Piaget, Vygotsky, Baillargeon

Question 1

What is cognitive development?

Answer 1

a general term to describe the development of all mental processes, in particular, thinking, reasoning and our understanding of the world - it continues throughout our lifespan, but psychologists have been particularly concerned with how thinking and development develops through childhood

Question 2

What were Piaget’s key assumptions?

Answer 2

• children think differently to adults
• maturation is the key to how children’s thinking changes
• the role of motivation - disequilibrium, equilibration
• how knowledge develops - schema: adaptation, assimilation & accommodation

Question 3

What are schemas?

Answer 3

contain our understanding of an object, person, idea - become increasingly complex during development as we acquire more information about each object/idea - mental framework of beliefs/expectations, developed by experience

Question 4

What is ‘me-schema’?

Answer 4

new schema constructed in infancy (we are born with a few) e.g. name, age

Question 5

What is disequilibrium?

Answer 5

the motivation to learn, an uncomfortable state that when we need to adapt to a new situation as schema are insufficient

Question 6

What is equilibration?

Answer 6

when we have encountered new information and built it into our understanding of a topic due to assimilation or accommodation - everything is balanced and we have escaped disequilibrium

Question 7

What is assimilation?

Answer 7

a form of learning that takes place when we acquire new information or more advanced understanding of an object, person or idea - if new info does not radically change our understanding, we can assimilate it into existing schema

Question 8

What is accommodation?

Answer 8

a form of learning that takes place when we acquire new information that changes our understanding of a topic to the extent that we need to form one or more new schemas and/or radically change existing schemas in order to deal with the new understanding

Question 9

AO3 Piaget’s theory - learn though forming mental representations

Answer 9

Howe et al: 9-12 year olds in groups discuss how objects move down a hill - showed level of understanding increases after discussion but children did not reach same conclusions

Question 10

AO3 Piaget’s theory - application: activity-orientated classrooms

Answer 10

allow children to learn in a more natural way as they actively engage so can construct their own understanding of cirriculum - positive impact on education

Question 11

AO3 Piaget’s theory - limited explanation

Answer 11

doesn’t refer to the role of others like Vygotsky, only recognised teachers as important in discovery situations

Question 12

AO3 Piaget’s theory - role of equilibrium overemphasised

Answer 12

not all children equally motivated to remove disequilibrium, Piaget used a biased sample of middle-class families children from his uni - this weakens the validity

Question 13

AO3 Piaget’s theory - underplay the role of language

Answer 13

just another cognitive ability that develops in line with other abilities - Vygotsky recognised its importance, if it is central and Piaget does not fully examine it, this means validity is limited

Question 14

What is object permanence?

Answer 14

the ability to realise that an object still exists when it passes out of the visual field, Piaget believed that his ability appears around 8 months, prior to this, children lose interest in an object once they can’t see it and and presumably are no longer aware of its existence

Question 15

What is conservation?

Answer 15

the ability to realise that quantity remains the same even when the appearance of an object or a group of objects changes

Question 16

What is egocentrism?

Answer 16

child’s tendency to only see the world from the own POV - Inhelder & Piaget demonstrated this with Three Moutains Task

Question 17

What is class inclusion?

Answer 17

an advanced classification skill in which we recognise that classes of objects have subsets and are themselves sets of larger classes

Question 18

What were Piaget’s stages of intellectual development?

Answer 18

Sensorimotor stage (0-2)
Pre-operational stage (2-7)
Stage of concrete operations (7-11)
Stage of formal operations (11+)

Question 19

Outline the Sensorimotor stage

Answer 19

(0-2) baby’s focus on physical sensations and basic coordination between what they see and body movement
understand people are separate objects and acquire some basic language
they develop object permanence at about 8 months

Question 20

Outline the pre-operational stage

Answer 20

(2-7) egocentrism: tested by Inhelder & Piaget 3 mountains task, child matched to own POV, not a dolls
do not have the ability to conserve
early in the stage can classification but when showed 7-8 year olds 5 dogs, 2 cats, and asked if there were more dogs or animals, they said dogs - do not yet have this ability

Question 21

Outline the concrete operations stage

Answer 21

(7-11) children mastered conservation and are improving on egocentrism and class inclusion
still have some reasoning problems and are only able to reason / operate on physical objects in their presence

Question 22

Outline the stage of formal operations

Answer 22

(11+) capable of formal reasoning and abstract reasoning develops, can focus on a line of argument and cannot be distracted by its content

Question 23

AO3 Piaget’s stages - underestimate children in pre-operations ability to conserve

Answer 23

McGarrigle&Donaldson: ‘naughty teddy’ accidentally move counters, 72% children under 7 correctly say same number as before

• suggests Piaget underestimated ability of 4-6 year olds
• methodology may have made them think something must have changed (otherwise, why would researcher ask?)
• question validity

Question 24

AO3 Piaget’s stages - underestimate ability of class inclusion

Answer 24

Siegler&Svetina: when 5 year pads received freedback on pointing out subsets they understood class inclusion - contradict Piaget’s stages and doubt validity

Question 25

AO3 Piaget’s stages - underestimate ability to see from multiple POV

Answer 25

Hughes: even at 3.5, child could position a boy doll in model building with 2 intersecting walls where he couldn’t be seen by policeman doll
- suggests children can decentre earlier

Question 26

AO3 Piaget’s stages - domain general - may not be valid

Answer 26

Studies show children with ASD suggest intellectual abilities may develop independently - these children are very egocentric but normal language - may not be valid to explain all examples of development

Question 27

Outline Vygotsky’s assumptions

Answer 27

• reasoning skills develop sequentially
• mainly dependent on social processes
• knowledge is intermental, then intramental
• cultural differences explained by differing experiences and cultural values/beliefs that surround us
• ZPD
• scaffholding

Question 28

What is the zone of proximal development?

Answer 28

the gap between a child’s current level of development, defined by cognitive tasks that they can perform without help, and what they are capable of with the help of an expert

Question 29

What did Vygotsky suggest the role of the teacher was?

Answer 29

to guide the child through their ZPD to reach a level of full understanding - not just acquiring facts but becoming more skilled at reasoning - only achieved with help of experts, not just though exploration

Question 30

What is scaffolding?

Answer 30

the process of helping a learner cross their ZPD suggested by Wood et al

Question 31

What are the features of scaffolding?

Answer 31

recruitment - engaging interest
reducing degrees of freedom - focusing learner, getting them started
direction maintenance - motivating them to preserver

Question 32

What progressive strategies are used to scaffold learning?

Answer 32

demonstration
preparation for child
indication of materials
specific verbal instruction
general prompts

Question 33

AO3 Vygotsky - evidence for ZPD

Answer 33

4/5 year olds perform better on ‘how many sweets’ when working with peers - demonstrate more advanced reasoning with more expert people - support validity ZPD

Question 34

AO3 Vygotsky - evidence for scaffolding

Answer 34

Cornner&Cross: longitudinal study - 45 children between 16 & 54 months and observed changes over time, less intervention from mother as child got older - level of help declines over time, also useful to explain how children move through ZPD

Question 35

AO3 Vygotsky - application

Answer 35

7 year olds tutored by 10 year olds, in addition to whole class teaching, progressed further in reading than control group - validity and usefulness

Question 36

AO3 Vygotsky - what children learn from interactions is individual

Answer 36

Howe et al: 9-12 year olds who had group discussions about movement of objects down a slope showed better understanding after discussion but did not pick up the same facts
- criticised for not showing explaining the differing rates of cognitive development like Piaget does with maturation

Question 37

AO3 Vygotsky - may not be applicable to all

Answer 37

not all children learn effectively in a social situation - personality of learner and style of processing need to be considered

Question 38

Outline Baillargeon’s assumptions about cognitive development

Answer 38

infants in sensorimotor stage have better understanding of the physical world than suggested by Piaget
born with an innate PRS and primitive awareness which is refined through experience
object persistence

Question 39

Why did Baillargeon argue that infants did not reach for hidden objects before 8 months?

Answer 39

did not have the right motor skills

Question 40

Why did Baillargeon develop the violation of expectation technique

Answer 40

thought Piaget’s methods underestimated children’s abilities - VOE shows reactions to expected/unexpected event so could make inferences about infant’s cognitive abilities

Question 41

Outline Baillargeon and Graber’s VOE research

Answer 41

24 5-6 month old infants shown tall or short rabbit passing behind a screen with a window
impossible = neither rabbit appear
possible = tall rabbit seen, short not

Question 42

What did Baillargeon & Graber find?

Answer 42

stare at possible for 25.11 secs
impossible = 33.07 secs
- knew tall rabbit should appear
- surprised at impossible
- object permanence before 6 months

Question 43

AO3 Baillargeon - better test for infant understanding than Piaget

Answer 43

eliminates Piaget’s confounding variable that they stop looking simply because they loose interest - greater validity in methodology

Question 44

AO3 Baillargeon - hard to judge what infant understands

Answer 44

VOE is just predicting how infant will behave if there is a VOE, might not actually stare at impossible for longer as they realise it is impossible, but because they just notice there is a difference - based on inference, lowers validity

Question 45

AO3 Baillargeon - PRS explains why physical understanding is universal

Answer 45

Hespos & van Marle: basic physical properties understood by almost everyone - understanding drop keys fall to floor (universal) = innate and no cultural difference

Question 46

AO3 Baillargeon - B’s findings not actually a criticism for Piaget’s

Answer 46

they weren’t measuring the same thing - looking for longer is not the same as reasoning about the physical world