findings and conclusions

• in the sensorimotor stage between 0-2 yeqars thechild explores the world through physical sensation and devlops hand eye co-ordination
• children learn via trial and error then go onto deliberate movement of the body - primary circular reactions
• object permanence is a limitation where infants believe an object ceases to exist if its not within their view. This is overcome after 8 months
• if an infant looks for an object after it has been covered this suggests they have object permanence
• in the preoperational stage children show rudimentary logic but cannot use it to understand how the world works for example via animism where they believe inanimate objects have feelings
• Conservation is a limitation between 2-7 years meaning children cannot understand the quantity of something remains the same despite changes in outward appearance
• Egocentrism is a limitation between 2-7 years where a child is unable to see from the perspective of others and is only able to think using their own perspective. For example in Piaget's 3 mountains study he asked children to view a model of three mountains from different angles and were asked to pick the view that the doll would see. Children in this stage were unable to see from the perspective of the doll and how the doll might have view the three mountains and ended up always picking their own view
• schemas are mental structures that contain information on an aspect of the world. They help us interact with the world around us
• as a child progressess through life they have interactions with their enviroment and gain new experiences so their schemas are also going to develop. This is known as discovery learning
• an example of discovery learning is a child having a black cat and having a schema all cats are black then as he goes outside and sees a white cat he updates his schema so he now understands cats can have different colours
• As schemas develop this leads to cognitive development
• a driving force behind modification of schemas is the motivation to learn caused by situations we do not understand
• Piaget states we are motivated to learn when existing schemas do not allow us to make sense of something new causing an unpleasant feeling known as disequilibrium
• to escape disequilibrium schemas need to be modified to reach equilibration - the preferred mental state
• assimilation is when we add new information to an existing schema to understand and reach equilibration
• accommodation is when we have dramatically new experiences requiring the formation of new schemas to make sense of the new situation in order to reach equilibration
• the process of assimilation and accommodation occur throughout our life as we encounter new experiences
• inability to do class inclusion hen children are able to place objects into categories however they struggle to understand that categories can have further subsets and objects can belong to more than one class
• an example of inability to do class inclusion is knowing breeds of cats all belong to the class of cats but not knowing they can also be categorized to the class of animals alongside dogs
• the concrete operational stage is begin 7-11 years
• by the age of 7 children are able to show conservation and are no longer egocentric and can class include. They develop operations which are better reasoning abilities than younger children
• the operations learned in the concrete operational stage can only be applied to physical and visible objects. Therefore, children in the concrete operational stage tend to lack abstract reasoning - for example they may be unable to reason about abstract ideas like love
• in the formal operational stage children can develop formal reasonng meaning that children are able to focus on an argument and comprehend abstract concepts ( for example they can understand arguments about how love is an emotion but can counter with the reasoning it is an act)
• part of formal reasoning is hypothetico deductive reasoning - being able to understand how to test a hypothesis in order to establish a casual relationship
• for example, you could understand how to test a hypothesis that water makes things wet by understanding that if you were to throw something in water and it came out wer water would be the cause of that object being wet