Piaget's stages of intellectual development Flashcards
What are stages of development?
- 4 stages, each categorised by a different level of reasoning ability
What are the 4 stages?
1- Sensorimotor stage
2- Pre-operational stage
3- Stage of concrete operations
4- Stage of formal operations
What is the sensorimotor stage?
- 0-2 years old
- Babies early focus is on physical sensations and developing basic co-ordination
- Learn by trial and error that they can deliberately move the body and other objects in certain ways
- Develop understanding that others are separate objects
- Acquire basic language
- By 8 months, capable of understandinf object permenance
- Before 8 months, switched attention from the object once out of sight
What is object permanance?
- The ability to realise that an object still exists when is passes out of the visual field
What is the pre-operational stage?
- 2-7 years old
- By 2 years old, toddlers are mobile and can use language
- Lack adult reasoning abilities, so display characteristic errors in reasoning
- Conservation
- Egocentrism
- Class inclusion
What is conservation?
- The ability to realise that quantity remains the same even when the appearance of an object changes
What was Piaget’s number conservation experiment and what did he find?
- Placed 2 rows of 8 identical counters side by side
- Even young children correctly reasoned that each row had the same number of counters
- One row was then pushed together
- 2-7 year olds struggled to conserve and reported fewer counters
What was Piaget’s liquid conservation experiment and what did he find?
- 2 identical containers were placed side by side with contents at the same height
- Most spotted that they contained the same volume of liquid
- Liquid poured into a taller, thinner vessel
- Children believed there was more liquid
What is egocentrism?
- A child’s tendency to only be able to see the world from their own point of view
What was Inhelder’s egocentrism study and what did he find?
- 3 mountains task
- Children shown 3 mountain models, each with a different feature- a cross, house, or snow
- A doll was placed at the side of the model so it faced a different angle from the child
- Children asked to choose what the doll could see from a range of pictures
- Pre-operational children found this difficult and often chose the picture that matched the scene from their own view
What is class inclusion?
- The advanced classification skills, in which we recognise that classes of objects have subsets and are themselves subsets of larger classes
- Classification= objects fall into categories
- Most pre-operational children class classify pugs, retriver, etc as dogs
What was Piaget and Inhelder’s class inclusion study and what did they find?
- Children under 7 struggled with the advanced skill of class inclusion
- 7-8 year olds were shown pictures of 5 dogs and 2 cats- asked ‘are there more dogs or animals?’
- Children responded with more dogs
- Interpreted as meaning young children cannot simultaneously see a dog as a member of the dog and animal class
What is the stage of concrete operations?
- 7-11 years olds
- From 7+ most children can conserve and perform better on tasks of class inclusion and egocentrism
- Children have better externally-verifiable reasoning abilities (operations) but these are concrete (only applied to physical objects in the child’s presence)
- They struggle to reason about abstract ideas and imagine objects/situations they cannot see
What is the stage of formal operations?
- 11+ years old
- Children are capable of reasoning, so can focus on the form of an arguement and not be distracted by content
- E.g: Smith= all yellow cats have 2 heads. I have a yellow cat, how many heads does he have?
- Once children can reason formally, they are capable of scientific reasoning and can appreciate abstract ideas
Limitation-
I- Conservation research is flawed
D- In Piaget’s study children were influenced by seeing the experimengter change the appearance of counters/ liquid. McGarrigle and Donaldson’s study- counters moved ‘accidentally’. Condition 1 replicated Piaget’s task with 4-6 year olds, and found most= incorrect. Condition 2- ‘naughty teddy’ knocked counters closer, and 72% said there was the same number as before
E- Means children aged 4-6 could conserve, as long as questioning was suitable, suggesting Piaget was wrong about the age of conservation
Limitation-
I- Research contradicts class inclusion
D- Siegler and Svetina- children are capable of understanding class inclusion. Gave 100 5 year olds from Slovenia 10 class-inclusion tasks, receiving explanations of tasks after each session. Condition 1- received feedback that there must be more animals than dogs as there were 9 animals and 6 dogs. Condition 2- feedback= more animals than dogs as dogs are a subset of animal. Scores improved for condition 2, suggesting children had acquired a real understanding of class inclusion
E- Means children under 7 can understand class inclusion, so Piaget underestimated the abilities of younger children
Limitation-
I- Lack of support for egocentrism
D- Hughes tested ability of children to see a situation from 2 people’s POV, using a model with 2 intersecting walls and 3 dolls- a boy and 2 police officers. Once familiarised with the task, children as young as 3.5 years could position the boy doll where one officer could not see him 90% of the time. 4 years old could do so 90% of the time when there were 2 officers to hide from
E- Means children can decentre and imagine other’s POVs earlier than proposed
Strength-
I- Criticism are of ages of each stage, not the stages themselves
D- For example, Hughes’ point is that children were able to decentre at a younger age. However it is still the case that this ability is not present in very young children, and we can see in Hughes’ study that ability improves with age
E- Means Piaget’s core principles remain unchallenged, but methods used meant timing of stages was incorrect
Evaluation extra-
I- Domain-general or domain-specific
D- Piaget claimed intellectual development is a single process, and that all aspects of cognition develop together (i.e. language, reasoning, egocentrism). However, abilities may develop separately. Some autistic childen experience co-occuring learning disabilities and often face challengs with reasoning, language, egocenrism. Othr autistic children without learning disabilities develop skills as in non-autistic children
E- It appears development is best seen as domain-specific which may have implications for education
