topic 1 - Piaget and Inhelder (1956)

Question 1

what is the background to the study?

Answer 1

According to Piaget a young child in the pre-operational stage can see the world from their own viewpoint an no one else’s. Piaget labelled this inability as egocentrism as the child is focused on themselves. This task is supposed to aid the child to ‘decentre’ and try to consider multiple viewpoints in a situation.

The three mountains task studies the way children look at the world. Piaget wanted to look at a childs understanding of groups of objects. They set up a study using a model of mountains where a child would be seated on different sides and have different views of the mountain.

Question 2

what are the four main pieces of equipment?

Answer 2

3 mountains
one mountain had a house on top
one mountain had a red cross at the top
one mountain was covered with snow

Question 3

what was the way of questioning children?

Answer 3

1. the child was asked to use the cardboard shapes to show how the mountain scene looked like from different viewpoints, such as the view they saw themselves looking at and the view of a doll positioned by a researcher around the model could see.
2. the child was shown 10 pictures of the model and were asked to pick out the picture that represented what they could see from different positions. They were also asked to pick out the picture that doll could see from a position the doll was placed.
3. The child would choose a picture then would have to position the doll to ‘see’ that viewpoint.

Question 4

what are the strengths of the studies?

Answer 4

1. children are able to discover things at their own pace and they can work according to their stage of development
2. supporting evidence
3. gave rich qualitative data
4. they evaluated their results
5. used experimental methods therefore careful controlled variables were in place.
6. using a lot of children for the study provided many results therefore strengthening the reliability of their findings.

Question 5

what are the weaknesses of the study?

Answer 5

1. the results suggest that children can develop thinking ability progressively as they age rather than their distinct stages.
2. there is contradictory evidence such as the Sally and Anne test and Heinzes moral dillema
3. children can do things earlier than piaget thought
4. Piaget didn’t look at the influences of social interactions and or culture
5. Piagets data came through interviews with children leading to subjective results implicating there is a certain degree of bias
6. the data of the children may not be valid

Question 6

what are the results in the pre-operational stage?

Answer 6

(ages 4-6.5 years old)
chooses pictures and places cardboard to show their own view of the 3 mountains model. They could not place the doll in a position where the view matched the picture the child is shown, this shows egocentrism.

Question 7

what are the results for concrete operational stage?

Answer 7

(ages 7-9 years old)
starts to understand that others can see the the model differently, which doesn’t show egocentrism

ages (9-10 years old)
children can understand that others have different view if in a position which is different from their own.

Question 8

what is the conclusion of the study?

Answer 8

they concluded that children up to about 7 years old were egocentric and that they could not see the viewpoint of others but towards the end of the pre-operational stage the children were more able to take into account the viewpoint of another person. Therefore the children in the pre-operational stage did not have the proper understanding of ‘viewpoint’ yet.

older children were more non-egocentric as they were able to look at the 3 mountains as objects relating to one another, such as the larger mountain was able to block the view of the smaller one. The older children were able to position their own viewpoint among the views of others and construct mental representations of what others could see. The older children had the ability to co-ordinate different perspectives.

This task provided evidence for Piaget’s stages of development and it showed that children in the pre-operational stage were ego centric whereas the concrete operational stage was able to take another view other than their own and co-ordinate different view points.