with new methods

Question 20

What are some limitations of Piaget’s theory?

Answer 20

The stages aren’t all accurate, some might develop at a later/earlier stage
Some of the tasks were too advanced and might underestimate children’s skills
The idea that children cannot and should not be taught something if they are not yet at that stage has been disputed
Infants may be able to form mental representations as they can imitate previous actions
They can pass egocentrism tasks when the materials change
Conservation can be achieved earlier when task instructions are simplified