Piaget's stages of intellectual development Flashcards
What did Piaget do?
Piaget identified 4 stages of intellectual development - each stage is characterised by a different level of reasoning ability. Every child will pass through the stages in the same order however, Piaget acknowledged the ages of the children may differ slightly.
What are the four stages of intellectual development?
Sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational and formal operational.
What is the sensorimotor stage (0-2 years)?
Infants interact with the world through eyes, ears, hands and mouth - by 2 children will learn basic language skills.
Infant invents ways of solving problems E.g., pulling lever to hear music, finding hidden toys, putting things into/taking toys out of boxes. Often by trial & error.
What is object permanence?
This skill is achieved by approx. 8 months. This is the ability to understand that if something is out of sight it still exists. Before 8 months, if an object goes out of sight, they won’t look for it (switch attention elsewhere). After 8 months, babies will continue to look for object even if they can’t see it.
What is the pre-operational stage (2-7 years)?
By 2 a toddler is mobile and has some language skills, but they still lack adult reasoning.
They engage in imaginative play and learn as they play (pretend play).
Piaget stated in this stage, children need to acquire 3 skills- egocentrism /conservation/class inclusion.
What is conservation?
The ability to realise that quantity remains the same even when the appearance of an object or group of objects changes.
Understanding of number/mass/volume is poor. E.g., if 5 buttons are stretched out in a line and 5 buttons were in a pile, child would say there were more buttons in the line because it was longer without the skill of conservation (younger children in this stage).
What is egocentrism?
The child’s tendency to only be able to see the world from their own viewpoint. This applies to physical objects as well as perspectives (e.g. in an argument).
If a child is egocentric they can’t appreciate that everyone’s view is different - this is demonstrated by the three mountains task.
What is the three mountains task?
Three model mountain- doll place on opposite side to child.
The doll would have seen the mountains at a different angle to the child. The child was then asked to describe what the doll would see from where it was sat.
Those children who were more egocentric struggled to do this and their description matched what they could actually see rather than doll.
What is class inclusion?
This skills is an advanced skill that means children can recognise that classes of objects have subsets and are themselves subsets of larger classes. Children without this skill struggle to place things in more than one class. E.g. most children in the pre-operational stage know there are different breeds of dogs e.g. Labrador, pugs etc.
However, when 7-8 year olds are shown a picture of 5 dogs & 2 cats and asked, “are there more dogs or animal?”- they often answered dogs. This shows that children of this age can’t simultaneously see a dog as a member of the dog class and the animal class.
What is the concrete operational stage (7-11 years)?
By 7, most children have the skills of conservation/egocentrism/class inclusion.
Reasoning abilities have also become more developed however, these are described at this stage as being “concrete operations”- can only be applied to physical objects in child’s presence.
Struggle with abstract reasoning/imagine objects or situations they can’t see - e.g. mental arithmetic can’t be carried out in child’s head. Need presence of counting beads etc to help.
What is the formal operational stage (11-18 years)?
From the age of 11, children become more capable of formal reasoning- they can focus on the form of an argument and not get distracted by its content. Child can think through complex ideas in their head.
What is a strength of Piaget’s theory of intellectual development?
What are the limitations of Piaget’s theory of intellectual development?
