© 2016 psychbug s theory of cognitive development pb.pdf · piaget’s theory of cognitive...

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development

According to Piaget, children do not only know less than adults they think very differently. He divided children’s cognitive development in four stages, each of the stages represent a new way of thinking and understanding the world. He also studied the way children learnt, he focused on the motivation (why do children learn) and how children learn. According to Piaget, we are born with a few primitive schemas such as sucking which give us a mean to interact with the world. These are physical but as the child develops they become mental schemas. These schemas become more complex with experience. Schemas are mental structures which contains all of the information we have relating to one aspect of the world around us.


Motivation for learning When our existing schemas can explain what we perceive around us, we are in a state of equilibration. However, when we meet a new situation that we cannot explain it creates a disequilibrium, this is an unpleasant sensation which we try to escape, this gives the motivation for learning. To get back to a state of equilibration we need to modify our existing schemas, to learn and adapt to the new situation. This is done through the processes of accommodation and assimilation. This is how our schemas evolve and become more sophisticated.

Equilibration

Disequilibrium


How children learn Assimilation: when the new experience is not very different form previous experiences of a particular object or situation we assimilate the new situation by adding information to a previous schema. Accommodation: when the new experience is very different from what we have encountered before we need to change our schemas in a very radical way or create a whole new schema. An example: Steve is 18 months old his experience of animals is the family dog, Snowball, then his mother bought a new dog, Max, which is much bigger. Steve assimilated Max in his previous dog schema, this required only adding information to his dog schema e.g. the size of dogs. Steve’s mother also bought a parrot. Steve has to create a new schema for animals, a schema for birds. This is accommodation.


Stages of cognitive development Sensory motor stage (birth – 2 years)

The focus is on physical sensations and on learning to co-ordinate our bodies. The child realises that other people are separate from them. The child acquires basic language. Object permanence from around 8 months old (slide 7).

Pre-operational stage (2-7 years)

At the beginning of this stage: errors in logical thinking as the child does not use operations so the thinking is influenced by the way things appear rather than logical reasoning. Conservation: the child does not understand that quantity remains the same even if the appearance changes. (slide 8 ) Egocentrism: the child assumes that other people see the world as he does (see mountain task slide 9 ). Inclusion: the child can classify objects but cannot include objects in sub-sets (slide 10) .

Concrete operational stage (7-11 years)

By the beginning of this stage, the child can use operations ( a set of logical rules) so he can conserve quantities, he realises that people see the world in a different way than he does (decentring) and he has improved in inclusion tasks. Children still have difficulties with abstract thinking.

Formal operational stage (11+)

Children can manipulate abstract ideas and concepts (not everyone achieves this stage).


Sweet (Sensory motor stage) Puppies (Pre-operational stage) Consume (Concrete operational stage) Flowers (Formal operational stage)



According to Piaget, cognitive development is driven by biological factors as a result of the maturation of innate structures in the brain (nature). These interact with the child’s experience (nurture). Children construct their knowledge in response to their experiences in their environment. Development can only occur when the brain has matured to a point of “readiness”.

Object permanence Object permanence refers to the understanding that objects exist permanently even when they are no longer visible. Piaget observed the behaviour of infants who were looking at an attractive object when it was removed from their sight. Until about eight months, children would immediately switch their attention away from the object once it was out of sight. From about eight months, however, they would actively look for the object. If, for example, the object was pushed behind a screen within their reach they would simply push the screen aside. Piaget concluded from this that, prior to about eight months of age children do not understand that objects continue to exist once they are out of sight.


Conservation tasks Conservation of volume The volume task used two identical glasses with either the same or different amounts of water. One amount was poured into either a narrower glass or a wider glass. Each child was given 4 trials with each task. 2 equal and 2 unequal. The order of trials varied between children. Piaget found that if children see two glasses together with liquid coming up to the same height in each they can correctly spot the fact that they contain the same amount of liquid . However, if the liquid was poured from a short and wide glass to a taller, thinner container, young children typically believed that there was now more liquid in the taller container.

Conservation of mass The mass task used two playdoh cylinders. In one test the cylinders were equal. In the other test they were unequal. One squashed into a flat pancake shape or a sausage shape. In most cases the children could not conserve before the age of 7-8 years old.

See clip on video page

In another study, Piaget investigated conservation of

number.


Egocentrism: the Three Mountains Task

A child is shown a display of three mountains; the tallest mountain is covered with snow. On top of another are some trees, and on top of the third is a church. The child stands on one side of the display, and there is a doll on the other side of it. The child is shown pictures of the scene from different viewpoints and asked to select the view that best matched what the doll can “see”. Typically a four years old child reports what can be seen from her perspective and not what can be seen from the doll's perspective. Six years old were more aware of other viewpoints but still tended to choose the wrong one. This shows egocentrism as the child assumed that the doll “saw” the mountains as he did. See clip on video page


Class inclusion

Class inclusion is the ability to classify objects as belonging to two or more categories simultaneously. For example, Piaget (1965) presented children with a number of brown and white wooden beads then asked “are there more brown beads or wooden beads?” . Children, before the age of 7, would answer “more brown beads” because they were unable to form a hierarchy of the categories e.g. they are wooden beads and some of them are brown.


Evaluation of the stages of cognitive development

• A number of issues have been identified in Piaget’s methodology. – Bower and Wihart (1974) found that one month old babies showed surprise

when objects disappeared, this raises the possibility that in fact the children did not look for the hidden objects because they did not have the motor abilities to do so rather because they lacked object permanence.

– A further difficulty is the way the questions were asked to the children during the conservation tasks studies, it is argued that when children are asked the same question twice (which beaker has the most water?) they assume that their first answer was wrong so they answer differently which means that the results could be influenced by the way the children were questioned rather than a lack of conservation. Furthermore, the conservation of numbers (using tokens) was replicated by McGarrigle and Donalson (1974) with 6 years old children, but this time a “naughty teddy” messed up the counters. Once the teddy was back in his box, the children were asked if the number of counters had changed. 62% of the children said that the number of tokens was the same showing that they could conserve numbers. McGarrigle and Donalson argued that, in the original condition, the researchers appeared to the child as if they were intending to alter the number of counters to the child, or that they are asking a trick question.


• Hughes (1975) argued that the three mountains task did not make sense to children (although it is worth remembering that Piaget carried out the task with Swiss children, they were used to mountains). He carried out a study with a more everyday like situation and found that 90% of the children had lost their egocentrism by the age of 4.

• Cross-cultural studies show that the stages of development (except the formal operational stage) occur in the same order in all cultures suggesting that cognitive development is a product of a biological process of maturation. However the age at which the stages are reached varies between cultures and individuals which suggests that social and cultural factors and individual differences influence cognitive development. For example, Dasen (1994) found that Australian Aborigines developed conservation later than Europeans counterparts (between 10-13 years old) but their spatial awareness abilities developed earlier.

• The fact that the formal operational stage is not reached in all cultures and not all individuals within cultures suggests that it might not be biologically based.


• Piaget neglects the influence of culture and other people in fostering cognitive development but, according to Vygotsky, this is crucial to cognitive development and he also over emphasizes the role of the individual in their own cognitive development.

• According to Piaget the rate of cognitive development cannot be accelerated as it is based on biological processes however, direct tuition can speed up the development which suggests that it is not entirely based on biological factors.

• Piaget claimed that language development was a reflection of cognitive development however Bruner argued that language development was the cause of cognitive development.

• Piaget combines nature (biological maturation) with nurture (the child’s experiences)


Applying Piaget’s theory to the classroom

• Educational programmes should be designed to correspond to Piaget’s stages of development. Children in the concrete operational stage should be given concrete means to learn new concepts e.g. tokens for counting.

• Instead of checking if children have the right answer, the teacher should focus on the student's understanding and the processes they used to get to the answer.

• Children should be encouraged to discover for themselves and to interact with the material instead of being given ready-made knowledge.

• Accepting that children develop at different rate so arrange activities for individual children or small groups rather than assume that all the children can cope with a particular activity.


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