Semester 1 Lecture 2- Piaget's Theories of Development

Question 1

Why where Piaget’s theories constructivist?

key words: Active learners, innate

Answer 1

He theorised our cognitive development, and believed that children were active learners, so learnt via an innate drive to test their own hypothesis by interacting with their environment. Therefore, the children actively constructed their own knowledge (hence constructivism)

Question 2

What did Piaget believe about children’s learning in terms of paternalism/self motivation?

Answer 2

He believed that children were innately motivated to learn and explore.

Question 3

How can we apply Piaget’s theory of active learning to education?

Answer 3

The idea of having an innate drive to learn in children could relate to the methods used in Waldorf education

Question 4

What 4 stages of cognitive development did Piaget suggest we all went through?

Answer 4

The Sensorimotor Stage, the Pre-Operational Stage, the Concrete Operational Stage, Formal Operational Stage

Question 5

What type/pattern of development did Piaget theorise?

Answer 5

Discontinuous development, as it involves building on the schemas created in previous stages.

Question 6

How did Piaget define schemas?

Answer 6

mental representations/sets of rules, created from previous experience that enable a child to interact with their environment through defining a particular new stimuli/behaviour.

Question 7

What are the two processes involved in changing schemas?

Answer 7

Assimilation and Accommodation

Question 8

What is assimilation?

analogy included

Answer 8

When children integrate new input into existing schemas- the information does not challenge the schema, but it does build on it- i.e. seeing a four legged furry thing and assuming it is a dog, even if it doesn’t look like YOUR dog- but in your schema, dogs can now look different from your dog as long as they have four legs and are furry.

Question 9

What is accommodation?

Answer 9

Information that challenges our previous schemas is presented to us, creating a disequilibrium. We then must change our existing schemas in order to process this information- e.g., in language, when we learn that to turn something to past tense we add “ed” (i.e. jumpED), but must then learn that this is not always applicable, as is the case for “ate” as the past tense of “eat”

Question 10

What are two ways schemas are seen in an infant’s motor development?

Answer 10

Learning to walk or learning to grasp

Question 11

What age is associated with the Sensorimotor stage?

Answer 11

0-2 years old

Question 12

What age is associated with the Pre-Operational stage?

Answer 12

2-7 Years old

Question 13

What age is associated with the Concrete Operational Stage?

Answer 13

7-12 years old

Question 14

What age is associated with the Formal Operational?

Answer 14

12+ Years Old

Question 15

What milestones occur during the sensorimotor stage?

Answer 15

• The child will develop awareness of being distinct from their parents/environment (self awareness)
  Infants will conquer their sensorimotor system (i.e. learn to walk)
  Develop mental representations
  Develop Object Performances

Question 16

What are mental representation?

Answer 16

Mental images- being able to picture something in our minds after it has happened

Question 17

What is deferred imitation?

How can this indicate development of mental representations?

Answer 17

This occurs towards the end of the sensorimotor stage and is when an infant will imitate someone’s behaviour after a short period of time has passed. This therefore shows that they are acting off the mental image they have formed from previous behaviours they have observed. This therefore marks the infant forming and recalling mental representations.

Question 18

What is object performance?

Answer 18

When children learn that things continue to exist even when we can’t see them.

Question 19

What is the rouge test? What is it testing for?

Answer 19

Testing for self awareness. Put a red splodge on a toddlers face and put them in front of a mirror and then see if they try and touch the mark on the mirror or on themselves.

Question 20

What are the two substages of the Pre-Operational stage of Piaget’s development (include associated ages)?

Answer 20

Pre-Conceptual (ages 2-4) and Intuitive Thought (aged 4-7)

Question 21

What are the major milestones in Pre-Conceptual Development?

Answer 21

They develop egocentrism
The child, now able to mentally represent, will do a lot of pretend play
There is a reduction in animism- the child no longer believes that everything that moves is alive

Question 22

What occurs in the Intuitive Thought stage of Piaget’s development?

Answer 22

Children develop symbolic thought (being able to represent things in their mind that are not there)
They become able to systematically order and identify items
They have not yet learnt conservation, so can’t pass conservation tasks

Question 23

What is conservation?

Answer 23

The idea that items do not always change in quantity or scale based on changes in appearance

Question 24

What are the major milestones in Concrete Operational thinking?

Answer 24

They develop metacognition- being able to think about thoughts
They begin to grasp the idea of cause and effect relationships
They grasp the idea of compensation (i.e. that lacking things may need more and things with excess need less)
They grasp reversibility and the fact that transformations in mass can be undone, so therefore the state/mass/number of it must remain the same

Question 25

What are the main milestones in Formal Operational development?

Answer 25

one develops hypotheticality/abstract thought

One can now reason with verbal hypotheses

Question 26

Give a brief overview of the main milestones involved in each stage of Piaget’s theory of development

Answer 26

Sensorimotor- Object permanence, Self awareness
Pre-Operational - Symbolic Thought- Mental Representations
Concrete Operational- Metacognition- Reversibility
Formal Operations- Hypothetical Thinking

Question 27

What are some limitations of Piaget’s work?

Answer 27

Every child is different, some develop some milestones of certain stages earlier on.
Some of the tasks used to test the stages were too complex and not child friendly
Piaget believed we shouldn’t try and teach kids things out of their stage, which resulted in limiting kids educational progress.

Question 28

How did Meltzoff and Moore contest Piaget?

Answer 28

Children can imitate parent’s facial expressions up to 24 hours after they occur, even at very early ages.

Question 29

How did later studies show earlier account of conservation?

Answer 29

More engaging stimuli can be more likely to help a child show elements of conservation- i.e. using a teddy to show conservation than water in a glass

Question 30

What did Lighte suggest about how to encourage conservation at earlier ages?

Answer 30

He suggested that if Conservation is “explained”, 70% of 4 year olds can show conservation skills

Question 31

What was Gibson’s theory for cognitive development?

Answer 31

An oppositional theory to constructivism- behaviourism. Suggested that the knowledge that we obtain during development is entirely from what we observe, with very little focus on internal thoughts.

Question 32

What were the bottom-up and top-down approaches to cognitive development?

Answer 32

bottom up- suggests we learn information from an original “uptake” of experience and then build up our more complex systems and knowledge from these simple learnings.
Top down- Our systems of knowledge and complex systems such as memory/sensorimotor movements are specified or presumed, so we must break this down to study their components.

Question 33

What are functional invariants?

Answer 33

Processes that are always there and do not change during development, such as accommodation and assimilation.

Question 34

What is centration? Which of Piaget’s stages is this involved in?

Answer 34

The focusing or centring of attention on one aspect of a situation, therefore excluding other aspects. This is demonstrated often in conservation tasks (if the child is able to do these tasks correctly) so is part of the concrete operations stage.

Question 35

What are perceptions of causality? When did Cohen suggest we learn this?

Answer 35

Perception of the causal nature between objects and between people- Cohen suggested that causal relation begins to be processed between 4 and 6 months.

Question 36

What is object unity?

Answer 36

it is an idea used to test children’s understanding of objects- if two parts of an object are connected but the middle is covered, is the child aware that the two parts are connected?

Question 37

What is connectionism?

Answer 37

A modern theoretical approach that developed from information processing in which computers are programmed to simulate the actions of the brain and nerve cells. This has helped us map out how we develop and learn certain things, such as object unity.

Question 38

What are three differences between Piaget’s organismic theories and Information processing approaches?

Answer 38

IPA focuses on how children’s processing is underdeveloped, hence they do not have certain skills that we do, so therefore we must overcome these limitations. Piaget focuses more on stages and developing logical frameworks from the basis formed in the previous stage of development.

Piaget’s theories are discontinuous while Information Processing Approach is more continuous

IPA focuses more on quantitative changes in ability in certain processes, whereas Piaget focuses more on qualitative changes between different processing stages.