Piaget

• Four stages of development

  The four stages are:

  • Sensorimotor.
  • Preoperational.
  • Concrete operational.
  • Formal operational.
• Sensorimotor (0-2 years)

   

  • Babies take in information via their five senses
  • Eventually, object permanence is developed.
• What is object permanence?


  The understanding that objects continue to exist even when they are not visible.
• Pre-operational (2-7 years)


  Children develop three characteristic errors in reasoning:

  • Egocentrism.
  • Conservation.
  • Class inclusion.

  Additional:

  Centration

  Irreversibility
• What is egocentrism?

  The tendency to view the world from one's own perspective and have difficulty understanding others' viewpoints.
• What is centration?

  When a child focuses on a certain part of the task and does not see it as a whole.
• What is conservation?


  When the quantity remains the same even when the appearance of an object changes.
• What is class inclusion?


  Where objects can be classed in more than one category simultaneously.
• What is irreversibility?


  The inability to reverse or undo a process or action.
• What are the three types of conservation?


  • Volume -> different shaped glass
  • Mass -> clay as ball vs sausage shape
  • Number -> five buttons
• What is accommodation?

  Where the new info a child receives does not match their existing schema and so they have to change it to accommodate
• What two processes make up equilibration?

  • Assimilation
  • Accommodation
• What is assimilation?

  If new information matches a child's existing schema, then they assimilate that information
• Which study suggested that Piaget underestimated the abilities of children?

  McGarrigale and Donaldson's naughty teddy experiment
• Piaget's theory of cognitive development

  The development of cognition depends on a process of active Discovery - the child performing actions on the world and developing schemas as a result of these actions
• Schemas

  Packages of mental information knowledge formed from experience
• Disequilibrium


  The state when we gain new information about the world that doesn't fit our existing schema, which is unpleasant, and we need to use either assimilation or accommodation to return to equilibrium
• Piaget's research has had significant implications for educational practice
• Much of the research in this area assumes that a lack of ability equals a lack of understanding, which is an inference, and it might be that children are simply unable to communicate effectively or misunderstand the nature of the task presented
• Piaget's theory of maturation


  The idea that children do not know less than adults, but that they think differently from them, and when they grow older, the way that they think changes
• How disequilibrium is created

  1. Existing schemas are insufficient in helping a child make sense of the world around them

  2. New situations not inline with schemas are encountered
• Motivation to learn


  Created when disequilibrium arises, to try and reduce this children learn new things with the hope that the new information they learn can be assimilated to increase their understanding
• Perceptual errors


  Distorting sensory stimuli
• Piaget's sample of children were from the nursery attached to the university, and so the children belonged to predominantly white, middle-class, well-educated families
• Not all children feel the same need to completely understand new situations and achieve equilibrium
• Children who come from poorer backgrounds and so may have had fewer educational opportunities, may display more or less intellectual curiosity than middle-class or upper-class children
• Piaget's theory cannot explain cognitive development in all children
• Vygotsky proposed that learning was a social process

  Children acquire new knowledge and more advanced reasoning abilities from frequent interactions with experienced peers called 'experts'
• Piaget placed far less importance on the social elements of learning


  Seeing peers and teachers only as facilitators of discovery learning
• Vygotsky emphasised the importance of language


  Seeing it as an external expression of thought, as opposed to just another cognitive ability
• Howe et al (1992) tested 9-12 year old children (placed in groups of 4) who all watched the motion of the same object sliding down a slope
• Despite all seeing the same motion, each child reported different details and had a different understanding of the motion
• This confirms Piaget's prediction that individual mental representations are formed through discovery learning, where individual differences in each child's existing schemas affects their understanding of the situation and the accommodation of new information through the creation of new schemas