Piaget's Stages of Intellectual Development Flashcards
What is the definition of Piaget’s stages of intellectual development?
Piaget identified four stages of intellectual development. Each stage is characterised by a different level mod reasoning ability. Although the exact ages vary between children, all children develop through the same sequence of stages.
What are the 4 stages of cognitive development according to Piaget?
Stage 1 - Sensorimotor period
Stage 2 - Preoperational period
Stage 3 - Concrete Operational period
Stage 4 - Formal Operational period
What is the Sensorimotor stage?
0-2 years
Focus on physical sensations and basic co-ordination between what they see and their body movement.
Come to understand that other people are separate objects and acquire some basic language.
Object permanence develop around 8 months.
Research supporting sensorimotor stage.
Piaget found that object permanence develops at around 8 months. He hid an object under a cloth and observed whether children would continue to reach for the object. Before 8 months, the children immediately switched their attention away but after 8 months, they continued to reach for it suggesting they understood it still existed.
What is the Pre-operational stage?
2-7 years
1 Children cannot CONSERVE. -Conservation is the ability to realise that quantity remains the same even when the appearance of an object or group of objects changes.
2 Children are EGOCENTRIC. -
egocentrism is a Childs tendency to only see the world from their own point of view.
3 Children find CLASS INCLUSION.-difficult. Class inclusion is the idea that classifications have subsets.
Research supporting Pre-operational stage.
1 Piaget showed children tow rows of counters and asked them to confirm thy were the same. Then he spied out the counters and asked if they were still the same. Pre-operational children said they were no longer the same, could not conserve.
2 Piaget and Inhaler (1952) showed children a model of three mountains and placed a doll at a different viewing angle. They then asked children to identify the dolls view from a set of pictures.
3 Piaget (1964) showed 7-8 year olds pictures of five dogs and two cats and asked whether there were moe dogs or animals in the picture. Children at the stage tended today there were more dogs.
What is the concrete operational stage?
7-11 years
from the age of around 7 most children can conserve and perform much better on tasks of egocentrism and class inclusion.
Children still have reasoning problems- they are only able to reason or operate on physical operations in their presence.
They struggle to reason about abstract ideas and to imagine objects/ situations they cannot see.
What is the formal operational stage?
11+ years
Abstract reasoning develops- children can this beyond the here and nw in a scientific way . Children can focus on an argument and not be distracted by its content. This formal reasoning can be tested using syllogisms.
Research supporting formal operational stage.
Smith et al (1998) found that children younger than this stage struggled with syllogistic reasoning tasks such as working out “how many heads a yellow cat has if all yellow cats have tow heads?”. Children answered with “one” when the answer to this is abstract task is two. They were too distracted by the content to think in a logical way.
