Week 8 - Piaget stages 3 & 4 Flashcards
Name 4 things that children accomplish once they reach stage 3: concrete operations.
- sophisticated schemes (can use these schemes to solve problems)
- decentering (categorization and class inclusion)
- reversibility (you can undo what you did to the thing)
- no more egocentrism (you can now think about other peoples thoughts, mental states and emotions)
What are some shortcomings of stage 3? (not quite as good as they will be in stage 4)
- logic can only be applied to concrete, real-world objects and events therefore can’t solve abstract problems, can’t handle contrary-to-fact premises
- poor systematic (mental) problem solving
Explain stage 4: formal operations.
children and adolescents apply mental operations to abstract entities; they think hypothetically and reason deductively
What is deductive reasoning? How is it different in kids in stage 3 verses stage 4?
- ability to draw appropriate conclusions from facts
- kids in stage 3 will draw appropriate conclusions but only if it is in correspondence with their experience
- kids in stage 4 are able to still draw conclusions even if the fact is counterfactual (ex: feather breaking window)
Stage 4 kids have hypothetico-deductive (abstract) reasoning. Explain the third eye problem experiment on kids in stage 3 and 4.
- stage 3: put it in the middle of their forehead b/c “thats where it goes”
- stage 4: put it all different places and had imaginative stories about their reasoning for the placement
Stage 4 kids can systematically problem solve. Explain Piaget’s pendulum task in stage 3 and 4 kids.
- test out lengths of string, weights and heights of bobs to discover which is responsible for the period of the pendulum (how long it takes it to do a swing)
- concrete kids just randomly changed things all at once
- formal operations kids thought about it, understood that while testing the length of the string, they should keep the string constant and test the other things
- they know to look at only one variable at once
- evidence of some sort of mental operation (organized)
Critiques: Did Piaget overestimate attainment of Formal operations kids? Talk about what Martorano did with the pendulum task with older children. What were the results?
- Tested grade 6-12 on pendulum task and other tasks
- Gr 6 and 8 could not do pendulum task
- Gr 10 and 12 could do it but were only talking about half of them
- She came up with 10 other tasks
- Had these kids try them, gr 6 and 8 could solve 2-3 out of 10 tasks
- Gr 10 and 12 could only solve about 5-6 out of 10 tasks
- A lot of university students have problems with this task as well
Is the Pendulum Task a good measure of Formal Ops ability according to Piaget?
- Testing swiss children who have very intensive science training in elementary school, so they have had exposure to this type of thing before (so results for them may have more to do with experience than formal operations)
- People might find it boring so they don’t bother trying
- In the end, he realized his tasks were limited and very science-related so you would need a background in it to do the tasks
- Interest/expertise -> motivation, ability to solve these things
In terms of expertise in formal operations kids, explain the systematic reasoning problems in 3 different school subjects.
- tasks in physics, politics and literature
- physics tasks: physics students did well, no one else did well
- political problem: political students did well, physicists did ok (close to science- political science)
- literature problem: English students did well
- need some sort of experience/interest in the field to do well on task
- if you test formal operational thinking using the wrong test, it can look like people don’t have it even though they do have it
Name some pros about Piaget’s theory:
- Founded discipline of cognitive development: ->Explanation, not just description
- > Talks about idea that maturation is responsible for the unfolding of intelligence
- Convinced us that kids are curious, active explorers
- Generally accurate re. how kids of different ages think: Generally we can replicate things he found
Name some cons about Piaget’s theory:
- failure to distinguish competence from cognitive performance
ex: object permanence: the first real evidence from his perspective of them developing it, is the ability to make the decision to lift something that is completely covering a toy but it takes motor coordination and you might not have that skill yet (is it b/c your motor skills aren’t good enough or b/c you don’t have object permanence? Skill or knowledge? - sometimes vague as to mechanism: what maturational changes and experiences are necessary to move through the stages? No detail about brain region, but couldn’t have specified this b/c no neuroscience back then
