Cognitive Development - Piaget PDF

Cognitive development - Piaget 1. Define 2. Key points 3. Processes Definition - Cognition: Growth of a child’s capabilitly of ability to think and reason Refers to our inner processes and mental activities that leads to knowing Focuses on learning leading to process of acquiring knowledge...

Cognitive development - Piaget 1. Define 2. Key points 3. Processes Definition - Cognition: Growth of a child’s capabilitly of ability to think and reason Refers to our inner processes and mental activities that leads to knowing Focuses on learning leading to process of acquiring knowledge Development of conscious thought mental processes: memory, thinking, perception, reasoning, symbolising and problem solving Children motivation to learn is intrinsic Constructivist approach - build their own knowledge Little scientist Piaget's theory emphasises a constructivist approach, where children are agents who build their own knowledge through active exploration and interaction with their environment. This perspective highlights the intrinsic motivation of children to learn and understand their world, likening them to 'little scientists. Piaget developed the idea that cognitive development is not continuous progression and is dependent on accumulation of information and skills Order of stages fixed and invariant as progressing through one stage is a prerequisite for another Key points of Piagets cognitive development (P) Schemas Organisation 2 Adaptation stages 4 universal, distinct stages of Piaget theory Main assumptions Schemas: Used to process information about the world but also to predict situation occurring in our environment. Schemas are mental patterns that help individuals interpret and understand their experiences, based on objects, people, and social situations. They evolve as children interact with their environment, allowing for a more sophisticated understanding of the world Operations - as children mature, they develop schemas on internal mental representations rather than physical activity Processes of Piaget cognitive development (p) Organisation - children change their schemas internal rearrangement of schemas and exploring the links and associations between the schemas Organisation to refer to the inborn capacity to coordinate existing cognitive structures, or schemas, and combine them into more complex systems. For example, a baby of 3 months has learned to combine looking and grasping with the earlier reflex of sucking. Adaptation - Through 2 processes, children learn by adjusting to the world Children gradually construct understanding of the world Better understanding as they develop cognitive awareness Assimilation and accommodation Assimilation: Child applies an existing schema to a new experience or object and adding to existing knowledge Learner fits information and integrates into pre existing knowledge The child ‘takes in’ a new experience and fits it into an existing schema. A child may have learned the words ‘dog’ and ‘car’.All animals are called ‘dogs’ or all four-wheeled vehicles might be considered ‘cars Accomodation: Schema doesn’t fit the situation or experience, the child need to take a different approach Changing or altering schema in light of new information Accommodation: When existing schemas do not fit new experiences, children must adapt their schemas. By 6 months, Laurent possessed the mental structure that guided the action involved in hitting a toy. He had also learned to accommodate his actions to the weight, size and shape of the toy, and its distance from him The child begins to perceive that cats can be distinguished from dogs (and may develop different schema for these two types of animals) and that cars can be discriminated from other vehicles. Equilibration: When a child uses their existing schema to organise new information When the child is able to make sense of most new information these interpretations and schemas fit together Disequilibrium: New information can’t be organised into an existing schema when attempting to make sense and understand objects and concepts Leads to unpleasant and uncomfortable thinking because humans seek order in their thinking Piaget suggested new information is added to schema (assimilation) or schema is adapted (accomodation) - balance Piaget four stages of cognitive development assumptions 1. Sensorimotor 0-2 2. Preoperational 2-7 3. Concrete 7-11 4. Formal operational 12+ Progress through succession of stages Sensorimotor -Sensorimotor, begins at birth and lasts until 2 years of age -Knowledge limited = based on physical interactions and experiences -Infants cannot predict reaction - learn through trial and error e.g shaking a rattle or putting objects in the mouth. -Infants have no understanding of the permanent existence of things other than self. -Infants cannot sense an object directly and hen objects are no longer accessible to the senses, they cease to exist for the baby e.g if the rattle is within reach and covered with a cloth even though the shape is conspicuous the baby will not reach out and lose interest and attention would switch Piaget suggests when an item is hidden from view, the baby no longer conceives of the existence Infant is unable to conjure an image or the object in its physical absence according to Piaget Object permenance Aim: -Infants learn to solve problems such as pulling a cloth and they learn objects exist when out of sight Method: -Piaget watched his own three children and reported whether or not they retrieved a toy that was hidden under a cloth - Piaget concluded infants were unable to retrieve the toy when it was no longer visible and were naive to the objects continuing existences -The reason, according to Piaget, is because the infant has difficulty imagining the object as an entity in its own right with its own independent existence; the infant struggles to understand that when the object is not directly experienced until 9 months -The infant achieves this, according to Piaget, by acquiring the faculty of mental imagery -Piaget claimed baby has the dexterity to remove the cloth which means lack of motor skill doesn’t account for a reason for baby’s aborted search Weaknesses - Piaget needs a larger sample than 3 participants to generalise his conclusion to the population of infants -Other possible explanations and factors for the search failure to search the toy out of view -Lack of scientific rigour -Studies carried out by other researchers suggest that Piaget’s tests underestimated infants. Aim - Bower (1982) examined Piaget's hypothesis that young children did not have an appreciation of objects if they were out of sight Method - Children a few months old were shown an object, then a screen was moved across to cover the object then moved to its original position 2 conditions in the experiment: in one condition, when the screen was moved back the object was still in place Other condition - the object had been removed and there was only an empty space The children's heart rate was monitored to measure changes, which reflected surprise. Weakness - According to Piaget, young children do not retain information about objects that are no longer present, which should undermine Bower finding out children have expectations and children should not show any reaction in the second condition. On the contrary, Bower found that children showed more surprise when the object was removed Weakness - Emphasis of motor development -Piaget's theory of the sensorimotor stage and of the development of object permanence heavily assumes that perception is insufficient to inform the developing child about the physical world. Piaget considered that extensive touching and grasping of objects, as well as looking, was necessary for gradually piecing together knowledge about object properties. One important source of evidence against Piaget's theory came from infants born without arms or legs following the thalidomide tragedy Aim: Bower and Wishart (1972) also demonstrated that babies, who will not search under a cloth for a hidden object searched for an object when the lights turned out Method: Waited for the infant to reach for an object then turned out lights -Lights switched off and infant reached for the silent and invisble object in the dark Weakness: Piaget’s search task requires infants to coordinate multiple actions (reaching grabbing and pulling a blanket), which they might not be able to do until around nine months of age. Difficulty co-ordinating actions as the task demands overwhelmed with limited memory ability may put strain on the baby's ability to hold in mind to retrieve the object from a particular. These limitations may reflect immaturity of brain development which supports sub-goals of complex behaviours necessary for search. Bower argued that using methods that don’t require such complex coordination can reveal object permanence in younger infants Strength - Other researchers have considered Piaget's conclusion that it is only towards the end of the sensorimotor period that children demonstrate planned actions that reflect their ability to form a mental representation of the event Method: Willatts (1989) placed an attractive toy out of reach of 9-month-old children. Aim: The toy was placed on a cloth and children could pull the cloth closer Children unable to pull closer due to light barrier -Willatts found that children were able to get the toy by carrying out the appropriate series of actions and did not need to go endure a period of ‘trial-and-error’ learning to work out how to get the toy - demonstrate novel, planned actions Deferred imitation: Deferred imitation is the capacity to imitate another person’s behaviour some time after the behaviour was observed. Enduring mental representations also mean that children no longer have to go through the trial and error method -Piaget pointed out that deferred imitation was evidence that children must have a memory representation of what they had seen at an earlier time Aim - To find out if Piaget deferred imitation based on stored representations only develops towards the end of the sensorimotor period Method: Meltzoff and Moore (1994) presented 6-week-old infants with one of two facial gestures, either mouth opening or tongue protrusion -24 hours later the infants saw the same experimenter who presented a passive face, and found that the infants imitated the gesture they had seen the previous day -Piaget claimed that this ability did not appear until around 18 months, but Meltzoff and Moore’s findings put its emergence at 6 weeks, and possibly even earlier Weakness: Infants must have had a memory representation of the gesture they had seen a day before, and this is evidence of mental representations at a much earlier age than Piaget proposed. Weakens Piaget's contention that infants in this period have little or no ability for deferred imitation earlier in the sensorimotor period Pre-operational 7-11 Divided into preconceptual period (2–4 years) and the intuitive period (4–7 years). Children understand conservation of mass, length, weight and volume, and can more easily take the perspective of others; can classify and order, as well as organize objects into series. The child is still tied to the immediate experience, but within these limitations can perform logical mental operations Symbolic play- growth od representational abiltiirs Egocentrism Conservation limited understanding Animism Class inclusion Children become increasingly adept at using symbols, as evidenced by the increase in playing and pretending. For example, a child is able to use an object to represent something else, such as banana as a telephone. Egocentrism -According to Piaget, the young child is plagued with egocentrism used as a cognitive limitation that prevents the child seeing things from somebody else’s point of view. -The young child’s grasp of things is intuitive and highly subjective, rather than logical and objective. -A classic example of egocentrism can be found in the “three mountains task” -The child sits in front of a model landscape of three mountains located side by side. At the summit of each is a distinctive feature, such as a house, snow, and a cross -Another individual sits facing the child, from the other side of the model, and we ask the child to select a photo of what the scene looks like to the other person -In the set of photos there is a picture of the child’s own view as well as the view from the other side of the model, in which the distinctive features on the top of the mountains are reversef - Preoperational children nearly always choose a photo of the model from their own vantage point - claiming this is how the person sitting opposite sees the mountains -Piaget claimed that because young children only conceive of their own viewpoint, and fail to appreciate that from another perspective things may look different; they have no notion of alternative views of the world Weakness- Donaldson (1978) have pointed out that it is an unusual task to use with young children who might not have much familiarity with model mountains or be used to working out other people's views of landscapes -Children may have performed poorly because they were unfamiliar with the nature of the task -Borke (1975) supported with model mountains, she used layouts of toys that young children typically play with themselves -Altered the questioning about what another person looking at the layout might see -Borke found that children as young as 3 or 4 years of age had some understanding of how another person would view the layouts from a different position -Earlier than intended by Piaget, and shows that the type of procedures and materials that affect how well children perform the tasks. -Donaldson argues that preschool children are very much more competent than Piaget gives them credit for -Suggests that Piaget's testing situations are too abstract and do not connect with young children's everyday, social experience -Additonally -Borke questioned the appropriatness of the task as viewing a mountain scene from different angles may not have been an interesting or motivating problem for young children Aim - Hughes’ (1975) task, young children apparently acknowledged that others do have views different from their own. Method - Hughes prepared two intersecting walls from a doll’s house, forming four quadrants Hughes introduced two “policeman” dolls, overlooking quadrants A–B and B–D and the child’s overlooked quadrants C–D Weakness - The child was told that a naughty boy doll was trying to avoid being caught, and the child was instructed to hide the boy doll where he could not be seen by the policemen -90% of children aged between 3 and 5 placed the boy doll in quadrant C -The children recognised that a quadrant they could see was one that the policemen could not see. -These young children seemed to understanding of different view of things different from their own -Young children recognise when another person can or cannot see something -Young children do not necessarily assume that others can see the same as they themselves and perhaps in this respect are not quite as egocentric as Piaget had proposed - underestimate of children abilities Limited understanding of conservation Inability to perform mental operations, such as reversibilityor conservation tasks. During this stage the child’s thinking is ‘irreversible’ in that the child cannot appreciate that a reverse transformation would return the material to its original state, for example to be able to imagine that a ball of clay that has been squashed could be made round again. -Piaget wanted to find out when children understand the concept that quantity is conserved despite an irrelevant and conscipuous change through asking questions in a structured activity -Piaget poured water into two glass beakere at the same level and made adjustments in each until the children agreed they contained the same amount -Asked the children whether there is more water in each glass or the same -Repeated the question about the amount of water in the glass was more or the same -Older children who were 7 and below gave an incorrect; non conversing answer that the tall, thin glass - wrong judgment that quantity has changed due to a superficial appearance -Concluded children were in a preoperational stage and unable to think logistically -Children were unable to interpret the thin tall glass has the same amount as the short wide glass - the child fails to decenter which means theyre unable to understand the various facets of a problem and fixate -Failed to compensate a change in the height of the liquid by the change in the width that results from the water being poured into a differently shaped jar. -Can’t understand reversibility, that is, if the water is poured back into the original jar then the level will once again be the same. Weakness - Donaldson (1978) offers the insight of a person asks a question whether the water in the glass was more or the same amount and repeats if after doing anither pouring -Conventionally and conversationally, it would cast a doubt on repeating the same answer and indicates lack of attention to the action of the experimenter -Donaldson suggest the form and context of questioning is misleading - led competent children to give a answer and for Piaget to decipher they’re incompetent through a leading question -If the experimenter asks you what has happened, you may undermine yourself for an non obvious answer -Donaldson critique of his methodology stimulated testing piagets theory with better methods -The child may not elicit a natural response because they are aware the experimenter is noting down what they say -Child may feel self conscious and become reserved -Donaldson (1978), the age when a child is judged to become capable of a new cognitive achievement depends not on appropriate mental structure being ready as Piaget believed but by the demands imposed by the assessment task (the complexity of the procedures and the nature of the instructions) Class inclusion - hierarchical classification -Young children’s difficulty with class inclusion - An example of this task involves Lego™ bricks, say four red and two blue. Piaget asked, “Are there more red bricks or more bricks altogether?” -Most children aged 6 years and below say there are more red bricks instead of understanding its part of the category of bricks Weakness - McGarrigle asked 6-year-olds, “Are there more cows or more black horses?” The correct answer, of course, is that there are more cows. However, 86% judged that there were more black horses, presumably meaning “There are more black horses than there are black cows.” As before, children were performing the comparison on subclasses (black cows/black horses), except this time the comparison was not between a subclass that was included in a class According to Donaldson, this shows that really the child’s difficulty has nothing to do with class inclusion, but rather stems from their attempt to impose sense on the experimenter’s question. -Donaldson claims that children’s problem is not with the logic of class inclusion, but is due to misunderstanding what the experimenter means. -Donaldson - Piaget intention for children interpreting him to mean something else to wrongly gives the impression that young children are logically incompetent. -Transitive inference is another difficulty for children to work out the relative length of two sticks, not by direct comparison, but by employing a stick of intermediate length -Stick A is smaller than stick B. Stick C is bigger than stick B - C must be bigger than A -Can solve the problem logically without needing to make a practical comparison between A and C. -Piaget claimed that children aged 7 years and below do not yet possess the logic to do this. -Recall that Piaget showed children two towers and asked them to find which was tallest using a stick he supplied, which was intermediate in length. -Children of 7 years and below failed, but older children succeeded Weakness - Whether it’s acquisition of logical thought or improved memory retention of the important information Animism -Animism can be defined as attributing life to inanimate objects - Piaget argued that children's answers do not simply reflect lack of knowledge -Children egocentrically assimilate what they do not understand to something that they do. Children believe that non- living objects have lifelike qualities such as thinking, feeling and acting like humans, e.g. ‘The chair is mad, it tripped me up’ Attributes both will and consciousness to an inanimate object. Weakness - One possibility is that young children, who have limited knowledge of the physical world, may not yet understand relatively complex terms such as living and simply make an guess when confronted with a question that they do not fully understand Questions that are asked by the adult steer them towards one answer rather than another - criticised wording -Donaldson suggests that Piaget's testing situations are too abstract and do not connect with young children's everyday, social experience. -Many researchers now think that Piaget overestimated young children’s animistic beliefs. -Some of the main criticisms of Piaget’s methodology are that Piaget used objects with which the children had little direct experience (e.g. entities such as the sun, the clouds) and relied on verbal justifications -Researchers have shown that, for familiar objects, 6–12-month-olds can sort pictures of objects into categories and can distinguish between animate and inanimate objects (e.g. Mandler & McDonough, 1998). And by the age of 2.5 years, children attribute wishes and likes to people and animals but hardly ever to objects (Hickling & Wellman, 2001) Stage of concrete operations: 7–12 years -Children understand conservation of objects and take the perspective of others; can classify and organise objects into series -The child is still tied to the immediate experience - limitations can perform logical mental operations -Children suddenly seem to appreciate that there is more to things than superficial appearances, and that their view of the world is but one of the many possible -A child in this stage cannot handle imagined or hypothetical problems, according to Piaget. -They provide the kind of justifications that seem to suggest they are using logical (operational) thinking for problems that were wrong in the pre-operational stage such as conservation Strength - broadly confirmed by subsequent research - Tomlinson-Keasey (1978) found that conservation of number, weight and volume are acquired in the order stated by Piaget. Aim - Children's performance in the concrete operational period may be influenced by the context of the task -Children in the concrete operational stage may demonstrate more advanced reasoning expected of children of that age Method - Jahoda (1983) showed that 9-year-olds in Harare, Zimbabwe, had more advanced understanding of economic principles than British 9-year-olds -Harare children, who were involved in their parents' small businesses, had a strong motivation to understand the principles of profit and loss -Jahoda set up a mock shop and played a shopping game with the children - The British 9-year-olds could not explain about the functioning of a shop, did not understand that a shopkeeper buys for less than he sells, and did not know that some of the profit has to be set aside for purchase of new goods -The Harare children had mastered the concept of profit and understood about trading strategies. These principles had been grasped by the children as a direct outcome of their own active participation in running a business Formal operation 12 -Development of logic, the child makes a shift from their own egocentric perspective and learns to distinguish what they see from what they know -Children can manipulate ideas; speculate about the possibilities; can reason deductively, and formulate and test hypotheses. -Systematic reasoning about things take a hypothetical form and not necessarily a real, concrete form. -Piaget gave a pendulum problem (see the figure below) -We show the adolescent a pendulum, and state the problem, which is to find what determines how frequently the pendulum swings back and forth (i.e. number of oscillations per minute) -We show the adolescent how to vary four factors, which rightly or wrongly we may suppose affect speed of oscillation: weight of the suspended object, length of string, force of initial swing, and the height from which the pendulum is release -The formal operational adolescent rigorously compares a short heavy pendulum with a short light rather than a long one -Shayer et al gave problems such as the pendulum task to schoolchildren in the UK - showed that by 16 years of age, only about 30% of young people had achieved ‘early formal operations’ -Proves young people can apply formal reasoning across a range of problem tasks. Weakness - Cheng and Holyoak’s findings strongly suggest that in the great majority of cases, adult reasoning is content-specific. Evaluation of Piaget’s stages Strength - Despite its shortcomings, Piaget's approach provided a comprehensive account of cognitive growth - implications for education, most notably for child-centred learning methods, especially in nursery and infant schools (Davis, 2003) Weakness - Reliance on verbal interview methods REDUCTIONIST- An important limitation of Piaget’s theory is that he underestimated the role of social learning - instruction by adults or other children. He claimed that children acquire knowledge by exploring and acting in the world in a process of self- discovery. He studied individual children and did not incorporate social and cultural context of cognitive development Researcher Bias – Questions Were Not Standardised- Piaget’s methods (observation and clinical interviews) are more open to biased interpretation than other methods. Piaget conducted the observations alone and the data collected are based on his own subjective interpretation of events.