Piaget's stages of intellectual development

• Stages of intellectual development

  = 4 stages of intellectual development. Each stage is characterised by a different level of reasoning ability. All children develop through the same sequence of stages, exact age varies.
• Sensorimotor stage (0-2 years)

  • Piaget= a babys early focus is on physical sensation and on developing some basic physical co-ordination.
  • Babies learn by trial and error that they can deliberately move their body and eventually they can move objects.
  • Develop an understanding that other people are separate objects.
  • At around 8 months they are capable of understanding object permanence.
• Object permanence

  = Ability to realise that an object still exists when it passes out of the visual field.

  • Before 8 months, babies immediately switched their attention away from once it was out of sight, however they would continue to look for it. This leads Piaget to believe at this age that babies understood that objects continue to exist when removed from view.
• Pre-operational stage (2-7 years)

  • Conservation
  • Egocentrism
  • Class inclusion
• Conservation

  = Ability to realise that quantity remains the same even when the appearance of an object has changed.

  • Piaget found that when two identical containers placed side by side with the contents at the same height most children said they contained the same volume. However if the liquid was poured into a tinner vessel, children believed there was more liquid in the taller vessel.
• Egocentrism

  = Child's tendency to only be able to see the world from their own point of view- demonstrated in the three mountain task. Where children tended to find choosing the picture from another point of view difficult and tended to choose the picture that matched the scene from their own point of view.
• Class inclusion

  = Children begin to understand classification- the idea that objects fall into categories

  • Piaget found that they struggle with more advanced skill of class inclusion, the idea that classification has subsets.
• Stage of concrete operations (7-11 years)

  • Piaget found that from age of 7 most children can conserve and perform much better on tasks of egocentrism and class inclusion.
  • Although children have better externally verifiable reasoning abilities= operations they are concrete operations- they can only be applied to physical objects. They still struggle to reason about abstract ideas and to imagine objects or situations they cant see.
• Stage of formal operations (age 11+)

  • Children become capable of formal reasoning.
  • Children become able to focus on the form of an argument and not be distracted by its content.
  • Can be tested using the pendulum task and by means of syllogisms.
  • Piaget believed that once children can reason formally they are capable of scientific reasoning and become able to appreciate abstract ideas.
• Evaluation- conservation research

  Limitation= Piaget's conservation conclusions has flawed research.

  • Children (4-6 years) in Piaget's conservation studies may have been influenced by seeing the experimenter change the appearance of the liquid, or counters.
  • A replication study- 1. Counters appeared to move by accident, they found that most children answered incorrectly, 2. A teddy appeared to knock the counters closer together, now most answered correctly.
  • Means that children could conserve as long as they weren't put off by the question. Suggests Piaget is wrong about the age.
• Evaluation- class inclusion research

  Limitation= findings are contradicted by newer research.

  • Showed that children were capable of understanding class inclusion.
  • They gave 5 year olds class inclusion tasks, recieving an explanation of the task- 1. Explanation that there must be more animals than dogs as there were 9 animals and only 6 dogs. 2. Explanation that there must be more animals because dogs were a subset of animals.
  • Scores improved more for group 2, suggesting that the children had acquired a real understanding of class inclusion. Which is contradictory to Piaget.
• Evaluation- lack of support for Piaget's view of egocentrism

  Hughes tested the ability of children to see as situation from two peoples viewpoints.

  • Children as young as 3 1/2 years were able to position the doll where one police officer could not 'see' him 90% of the time, and 4 years olds, 90% of the time when there were two police officers to hide from.
  • Means that when tested with a scenario that makes more sense, children are able to decentre and imagine other perspectives much earlier than Piaget proposed, so he underestimated the abilities of younger children.
• Evaluation- counterpoint

  • One issue with all the limitations is that they are criticisms of the age at which a particular cognitive stage is reached, not a criticism of the stage itself.
  • Eg: Hughes point is that children were able to decentre at a younger age than Piaget had claimed. However it is Hughes research that the ability improves with age.
  • Therefore the core principles of Piaget's stage remain unchallenged but the methods he used meant the timing of his stages was wrong.