Piaget Flashcards
(Piaget) Five general orientations to the theory:
- Genetic epistemology
- The biological approach
- Structuralism
- The stage approach
- Piaget’s methodology
What is a stage according to Piaget?
A stage is a period of time during which the child`s thinking and behavior tend to reflect a particular type of underlying mental structure.
(Piaget) Five characteristics to the stage approach:
- A stage is a structured whole in a state of equilibrium
- Each stage derives from the previous stage, incorporates and transforms that stage and prepares for the next stage
- The stages follow an invariant sequence
- Stages are universal
- Each stage includes a coming-into-being and a being
Piaget’s methodology:
- Combination of interviews with manipulation of objects
2. Combination of infant observation with little experiments
What are the four stages of development according to Piget?
- Sensorimotor
- Preoperational
- Concrete operational
- Formal operational
(Piaget) First stage: Sensorimotor:
birth to 2 years
Infants understand world in terms of their
overt, physical actions on the world.
- A human starts life with a set of reflexes and inherited ways of interacting with the environment
- Infants actively construct a model of the world by means of the sensory (perceptual) and motor (physical movement) systems
- Sensorimotor period involves six stages
(Piaget) Second stage: Preoperational:
2 to 7 years
Children can use symbols (mental
images, words, gestures) to represent
objects and events
(Piaget) Third stage: Concrete operational:
7 to 11 years
Children acquire logical structures that
allow them to perform various mental
operations
(Piaget) Fourth stag: Formal operational:
11 to 15 years
Mental operations can be applied to
purely verbal or logical statements
(Piaget) 1.1. Modification of reflexes (birth to 1 month):
- newborn as a bundle of reflexes
- reflexes (e.g., sucking, grasping) are gradually modified when activated several times
- babies transform reflexes into organized patterns of behavior (schemes)
- construct primitive concepts about objects to suck, grasp, look at etc.
(Piaget) 1.2. Primary Circular Reactions (roughly 1 to 4 months):
- circular reaction is a behavior that is repeated over and over again and thus becomes circular
- “primary” because circular reactions involve consequences that are centered on or around the infant`s body (e.g., thumb sucking)
- circular reactions become deliberate, accompanied by feelings of pleasure
(Piaget) 1.3. Secondary Circular Reactions (roughly 4 to 8 months):
- secondary circular reactions are oriented to the external world, environmental consequences are of interest (e.g., noise of a rattle)
- infants repeat movements that had produced an interesting effect
(Piaget) 1.4. Coordination of secondary schemes (roughly 8 to 12 months):
- infants combine their schemes in complex ways
- they differentiate an instrumental (means) behavior and a goal behavior
- infants can put together schemes to achieve a goal and apply mean-end behavior in new situations
(example: remove a barrier to get an interesting object) - important outcome: anticipation of events
(Piaget) 1.5. Tertiary circular reactions (roughly 12 to 18 months):
- infants as scientists: they deliberately vary an action to see how this affects the outcome
- example: let objects fall from different positions
- trial-and-error exploration, discovery of new means through active experimentation
(Piaget) 1.6. Invention of new means through mental combinations (roughly 18 to 24 months):
- before stage 6, children have displayed their thinking to the world, now it begins to go underground
- external physical exploration gives way to internal mental exploration
- they now use mental symbols to represent objects and events
(Piaget) Overview sensorimotor period:
- Child actively learns about properties of objects and relations among them
- Cognitive structures gradually become more tightly organized
- Behavior gradually becomes more intentional
- The self is gradually differentiated from the environment
(Piaget) Sensorimotor concept of object permanence:
- An object continues to exist even when one cannot see, hear or feel it
- Knowledge necessary for a notion of a stable, predictable world
- Development:
- Stages 1 and 2: infants do not search for object that disappeared
- Stage 3: infants search e.g., if object in only partially hidden
- Stage 4: children have the skills needed to look for hidden objects; however, they persist in searching in the place where they searched previously (A-not-B error)
- Stage 5: search successfully even if there are several (visible) displacements
- 5.Stage 6: search for objects if displaced invisibly, as object is mentally represented
(Piaget) Summary of preoperational stage:
- What children achieved with actions on the world in the sensorimotor period is redeveloped, now in the area of mental representations
- Mental representations stand for objects or events
Two types:
2.1. Symbols: bear some similarity to the objects or events they stand for (e.g., in symbolic play pretending that a cloth is a pillow)
2.2. Signs: are arbitrarily related to events or objects (e.g., words) - Advantages of representational thought:
3.1. Faster and more mobile
3.2. Can deal with past, present and future
3.3. Can recombine its parts to create ideas that refer to nothing in reality
(Piaget) Characteristics of the preoperational period:
- Preoperational: children have not yet acquired reversible mental operations
- Time of preparation for the next stage - Piaget described children in terms of what they cannot do:
- Egocentrism
- Rigidity of thought
- Limited social cognition
(Piaget) Egocentrism:
- tendency to perceive, understand and interpret world in terms of self
- children have trouble taking another person`s perspective
- Task: three mountains
(Piaget) Egocentric speech:
remarks are unrelated to those of the
other
(Piaget) Rigidity of thought:
- centration: tendency to attend to or think about one salient feature of an object or event and ignore other features
- tendency to focus on states and ignore the transformation linking the states
- lack of mental reversibility
- example: conservation task
(Piaget) 2nd stage: Limited social cognition:
Work on moral judgment: children judge the wrongness of an act according to external outcomes, ignore the person`s intentions
-Example: A boy who breaks five cups while trying to help his mother set the table is considered naughtier than a boy who breaks only one cup while trying to steal cookies from the cabinet
(Piaget) Characteristics of the concrete operational period:
(roughly 7 to 11 years)
- Mental operations take place: operation as internalized mental action that is part of an organized structure
- With the ability to use operations, the child’s representations are no longer isolated or rigid as before
- Acquisitions (examples):
- Concept of conservation (e.g., amount of liquid remains the same)
- Class inclusion: Concept that subcategories are part of a broader category
- Operations applied to relations
- Social world: take into account intentions in moral judgments
- Concrete operational acquisitions
- do not develop at the same time
- each acquisition develops over a period of time
(Piaget) Limitations of the concrete operational period:
- operations can only be applied to concrete objects (present or mentally represented)
- the final step is to apply the operations to purely verbal or logical statements
(Piaget) Characterrisatics of the formal operational period:
(roughly 11 to 15 years)
- Adolescents can take the results of concrete operations and generate hypotheses about their logical relations (i.e., operations on operations)
- They can think logically and abstractly about events, even hypothetical ones
- Scientific thinking develops: formulate hypotheses and test them against reality
- Method: problem from physics, observation of problem-solving process
- Social world: ability to consider abstract ideas, the future, possibilities
- Adolescents complete their cognitive structures, but thinking continues to develop throughout adulthood
(Piaget) What is the pendulum problem?
an example for the formal operational period.
-Task: find out which variables are responsible for
the time it takes for a pendulum to swing back and
forth:
1. Weight severity
2. Length of the string to which the weight is attached
3. The height from which the weight is released
4. The force with which the weight is pushed
-Systematic experimentation leads to solution
(Piaget) By what processes does a child’s thinking progress?
- Stagelike changes are due to many small sevelopments
- These are driven by thinking processes:
- Organization: the mind is a coherent view of the world
- Adaptation: fit between the mind and the enviroment; two complementary processes:
- 2.1. Assimilation: process of fitting reality into one’s cognitive organization
- 2.2. Acommodation: adjustment in cognitive organization when reality does not fit our expectations
- ->Both are closely intertwined - Equilibration:
- 3.1. every organism strives toward equilibrium with the enviroment and equilibrium within itself
- 3.2. when assimilation and accomodation are in balanced coordination, equilibrium is achieved
- 3.3. change in either organism or enviroment leads to disequilibrium which must be corrected
- 3.4. equilibrium is the grand process that intergrates and regulates all of the elements of development
(Piaget) What is the basic nature of humans?
Piaget`s worldview was organismic:
1. The child as self-regulating, organized whole striving to maintain
equilibrium by correcting cognitive imbalances
2. Activity and self-regulation cause continual change
(Piaget) Is development qualitative or quantitative?
Piaget saw both qualitative and quantitative changes, but emphasized qualitative changes in structures from stage to stage.
- Quantitative changes: schemes, operations, or other cognitive skills become stronger, more easily activated, more efficient, or more consistent
- Qualitative changes: changes in structure from stage to stage
- Qualitative and quantitative changes build on each other
(Piaget) How do nature and nurture contribute to development?
Piaget emphasized interaction of innate and experiential factors
• Four-factor “formula” for development:
Development = physical maturation + experience with the physical
environment + social experience + equilibration
(Piaget) What is it that develops?
- essence of cognitive development: structural change
- structural change gives meaning to and influences change in the
content of thought
(Piaget) Applications of Piaget’s theory:
- Piaget`s theory influenced educators
- Notion of “readiness”
- Learning most likely occurs if children actively participate
- A teacher mainly provides guidance and resources so that children can teach themselves
- Teachers should be aware of individual differences in learning
(Piaget) Evaluation: Strengths:
1. Recognition of the central role of cognition 2. Discovery of surprising features of children`s thinking 3. Wide scope 4. Ecological validity
(Piaget) Evaluation: Weaknesses:
1. Inadequate support for the stage notion 2. Inadequate account of mechanisms of development 3. Need for a theory of performance 4. Slighting of social and emotional aspects of development 5. Underestimation of abilities 6. Methodological and stylistic barriers
