Topic 4: Evaluating Piaget Flashcards
What experiments showed that children are better at tasks that Piaget thought portrayed object permanence? (e.g. A not B error)
Hood and Willatts study -
Worked with 5 months olds
They were shown an object to left/right
Then they turn the lights off
The baby then has the option to reach out for the object in the dark and found that 62% of reaches are out to the correct side.
This shows some evidence in children in sensorimotor stage substage 3 of knowledge that the object exists independent of their perception of it
Baillargeon’s study -
4 month olds
Showed infants an apparatus involving a drawbridge.
Drawbridge would move from flat position in front of them to a flat position away from them.
Showed this multiple times to the infant to make them habituate to the experience.
Habituation: when infants move from looking intently at something for a lengthy period to becoming bored of seeing it which will make their looking time decrease.
She then introduced an object like a block which blocks the progress of the drawbridge as it moves backwards.
Found that infants spent much longer looking at the impossible event. Shows that infants are surprised by this event. Violates their expectation. They dishabituate to the impossible event. Shows they ‘know’ the box is there.
Why have people like Hood, Baillargeon found evidence that children have some knowledge of object permanence much earlier than what Piaget thought?
Even though Piaget’s findings are robust in that children would still make errors that he said they would make.
It’s not that his findings were wrong, it’s just that different tasks show different patterns. Hood and B’s tasks were just different in that they did not involve the child to carry out complex actions which resulted in the child portraying knowledge of object permanence earlier than what Piaget thought.
This is evaluation from the sensorimotor period.
What experiments showed that children are better at tasks that Piaget thought portrayed egocentrism? (e.g. 3 mountains task)
Study by Hughes (in Donaldson, 1978): “put the boy where the two policemen can’t see him”
90% of 3 year olds can do this. Suggests can take multiple perspectives if the context is familiar to them
Hughes would argue that Piaget’s study was too complex for the children to carry out. It’s uncommon for children to be picking out pictures of someone else’s view. Would argue his study is better as he gets children to carry out ‘hide and seek’ task which is more familiar to them.
Failures also lied in conservation in the preoperational stage:
Again involves ability to integrate multiple perspectives
Study by McGarrigle & Donaldson (1974):
Involved a large sample of 80 4-6 year olds
Carried Piaget’s conservation task but added ‘Naugty Teddy’ and it is NT that mucks up the display. Not the experimenter like in piaget’s experiment.
When asked if they’re the same, 72% children were correct in this condition (compared to 34% in standard Piaget test)
This works because in the standard Piaget condition where the experimenter makes the change, there’s an implied consequence of the adult acting on the display; young children are used to adults doing things which have importance. So if an adult does something, it must mean something. So believe adult intentions to disrupt the display is deliberate so say that they’re “the same”.
These evaluations all in the preoperational stage.
What is the Rose and Blank effect?
“Are they the same” - “Are they still the same?”
Implication of this repeated question experiment is that there’s a pragmatic inference that you should change your answer.
Why would I ask if I didn’t suggest to you that you should change your answer?
What is evidence to say that children do not develop in isolation?
Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development:
A child is operating at any given time at their level of actual development. E.g. she’s a 4 year old child functioning at the 4 year old level. There is another opportunity for that child to function at the next, more advanced level of seeing things, understanding the world, completing tasks to her age (zone of proximal development)
Vygotsky’s claim that one’s ability to move the child into the zone of proximal development will depend on interactions that operate within the ZPD. So, a 4 year old child will be taught most effectively on how to integrate and operate in that zone such as a 5 year old. So vygotsky emphasises the importance of peer to peer learning but with a slightly more competent peer.
Why did Piaget fail in the social context?
Piaget’s underestimation of children’s abilities follows largely from a failure to contextualise the problem in a way that made sense to the child and accommodate to what they’re used to, and a failure to appreciate the social influence of the adult.
What is another way of thinking about how children develop strategies other than Piaget’s belief of qualitative, step like change?
Some argued that development/acquiring new strategies mirrored the overlapping waves model.
Plots given age against the percentage of use in each strategy on a particular task.
Strategy 1 is the least sophisticated, 5th is the most.
The preferred strategy does develop sequentially; there is a point in time where strategy 1 is the preferred, then 2, then 3 etc. (peak of the waves)
Things are not as discrete as Piaget’s staircase model.
This diagram shows the fact that children overall progress through using different strategies but in a more fluid way such that different strategies can be occurring at different times, overlapping with each other.
Gathercole (1993)
Plotted children’s performance across a range of ages on a set of different short term/ working memory tasks. All proportionalised against the level all 9 year olds show.
The curves are fairly gradual. They don’t show evidence of the discontinuities that we would think would characterise qualitative change.
It looks like quantitative change
Issue with Piaget is that we see quite a bit of evidence of quantitative change.
What is evidence for the overlapping waves model?
Siegler (1995)
45 5 year olds failing number conservation on ‘pretest problems’ - some include conservation, some transformation
Given various types of training on same problems
He can look at what strategies children are using across all the training.
There are 12 problems and on average three or more strategies are used per child.
Showing that you’re not just using one approach even in a relatively short space of time.
They will sometimes bring out a successful transformation strategy but 26% of the time they change and use a less successful strategy at least for one or two trials after.
So they’re not fixed even when they pick up and employ an appropriate successful strategy.
What domain did Piaget believe the way in which children developed?
Piaget claimed that children’s development is domain general: only 1 essential process of development which manifests itself in all areas.
E.g. piaget says that language is not special and is instead dependent on cognition.
Is domain specificity consistent with a nativist or environmentalist view?
Nativist
e.g. different types of intelligence - aligns with a nativist approach - domain specificity.
What is evidence that language or syntax is domain specific rather than dependent on cognition like Piaget thought?
Bickerton (1984)
Impoverished input: Pidgins and Creoles
suggestion that language might have innate systems that are specific to language.
