Cognitive Development Piaget

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Cognitive Development - Piaget

• Outline
• What is cognition?
• Piagets Theory
• Features of the theory
• Sensorimotor stage
• Preoperational stage
• Concrete operations stage
• Formal operations stage
• Problems with the theory
• Learning Outcomes

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What is cognition?

• Virtually everything we do involves thinking or
  cognitive functioning
• Recalling a phone number
• Remembering a list
• Following directions
• Reading your watch (how much time until?)
• How do children become able to do all these
  things?
• Why are some better at some tasks?
• Why are some quicker to develop?

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A Constructivist Approach

• Jean Piagets theory remains the standard against
  which all other theories are judged
• Often labeled constructivist because it depicts
  children as constructing knowledge for themselves
• Children are seen as
• Active
• Learning many important lessons on their own
• Intrinsically motivated to learn

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Nature and Nurture

• Piaget believed that nature and nurture interact
  to yield cognitive development
• Adaptation The tendency to respond to the
  demands of the environment to meet ones goals
• Organization The tendency to integrate
  particular observations into coherent knowledge

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Sources of Continuity

• Three processes work together from birth to
  propel development forward
• Assimilation The process by which people
  translate incoming information into a form they
  can understand
• Accommodation The process by which people adapt
  current knowledge structures in response to new
  experiences
• Equilibration The process by which people
  balance assimilation and accommodation to create
  stable understanding

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Discontinuities

• The discontinuous aspects of Piagets theory are
  distinct, hierarchical stages
• Central properties of Piagets stage theory
• Qualitative change
• Broad applicability across topics and contexts
• Brief transitions
• Invariant sequence
• Hypothesized that children progress through four
  stages of cognitive development, each building on
  the previous one

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Piagets Stages of Cognitive Development
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Piagets Stages of Cognitive Development
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Sensorimotor Substages
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Sensorimotor Substages
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Object permanence

• Objects are tied to infants awareness of them
• out of sight, out of mind
• Hidden toy experiment
• 4 months no attempt to search for hidden object
• 4-9 months visual search for object
• 9 months search for and retrieve hidden object
• A-not-B task (Diamond, 1985)
• 9 months A/B error after 1/2 second delay
• 12 months 10 second delay needed to produce
  error

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Piagets A-Not-B Task
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Sensorimotor Substages
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Preoperational Stage

• A mix of impressive cognitive acquisitions and
  equally impressive limitations
• A notable acquisition is symbolic representation,
  the use of one object to stand for another, which
  makes a variety of new behaviours possible
• A major limitation is egocentrism, the tendency
  to perceive the world solely from ones own point
  of view
• A related limitation is centration, the tendency
  to focus on a single, perceptually striking
  feature of an object or event
• Preoperational children also lack of
  understanding of the conservation concept, the
  idea that merely changing the appearance of
  objects does not change their key properties

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Piagets Three-Mountain Task
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Egocentric Conversations
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The Balance Scale An Example of Centration
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Procedures Used to Test Conservation
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Concrete Operational Stage

• Children begin to reason logically about the
  world
• They can solve conservation problems, but their
  successful reasoning is largely limited to
  concrete situations
• Thinking systematically remains difficult

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Inhelder and Piagets Pendulum Problem

• The task is to compare the motions of longer and
  shorter strings, with lighter and heavier weights
  attached, in order to determine the influence of
  weight, string length, and dropping point on the
  time it takes for the pendulum to swing back and
  forth
• Children below age 12 usually perform
  unsystematic experiments and draw incorrect
  conclusions

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Formal Operational Stage

• Cognitive development culminates in the ability
  to think abstractly and to reason hypothetically
• Individuals can imagine alternative worlds and
  reason systematically about all possible outcomes
  of a situation
• Piaget believed that the attainment of the
  formal operations stage, in contrast to the
  other stages, is not universal

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Implications for Education

• Piagets view of childrens cognitive development
  suggests that childrens distinctive ways of
  thinking at different ages need to be considered
  in deciding how best to teach them
• In addition, because children learn by mentally
  and physically interacting with the environment,
  relevant physical activities, accompanied by
  questions that call attention to the lessons
  of the activities, are important in
  educational practice

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Critique of Piagets Theory

• Although Piagets theory remains highly
  influential, some weaknesses are now apparent
• The stage model depicts childrens thinking as
  being more consistent than it is
• Infants and young children are more cognitively
  competent than Piaget recognized
• Object permanence in 3-month-olds (Bower, 1974)
• Number conservation in 4 year olds (McGarrigle
  Donaldson, 1974)

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Critique of Piagets Theory

• Piagets theory understates the contribution of
  the social world to cognitive development
• Piagets tasks are culturally biased
• Schooling and literacy affect rates of
  development
• Formal operational thinking is not universal
• Piagets theory is vague about the cognitive
  processes that give rise to childrens thinking
  and about the mechanisms that produce cognitive
  growth