Week 2 - Piaget and Beyond Flashcards
What is genetic epistemology?
The development of knowledge
What is constructivism?
The synthesis of nature and nurture
Theory that children actively construct knowledge through interactions with the environment
But also not just watching, interactions between internal and external forces
How is knowledge abstracted from our experience?
Physical properties of objects -> physical knowledge
Our actions upon the objects -> logical mathematical knowledge
What are the mechanisms of children’s knowledge?
Organised into schemas or cognitive structures
Internalised actions
Intellectual activity
What is the principle of adaptation?
Assimilation: incorporating new objects from environment into an already existing scheme
Accommodation: modifying or re-organising mental structures in response to a new object/event
Equilibration: sequential pattern of self regulation, maintaining existing schemas and modifying them to deal with new environment
(Organisation)
What is infancy: sensorimotor stage
0-2 years
Move from reflexes to reflecting
Newborn reflexes
Primary circular reaction
Secondary circular reactions
Coordination of secondary circular reactions
Tertiary circular reactions
Mental representation
Early to middle childhood: preoperational stage
2-7 years
Increase in mental representations
Difficulty in manipulation of mental representations
Conversation
What are the key principles of early to middle childhood?
Invariance
Identity
Compensation
Reversibility
What is the theory of egocentrism?
Recognising that others have points of view different to ours
Learning to engage in decentration
Middle childhood/pre-adolescence: concrete operations
7-11 years
Classification can take place along multiple dimensions
Understanding of compensation and reversibility
Physical presence of objects often still needed in order for operations to be applied to them (e.g lily is darker than Suzanna example)
Limited ability to reason with abstract representations
Adolescence to childhood: formal operations
Applying logical operations to abstract intangible entities Dissociation of truth from logic Systematic hypothesis testing Strategic planning Appreciation of multiple alternatives Problem solving
What are the general issues with Piagets model?
Basic features such as ordered sequence of stages
What is the information-processing approaches?
Mind as a computer metaphor
Hardware: Brain, sensory system
Software: strategies and rules
Attention
Coding
Storage
Retrieval
What is automatisation?
Where conscious and controlled strategies become automatic
Generalisation (applying same rule to different situations)
What are the stages of Vygotsky’s model?
Stage 1: inter psychological
Stage 2: performance assisted by child
Stage 3: automatised performance
