Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

Question 1

Object Permanence

Answer 1

Knowing something exists even if it is out of sight.

Question 2

When does a child develop object permanence?

Answer 2

At around 6 months in the Sensorimotor stage.

Question 3

What are the four stages of Cognitive Development

Answer 3

Sensorimotor Stage (birth to 2 years)
Pre-Operational Stage (2-7 years)
Concrete Operational (7-12)
Formal Operational (12+)

Question 4

What are the two stages of Pre-operational

Answer 4

Symbolic function (2-4 Years)
Intuitive Thought Stage (4-7 years)

Question 5

At what stage will a child be Egocentric?

Answer 5

Pre-operational Stage

Question 6

Symbolic Play

Answer 6

Children play using objects and ideas to represent other objects and ideas, e.g. a cardboard box may represent a car.

Question 7

Egocentrism

Answer 7

Unable to see the world from any other viewpoint but one’s own.

Question 8

Animism

Answer 8

Believing that objects that are not alive can behave as if they are alive.

Question 9

Centration

Answer 9

Focusing on one feature of a situation and ignoring other relevant features.

Question 10

Irreversibility

Answer 10

Not understanding that an action can be reversed to return to the original state.

Question 11

What abilities will the child show in the Concrete Operational Stage?

Answer 11

Seriation
Classification
Reversibility
Conservation
Decentration

Question 12

Seriation

Answer 12

The ability to sort objects into size

Question 13

Classification

Answer 13

The ability to name and identify objects according to size or appearance.

Question 14

Reversibility

Answer 14

E.g. if a child knows that two bricks plus four bricks gives six bricks, they will know that six bricks minus two bricks gives four bricks.

Question 15

Conservation

Answer 15

A child will know that length, quantity or number are not related to how things look. If the shape is changed, e.g. making the quantity look different, children know that the quantity is still the same.

Question 16

Decentration

Answer 16

The ability to take multiple views of a situation.

Question 17

Morality

Answer 17

General principles about what is right and wrong, including good and bad behaviour.

Question 18

Schema

Answer 18

Mental representations of the world based on one’s own experiences.

Question 19

Assimilation

Answer 19

Incorporating new experiences into existing schemas, e.g. a young child develops a schema for birds flying and, seeing an aeroplane, calls it a bird.

Question 20

Accommodation

Answer 20

A schema no longer works and has to be changed to deal with a new experience, e.g. the child will see that birds are alive and aeroplanes are not, and so they will need to change their ‘everything that flies is a bird’ schema.

Question 21

Equilibrium

Answer 21

When a child’s schema work for them and explain all that they experience. They are in a state of mental balance, e.g. the ‘bird’ schema is changed. Aeroplanes are included, and the child understands that they are metal and carry passengers, thus moving from disequilibrium into a state of equilibrium.

Question 22

What is a strength of Piaget’stheory?

Answer 22

It has practical applications which strengthens the theory.

When children are allowed to discover things at their own pace, they are able to build knowledge using schemas and can work to the stage of their development.

Question 23

What is another strength of Piaget’s theory?

Answer 23

His work has generated a lot of research including experiments to show that the different stages exist and children build knowledge through schemas.

Question 24

What is a weakness of Piaget’s theory?

Answer 24

Piaget didn’t look at the cultural setting.

Dasen (1994) found that aboriginal children developed the ability to conserve at a later stage then Piaget’s Swiss sample.

Question 25

What is another weakness of piaget's theory?

Answer 25

Piaget's data came from his interviews and observations with children. As a result, his interpretations of situations and events may have been subjective, leading to some bias in his findings.

Question 26

Mindset

Answer 26

A set of beliefs someone has that guides how someone responds to or interprets a situation.

Question 27

Ability

Answer 27

What someone can do, such as maths ability or ability to play tennis. Dweck suggests ability can be seen as either fixed and innate or as able to be improved.

Question 28

Effort

Answer 28

When you try to do better using determination

Question 29

Fixed Mindset

Answer 29

Believing your abilities are fixed and unchangeable.

Question 30

Growth Mindset

Answer 30

Believing that practise and effort can improve your abilities.

Question 31

What is a strength of Dweck's mindset theory?

Answer 31

It has practical applications. Teachers and parents can focus on praising effort rather than ability in order to encouragechildren.

Question 32

What is another strength of Dweck's mindset theory?

Answer 32

There is evidence to support the theory: Yeager and Dweck's (2012) study found that adolescents could deal better with not fitting in if they had a growth mindset. Believing that people can change led to better school performance.

Question 33

What is a weakness of Dweck's mindset theory?

Answer 33

Many of the studies that look into mindset have been experiments and so have artificial settings. This is a weakness because the results may not represent real life. This means that the data may lack validity. One exception is Gunderson (2013) who used a natural experiment.

Question 34

What is a further weakness of Dweck’s mindset theory?

Answer 34

Studying the mindset of a child may result in the child becoming the focus if there are problems with their progress, rather than the quality of what is being taught and how teaching is done. This can affect the usefulness of the theory.

Question 35

What is a strength of Willingham’s learning theory?

Answer 35

There are other studies that support Willingham’s work. Repacholi and Gopnik’s (1997) study provides experimental support, showing that young children were not as egocentric as Piaget thought.

Question 36

What is another strength of Willingham’s Learning Theory?

Answer 36

There is further experimental support for Willingham’s theory. Ericsson et al (1993) found that the violinists that engaged in more practise were the best. This means that the Willingham’s theory works in reality and therefore has practical application.

Question 37

What is one weakness of Willingham’s theory?

Answer 37

Willingham did not emphasise the importance of individual differences which means the universal strategies suggested by Willingham might not work for all.

Question 38

What is a further weakness for Willingham’s learning theory?

Answer 38

His theory comes from many areas of neuroscience, cognitive development and memory which means that his ideas are not really one singular theory that can be tested by gathering data.

Question 39

What is a strength of Piaget and Inhelder’s 3 mountains task.

Answer 39

They provided a great deal of detail about what was done and the results. They wrote about individual children, giving qualitative data that was rich in detail and had depth. This adds to the validity of the results.

Question 40

What is a further strength of Piaget and Inhelder’s 3 mountains task.

Answer 40

It was a laboratory experiment which meant that careful controls were in place such as using the same model and questions for each child. This means that comparisons could be made between the results from different children which added strength to the findings.

Question 41

What is a weakness of Piaget and Inhelder’s 3 mountains task?

Answer 41

Other studies used more realistic scenarios and they did not get the same findings. Borke (1975) changed Piaget and Inhelder’s task to make it more appropriate for the younger children. Borke used a puppet character from Sesame Street and let the children turn the model of the mountains that she used. She found that 3 year olds could give the puppets viewpoint correctly more than 79% of the time. Borke suggested that the three mountains task was too hard for the younger children and it was not that they were egocentric.