Piaget's stages of intellectual development Flashcards
Outline the sensori-motor stage
Children are aged between 0-2
Children focus on physical sensations and gaining basic motor coordination and learn this through trial and error.
They begin to establish that other people are separate objects and begin to understand basic language
Outline the main process in the sensori-motor stage
Object permanence (by 8 months)
Object permanence = where children understand something still exists even when it is not in view.
Piaget found that when babies were shown an object and then it was removed from their sight, babies before 8 months would immediately switch their attention, but from 8 months babies would still look for the object
Outline the pre-operational stage of development
Children are aged 2-7
Children are now mobile and understand language, however lack reasoning abilities.
What are the three processes within the pre-operational stage
-Class inclusion
-Egocentrism
-Conservation
Outline conservation
Children understand that the quantity of an item stays the same if the shape of the object changes
Piaget tested conservation by placing two identical lines of 8 counters next to each other and asking children if they were the same. Piaget then moved the counters of one line closer together and found children said that there was now less counters in the line
Outline egocentrism
Children can only see the world from their own point of view.
Piaget and Inhelder = 3 mountains task
Each model mountain had a different feature (a cross, snow, and a house). A doll was placed on a different side of the models than the child, and the child was then asked to select from a range of pictures what the doll could see.
Children in the pre-operational stage tended to find this hard and instead picked pictures of their own view of the models.
Outline class inclusion
The idea is that objects can be categorized into subsets and categories.
Piaget and Inhelder = children under 7 found complex class inclusion difficult.
Showed 7-8 year olds pictures of 5 dogs and 2 cats, and asked them if there were more dogs or animals. Found that children said more dogs and they could not fit the dog pictures into the categories of ‘dogs’ and ‘animals’
Outline the concrete operational stage of development
Children aged 7-11
From 7 years old, children are less egocentric and perform better on class inclusion tasks.
They have better externally-verifiable reasoning abilities, however these are concrete to physical objects.
Children struggle to comprehend abstract ideas.
Outline the formal operations stage of development
Children are aged 11+
Children are now capable of formal reasoning and can understand the form of an argument rather than just the content in it.
Tested through syllogisms = children were told that ‘all yellow cats have 2 heads, I have a yellow cat called Charlie, how many heads does Charlie have?’
Younger children answered that cats can’t have two heads, but children 11+ were able to give the correct answer of 2 as they were less focussed on the content.
Evaluation (conservation is flawed)
The children in Piaget’s study may have been influenced by watching the researcher change the counters shape, as they have watched the counters be deliberately changed and then asked if they were the same.
McGarrigle and Donaldson repeated the study but made the change in counters appear accidental. They found 4-6-year-olds still answered wrong.
However when a ‘naughty teddy’ had knocked the counters over, 72% said that there was still the same number of counters.
Suggests that 4-6 year olds could conserve if not put off by wording of questions, therefore Piaget’s age range for conservation was wrong.
Evaluation (Class inclusion evidence contradicted)
Sieglar and Svetina gave 100 slovenian 5 year olds, 10 class inclusion tasks in sessions and gave them an explanation after each task.
1) group one were told that there was ‘more animals than dogs because there are 9 animals but only 6 dogs’
2) group 2 were given an explanation true to class inclusion and were told ‘there were more animals as dogs are a subset of animals’,
Group 2 performed better in class inclusion tasks that followed the explanation, suggesting that they did understand class inclusion therefore Piaget underestimated young children’s abilities.
Evaluation (lack of support for egocentrism)
Hughes gave children a similar task to the three mountains using intersecting walls and three dolls (a boy and two police officers).
He found once familiar with the tasks, 90% of 3 1/2 year olds could place the boy hidden from one police officer, and 90% of 4 year olds could do this for 2 police officers.
Suggests = when the scenario makes sense to the child they can imagine other perspectives.
EVAL (HOWEVER)
However all criticisms made are not of the characteristics of Piagets stages, but rather of the ages listed of each stage. This suggests that the fundamentals of Piaget’s stage still apply, however the timings and methods in each stage are flawed.
