Stages

• Egocentrism


  The tendency of pre-operational children to view the world from their own perspective
• Measuring egocentrism using the Three Mountains Task

  1. Pre-operational children exposed to 3 mountains, topped with different objects

  2. A doll faced opposite to the child, who had to match images of the mountains to what they thought the doll could see

  3. Majority of children recounted their own viewpoint, hence displaying egocentrism
• Class inclusion


  The cognitive ability to appreciate that a group of objects can form a class, and this same group can be a subset of an even larger group
• Measuring class inclusion


  1. Piaget and Inhelder showed 7-8 year olds pictures of 5 dogs and 2 cats, and asked whether there were more dogs or animals

  2. Vast majority of pre-operational children replied that there were more dogs
• Conservation


  The cognitive ability to appreciate that the quantity of an object remains the same, even when its appearance changes
• Measuring conservation


  1. Showing pre-operational children two identical beakers with the same volume of liquid, then pouring liquid into a thinner, taller beaker

  2. Most children reported that there was more liquid in the taller beaker
• Reversibility


  The idea that an operant can be reversed, and the state of an object can be returned to normal
• Pre-operational children do not understand the concept of reversibility
• Impairments in egocentrism, class inclusion and conservation show that, according to Piaget, pre-operational children are unable to learn 'concrete' subjects such as science because these subjects require abstract reasoning
• Smith et al - neologisms

  Formal operations stage are capable of scientific thinking because they reason about abstract ideas
• Piaget's action made the child believe it was deliberate and so the quantity must have changed
• Piaget didn't conduct any statistical analysis, moaning that his data was unreliable because it's unclear whether the results were significant or not
• Piaget did not adhere to standardisation and control procedures during clinical interviews, so differences between children were more likely to be due to this, rather than age
• Piaget was therefore wrong to assume that task failure equates to a lack of ability
• Conflicting Empirical Evidence


  • Martin Hughes (1975) demonstrated that in a task of egocentrism, children aged 3 and a half years old could position a doll where a single police man could not see him 90% of the time, and 4 year olds could make the doll hide from two police men in 90% of cases
  • This suggests that pre-conventional children are able to conserve, but only when this has been tested in specific ways and when the child fully understands the task
  • This also gives further evidence to the idea that Piaget and Inhelder's original experimental method may have been confusing to 2 or 3 year old children, which may have biased the findings
• Piaget's approach


  Domain-general - intellectual and cognitive abilities all developed together at the same time and at the same rate, with no one ability being more important than the other
• Vygotsky's approach


  Domain-specific - certain cognitive abilities such as language were upheld as being more important than others, especially considering that Vygotksy viewed learning as a social process, where advanced language skills would have been particularly important for maximising interactions with experts
• A more moderate interactionist approach would better be adopted i.e. a 'middle-ground'
• Name studies relating to class inclusion

  Pro: piaget + inhaler -> moe animals or dogs?

  COUNT: Seigler + Svetina -> feedback progression
• Name the studies about egocentrism

  Pro: piaget + inhedler -> 3 mountain task (10% success)

  COUNT: Hughes -> police (90% success)