Week 3 Flashcards
What was controversial about Piaget’s theories?
Not the findings, but the interpretations. Many researchers believe that Piaget thought children had more limited abilities than they actually do
What disciplines did Piaget integrate?
Psychology, biology, and epistemology
Who was Piaget influenced by?
Binet, and his method of observing children in their natural settings
What was Piaget’s experimental method?
Clinical interview - an open-ended, conversational technique for eliciting children’s thinking processes.
His interest was in the child’s own judgements and explanations
Piaget’s Stages of Intellectual Development
Sensorimotor
Preoperational
Concrete operational
Formal operational
Piaget’s concept of the unchanging aspects of thought
Stay the same at all ages - we strive for a state of equilibrium (intrinsic motivation to learn).
Orginisation of schemas, and their adaptation through assimilation (info into existing schema) and accommodation (info may require new schema).
Sensorimotor stage
0-2 years
Infant knows about the world through actions and sensory information.
Learn to differentiate themselves from the environment, begin to understand causality in time and space, and develop the capacity to form internal mental representations
Preoperational stage
2-7 years
Through the symbolic use of language and intuitive problem solving, the child begins to understand about the classification of objects. But thinking is characterized by egocentrism, children focus on just one aspect of a task and lack operations like compensation and reversibility. By the end of this stage, children can take another’s perspective and can understand the conservation of number.
Preconceptual stage (2-4 years)
Intuitive period (4-7 years)
Concrete operational stage
7-12 years
Children understand conservation of mass, length, weight and volume, and can more easily take the perspective of others; can classify and order, as well as organize objects into series. The child is still tied to the immediate experience, but within these limitations can perform logical mental operations. Dificulty with abstract ideas.
Have processes like compensation and reversibility. Can do conversion and perspective tasks.
Formal operational stage
12 years
Abstract reasoning begins. Children can now manipulate ideas; can speculate about the possible; can reason deductively, and formulate and test hypotheses.
Discrepancies in the sensorimotor stage
Piaget believed children did not have an appreciation of objects if they were out of sight.
Bower (1982) moved a screen in front of an object while a baby was watching, and removed the object secretly. Upon removing the screen and the baby not seeing the object, the baby’s heartrate indicated surprise.
Willatts (1989) showed that 9-month-old children can carry out planned actions without trial-and-error. This is earlier than Piaget suggested.
Barr et al. (1996) showed 6-month-old babies to take gloves off a handpuppet, shake it to hear a bell ring, and put the glove back on. Babies could repeat this the next day. This is evidence of mental representations earlier than Piaget suggested.
Piaget’s ideas on thought and language
Thought thought arises out of action, not language. Thought thought shaped language much more than the other way around.
How did Piaget prove egocentrism?
1956 (with Inhelder)
The mountain view experiment. Kids got it wrong at 4/5, but right at 8/9.
Borke (1975) repeated this with toys, and found kids at around 3/4 already have some understanding.
What tests for the preoperational stage are carried out?
Proving egocentrism (mountain view)
Conservation (kids have difficulty applying compensation and reversibility principles) (Donaldson, 1978, also argued that kids might be expecting adults to change something and are responding to that - kids were more likely to answer correctly if it had been messed up by Naughty Teddy)
Transitive inference tasks (if A is longer than B, and B longer than C, which is longest?)
Tasks Piaget and Inhelder tried for the formal operational stage?
1958
Pendulum task, chemical reactions
Mimics the process of scientific inquiry
One of the first models of information processing
Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968)
There are three memory stores and control processes that operate on them.
Stimulus input > sensory register > short-term memory > long-term memory
Short-term memory has since been replaced by working memory
Strategies for retaining information in working memory
Encoding strategies
Processing limitations
Brainerd (1983)
Encoding limitations - children may encode the wrong information about a problem
Computational limitations - may not have the appropriate strategies in long-term information to apply to the encoded information
Retrieval limitations - may retrieve the wrong strategy
Storage limitations - may not be able to retain all the relevant information in working memory
Workspace limitations - can only retain a few items of information at the same time
Stage-like performance in information processing
Case (1985) analysed Noelting’s (1980) orange juice problem.
Case said one of the main constraints on children’s performance was their information processing capacity
Problem-solving strategies in balance scale task
Siegler (1976) considered the possible strategies a kid could use, and what the outcome would be. He then looked at what the child did and inferred which strategy they must’ve used.
Siegler (1996) argued that how children develop from one stage to the next is the most important, yet most researchers focus on describing the stages.
Giving children the problem of adding numbers
Siegler and Robinson (1982)
On less novel tasks, kids might not show such defined strategies.
Because they’re still learning, they may use different strategies at the same time - overlapping waves metaphor.
Microgenetic approach
Studying change in children’s performance as it’s occurring - intense and repeated testing of the same children over very short periods of time.
As opposed to cross-sectional or longitudinal
Eg Siegler and Jenkins (1989) studying the development of the ‘min’ strategy
Attention testing task
Vurpillot, 1968
Comparing pictures of houses.
At ages 6 to 9 kids started considering all the windows
Encoding strategies
Rehearsal
Organisation
Elaboration (making associations)
