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Jean Piaget - Cognitive Theory
What Piaget noticed during testing was that children made similar mistakes on questions older children and adults did not. The began to question if children's cognitive processes were different from adults.
Stages of Cognitive Development
Substages
Stage 2 - Preoperational Stage
Biological Results
Piaget invented some trials for his own children. He would place a cloth over a toy his children were playing with to see if the child could remove the cloth. If they did, it showed they had a mental image of the toy and the intelligence to remove the cloth. If they didn't, they had not yet obtained representational thought.
Language
Piaget hypothesized that egocentric language was primarily for communicating with one's self, as children do during play. Piaget believed this talk was merely the child's thoughts. Vygotsky, however, believed this egocentric speech to be how children learn to speak socially as was crucial for cognitive development.
Piaget began to investigate children's minds. He proposed that children will move from egocentrism to sociocentrism.
Egocentrism
Egocentrism is the idea that the self is the most important thing. In development, it means language and morality.
Introduction
Sociocentrism
Eventually children move to sociocentrism. This is where morality and language become reflected in the culture around them. For example, eventually a child will recognize different viewpoints and not assume someone is lying to them.
Conclusion
Jean William Fitz Piaget was born August 9th, 1896 in Neuchatel, Switzerland.
His early interest was biology, but after working with Alfred Binet (famous for the Binet intelligence test), Piaget moved towards psychology.
Education has been changed as a result of Piaget's thinking.
Discovery learning has become embraced by education. As has the idea of maturation and readiness.
Education is forever changing through assimilation and accommodation.
Schemas
Much of Piaget's biological and cognitive theory is based on the idea of a schema.
A schema is an organized thought or pattern. If you believe pigs can fly, that is a schema.
The interesting thing about a schema is that we often will believe ours, even in the face of contradictory information.
This idea is paramount in Piaget's theories and the trials involving his own children
Biological Development
After Piaget married in 1928 (one of his students), he studied his own children.
Morality...cont'd
Equilibration
Equilibration is the force that drives learning. If assimilation does not work, we seek balance through accommodation.
Part of the issue of morality in egocentric people is that children don't understand consequence either. Only outcome.
Morality
Due to egocentrism, Piaget believed that children don't understand morality. If you break a child's toy by accident, they only recognize the toy is broken, not the intent and will be angered. They only worry about outcome.
Concrete Operational Stage ( 7 - 11)
Accommodation
This is the stage where children become more mature.
Concrete Operations - logic and understanding are developed. This is limited by the fact that concrete objects must exist. Abstract, hypothetical thinking is not yet developed.
Children, at this stage, also lose egocentrism and recognize they may think differently than others. In addition, at this stage, classification becomes a central idea.
Accommodation is where existing schemas change to understand the information. For example, the child will learn zebras are striped horses or that the picture of the baby is them a long time ago.
Notes
Formal Operational Stage
The final stage in cognitive developmental theory is the formal operational stage.
This stage extends from adolescence into adulthood.
It is at this stage that a person is capable of hypothetical thinking and deductive reasoning.
Stage 1 - Sensorimotor Stage - 0 - 2 Years of age
Intellectual and Cognitive Development
This stage extends from birth to the acquisition of language. This stage is where the child will construct the reality of the world around them. They do so through their five senses and movement. At this stage children are very egocentric, so they only see the world through their own view point. They move from reflexive, instinct to the internalization of symbols through 6 sub-stages of development.
The most important acquisition during this stage is object permanence...the idea that objects continue to exist even when they cannot been seen or heard.
Development became a reorganization of mental process which came from growth and interaction with environment. Children create the reality of the world around them through assimiliation and accommodation.
However, it is important to note the biological impact in that statement. Piaget believed that a certain level of maturation must happen before a new level of development could occur. This is known as the developmental stage theory.
1. Simple reflexes - (Birth - 6 weeks) - The coming together of sensation and action. Three primary reflexes are observed: sucking, following objects with eyes, closing hand when in contact. Over the first six weeks, these reflexes become voluntary.
2. Habits and Primary Circular Reactions - (6 weeks - 4 months) - Sensation meets primary circular reactions, which is the replication on action which happened by chance. Example: A baby repeats the motion of passing a hand in front of its face
3. Secondary Circular Reactions - (4 - 8 Months) - The development of habits occur. It is also the stage in which intentional repition occurs, such as turning on or off a light. The understanding of cause and effect begins. Widely regarding as the most important stage.
4. Coordination - (8 - 12 months) - Coordination of vision, hand-eye coordination. Also the stage where logic and cause-effect meet. Piaget believes this is the stage where true intelligence shows up. The idea is this the stage where steps are taken to achieve goals...i.e. "If I get the cookie jar, then open it, I can get a cookie"
5. Tertiary reactions, curiousity - (12 - 18 months) - At this stage infants experiment with different ways to meet goals...i.e. "I can't reach the cookie jar, so maybe if I point at it and cry?"
6. Internalization - (18 - 24 months) - This stage is where rudimentary symbols are used and mental representations are formed. for example children may learn a heart means love, even if they cannot grasp the concept. This also marks the shift into pre-operational stages.
Intuitive Thought (age 4 - 7)
This stage marks the use of primitive reason. Children tend to be extremely curious and ask a lot of questions. It is called intuitive thought because Piaget realized children wanted to know more, yet already possessed a great amount of knowledge.
Children at this stage focus on one characteristic. For example Piaget did an experiment where two beakers were filled to the same level, he then poured one beaker into a taller, thinner beaker. Children at this stage believed the amount had been changed. Another element of this stage is the inability to classify. Piaget would show a picture of 5 dogs and 3 cats. He would show the understanding of the child (knows what dogs and cats are, recognizes they are both animals) then would ask are there more dogs or animals in the picture? The child usually answered more dogs.
This stage also marks the weakening of egocentrism.
Ages 2 - 7
This is the stage at which language is developed. The stage is broken into 2 sub-stages: Symbolic function and Intuitive thought.
Symbolic function is where the child thinks in images and symbols.
It is also known as the 'magical thinking' stage, where play formulates thinking. For example, a cardboard box becomes a playhouse, a table, a racecar, a boat, etc. The child can imagine the objects without them being actually present. They also develop social behaviour through play. They may play house or have imaginary friends.
Precausal thinking also occurs at this stage to explain cause and effect. It includes animism (inanimate objects are given life), artificialism (the environment is shaped by human interaction), and transductive reasoning (no understanding of cause-effect, relationships between things are drawn from two separate events)
Assimilation
Assimilation is how people perceive and incorporate new information using their existing cognitive schemas. For example, a child seeing a zebra for the first time would use its existing schema and think it is a horse. Or a child seeing a baby picture of itself would only recognize it is a picture of a baby.
Following the trials, Piaget was able to state that intelligence had two facets. Thinking and activity. This was considered groundbreaking.
Operative intelligence is the active aspect. It must understand transformation of the world and it also overrules the figurative intelligence, which is static (shapes, locations, etc)
It was then he introduced the two central ideas of adaptation: assimilation and accommodation.