Piaget's Stages of Intellectual Development Flashcards
What are the 4 stages of Intellectual Development?
Sensorimotor stage
Pre-operational stage
Concrete operational stage
Formal operational stage
What happens in the sensorimotor stage?
Baby’s focus is on physical sensations
Understand object permanence
What happens in the pre-operational stage?
Use language Lacks reasoning ability CANNOT conserve Egocentric Class inclusion
What happens in the concrete operational stage?
Can conserve
Better reasoning abilities
Cannot understand abstract ideas
What happens in the formal operational stage?
Capable of formal reasoning
Appreciate abstract ideas
What is object permanence?
The ability to realise that an object still exists when it passes out of the visual field
What is conservation?
The ability to realise that quantity remains the same even when the appearance of an object changes
What is egocentrism?
The child’s tendency to only see the world from their point of view
What is class inclusion?
Recognising that classes of objects can also be subsets of large classes
What task demonstrates the idea of egocentrism?
Three mountains task
Describe the three mountains task
3 model mountains had a different feature on top.
A doll was placed somewhere in between the mountains.
The child was asked to choose what the doll would see from a range of photos.
What were the findings of the 3 mountains task?
Pre-operational kids struggled with the task.
They often pointed out the photo that showed their own perspective.
What is a research limitation of the stages of intellectual development?
Qualitative techniques, subject to bias. Not reliable. Cannot generalise findings.
What is a weakness of Piaget’s stages of intellectual development?
THEORY LIMITATION
Dubious questioning.
When investigating conservation, the experimenters made it seem like the quantity had changed.
HOWEVER when replicated, children weren’t put off by the way they were questioned and were found to be able to conserve, suggesting Piaget was wrong about conservation in the pre-operational stage.
