"By the end of the sensorimotor period, objects are both separate from the self and permanent.... Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched....” (’La Construction du Réel chez L'enfant’ (‘The Construction of Reality in the Child’ (Delachaux et Niestlé, Geneva, 1937)) Show
Preoperational Stage By observing sequences of play, Piaget was able to demonstrate that, towards the end of the second year, a qualitatively new kind of psychological functioning occurs. (Pre)Operatory Thought is any procedure for mentally acting on objects. The hallmark of the Preoperational Stage is sparse and logically inadequate mental operations. During this stage, the child learns to use and to represent objects by images, words and drawings. The child is able to form stable concepts as well as mental reasoning and magical beliefs. The child, however, is still not able to perform operations; tasks that the child can do mentally rather than physically. Thinking is still egocentric; the child has difficulty taking the viewpoint of others. It was while marking intelligence tests in the early 1920s at the Grange-Aux-Belles street school for boys, founded by Alfred Binet (developer of the Binet IQ Test), that Jean Piaget first noticed that young children consistently gave wrong answers to certain questions. Piaget did not focus so much on the fact of the children's answers being wrong, but that young children kept making the same pattern of mistakes that older children and adults did not. This led him to the theory that young children's cognitive processes are inherently different from those of adults. Ultimately, Piaget (1923) was to propose a global theory of developmental stages stating that individuals exhibit certain distinctive common patterns of cognition in each period in their development. His theory proposes that there are four distinct, increasingly sophisticated stages of mental representation that children pass through on their way to an adult level of intelligence. The four stages, roughly correlated with age, are as follows:- Sensorimotor Stage Piaget said of the Sensorimotor Stage: "In this stage, infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences (such as seeing and hearing) with physical, motoric actions.....Infants gain knowledge of the world from the physical actions they perform on it....An infant progresses from reflexive, instinctual action at birth to the beginning of symbolic thought toward the end of the stage." The Sensorimotor Stage is divided into six sub-stages:-
Sub-Stage Age 1. Simple reflexes Birth-1 month "Co-ordination of sensation and action through reflexive behaviours" 2. First habits and primary circular reactions phase 1-4 months "Coordination of sensation and two types of schemas: habits (reflex) and primary circular reactions (reproduction of an event that initially occurred by chance). Main focus is still on the infant's body." 3. Secondary circular reactions phase 4-8 months Development of habits. "Infants become more object-oriented, moving beyond self-preoccupation; repeat actions that bring interesting or pleasurable results." 4. Co-ordination of secondary circular reactions stage 8-12 months "Co-ordination of vision and touch - hand-eye co-ordination; co-ordination of schemas and intentionality." 5.Tertiary circular reactions, novelty, and curiosity 12-18 months "Infants become intrigued by the many properties of objects and by the many things they can make happen to objects; they experiment with new behaviour." 6. Internalisation of schemas 18-24 months "Infants develop the ability to use primitive symbols and form enduring mental representations." 2 sub-stages comprise Preoperational thought:-
Graphics copyright © 2001 Psychology Press Ltd Centration is noticed in conservation: the awareness that altering a substance's appearance does not change its basic properties. Children at this stage are unaware of conservation. They are unable to grasp the concept that a certain liquid be the same volume regardless of the container shape. In Piaget's most famous task, a child is represented with two identical beakers containing the same amount of liquid. The child usually notes that the beakers have the same amount of liquid. When one of the beakers is poured into a taller and thinner container, children who are typically younger than 7 or 8 years old say that the two beakers now contain a different amount of liquid. The child simply focuses on the height and width of the container compared to the general concept. Piaget believes that if a child fails the conservation-of-liquid task, it is a sign that they are at the Preoperational stage of cognitive development. The child also fails to show conservation of number, matter, length, and area as well. Another example is when a child is shown 7 dogs and 3 cats and asked if there are more dogs than cats. The child would respond positively. However when asked if there are more dogs than animals, the child would once again respond positively. Such fundamental errors in logic show the transition between intuitiveness in solving problems and true logical reasoning acquired in later years when the child grows up. Piaget considered that children primarily learn through imitation and play throughout these first two stages, as they build up symbolic images through internalised activity. Studies have been conducted among other countries to find out if Piaget's theory is universal. Patricia Greenfield & Rodney Cocking (1996) reported Greenfield conducting a task similar to Piaget's beaker experiment in the West African nation of Senegal. Her results stated that only 50 percent of the 10-13 year olds understood the concept of conservation. Other cultures such as central Australia and New Guinea have had similar results. There may have been discrepancies in the communication between the experimenter and the children which may have altered the results. It has also been found that if conservation is not widely practiced in a particular country, the concept can be taught to the child and training can improve the child's understanding. Therefore, it is noted that there are different age differences in reaching the understanding of conservation based on the degree to which the culture teaches these tasks. Concrete Operational Stage The Concrete Operational stage occurs between the ages of 7 and 11 years and is characterised by the appropriate use of logic. Important processes during this stage are:
Children in this stage can, however, only solve problems that apply to actual (concrete) objects or events, and not abstract concepts or hypothetical tasks. Formal Operational Stage The Formal Operational period commences at around 11-15 years of age (puberty) and continues into adulthood. In this stage, individuals move beyond concrete experiences and begin to think abstractly, reason logically and draw conclusions from the information available, as well as apply all these processes to hypothetical situations. The abstract quality of the adolescent's thought at the Formal Operational level is evident in the adolescent's verbal problem-solving ability. The logical quality of the adolescent's thought is when children are more likely to solve problems in a trial-and-error fashion. Adolescents begin to think more as a scientist thinks, devising plans to solve problems and systematically testing solutions. They use hypothetical-deductive reasoning, which means that they develop hypotheses or best guesses, and systematically deduce, or conclude, which is the best path to follow in solving the problem. During this stage the young adult is able to understand such things as love, ‘shades of gray’, logical proofs and values, etc. The young adult begins to entertain possibilities for the future and is fascinated with what they can be. Adolescents are changing cognitively also in that they think about social matters. Adolescent egocentrism governs the way that adolescents think about social matters and is the heightened self-consciousness in them as they are which is reflected in their sense of personal uniqueness and invincibility. Adolescent egocentrism can be dissected into two types of social thinking:-
General information regarding the stages
Challenges to Piagetian stage theory Piagetian accounts of development have been challenged on several grounds. First, as Piaget himself noted, development does not always progress in the smooth manner his theory seems to predict. 'Decalage', or unpredicted gaps in the developmental progression, suggest that the stage model is at best a useful approximation. More broadly, Piaget's theory is 'domain general', predicting that cognitive maturation occurs concurrently across different domains of knowledge (such as Mathematics, logic, Physics, language, etc.). However, more recent cognitive developmentalists have been much influenced by trends in Cognitive science away from domain generality and towards domain specificity or ‘modularity of mind’, under which different cognitive faculties may be largely independent of one another and thus develop according to quite different time-tables. In this vein, many current Cognitive developmentalists argue that rather than being domain general learners, children come equipped with domain specific theories, sometimes referred to as 'core knowledge', which allows them to break into learning within that domain. For example, even young infants appear to understand some basic principles of physics (eg: that one object cannot pass through another) and human intention (eg: that a hand repeatedly reaching for an object has that object, not just a particular path of motion, as its goal). These basic assumptions may be the building block out of which more elaborate knowledge is constructed. Additionally, some psychologists, such as Lev Vygotsky and Jerome Bruner, thought differently from Piaget, suggesting that language was more important than Piaget implied. During which stage of Piaget's developmental model is the world experienced through senses and actions?The Sensorimotor Stage. The sensorimotor stage is the first phase of children's cognitive development. During this stage, children primarily learn about their environment through their senses and motor activities.
What is true of a child in the concrete operational stage of development?The child is now mature enough to use logical thought or operations (i.e. rules) but can only apply logic to physical objects (hence concrete operational). Children gain the abilities of conservation (number, area, volume, orientation), reversibility, seriation, transitivity and class inclusion.
Which of the following is a developmental issue children face during the preoperational stage?Piaget believed that children remain egocentric throughout the preoperational stage. This means they cannot understand that other people think in different ways to them or that events that take place are not always related to them.
When children develop theory of mind they can recognize that?The Theory of Mind is the idea that each child develops an understanding of their own thoughts, desires, and beliefs—and can recognize that other people have their own thoughts, desires, and beliefs.
|