COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT – JEAN PIAGET
• Outline
• What is cognition?
• Piaget’s Theory
• Features of the theory
• Sensori-motor stage
• Preoperational stage
• Concrete operations stage
• Formal operations stage
• Problems with the theory
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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?
2
A CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH
• Jean Piaget’s 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 foster
cognitive development
• He believed each stage in development occurs as a result of
interaction between maturation and environment
• Our thinking develops, which enables us to learn (vs. we
learn, and that is how our thinking develops)
• Adaptation: The tendency to respond to the demands of
the environment to meet one’s goals
• Through social interaction – interacting with the reasoning of others
• 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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EXAMPLES


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
• When a child learns the word for
dog, they start to call all fourlegged animals dogs.
• Babies sucking on various styles
of bottles, easily adapting to
different shaped nipples and
bottles
• People around them will say,
“No, that's not a dog, it's a
cat.” The schema for dog then
gets modified to restrict it to only
certain four-legged animals.
• Try sucking scheme on a sippy
cup usually bring about pretty
rapid accommodation
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EXAMPLES
• When you take in new information and try to
understand it using a schema you already
have, you are assimilating that information
into your current way=ofAn
thinking.
Organizational
Structure of
Knowledge used to categorize things
• We don't, however, accommodate
information--we accommodate TO it by
changing the way we think. That is, when
your current way of thinking doesn't help,
you need to accommodate your current
schema, or accommodate TO the
new information by developing a new
schema.
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DISCONTINUITIES
• The discontinuous aspects of Piaget’s theory are distinct,
hierarchical stages.
• Each stage represents a different ( or dis- continuous) way of
acting on (or thinking about) the environment:
• Central properties of Piaget’s stage theory:
• Qualitative change (a different level of thinking)
• Broad applicability across topics and contexts
• Brief transitions
• Invariant sequence (always the same order)
• Hypothesis - that all children progress through the same four stages
of cognitive development, each building on the previous one
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PIAGET’S STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Sensori-motor
Birth to
2 years
Infants know the world through their
senses and through their actions. For
example, they learn what dogs look
like and what petting them feels like.
Preoperational
2-7
years
Toddlers and young children acquire
the ability to internally represent the
world through language and mental
imagery. They also begin to be able to
see the world from other people’s
perspectives, not just from their own.
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PIAGET’S STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Concrete
Operational
7 - 12
years
Children become able to think
logically, not just intuitively. They now
can classify objects into coherent
categories and understand that
events are often influenced by
multiple factors, not just one.
Formal
Operational
12+ years
Adolescents can think systematically
and reason about what might be as
well as what is. This allows them to
understand politics, ethics, and
science fiction, as well as to engage
in scientific reasoning.
1
PIAGET’S STAGES
1
I. SENSORIMOTOR - SUBSTAGES (CALLED “SCHEMES”)
Scheme
Age
Description
1
Birth – 1 Infants begin to modify the
month
reflexes with which they are born
to make them more adaptive.
2
1–4
months
Infants begin to organize
separate reflexes into larger
behaviors, most of which are
centered on their own bodies.
1
SENSORIMOTOR SUBSTAGES
Scheme
Age
Description
3
4–8
months
Infants becoming increasingly
interested in the world around them.
By the end of this sub-stage, object
permanence, the knowledge that
objects continue to exist even when
they are out of view, typically emerges.
4
8 – 12
months
During this sub-stage, children make
the A-Not-B error, the tendency to
reach to where objects have been
found before, rather than to where
they were last hidden.
1
OBJECT PERMANENCE
• Objects are tied to infant’s 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
1
PIAGET’S A-NOT-B TASK
1
SENSORI-MOTOR SUB-STAGES
Scheme
Age
Description
5
12 – 18
months
Toddlers begin to actively and
avidly explore the potential uses
to which objects can be put.
6
18 – 24
months
Toddlers become able to form
enduring mental representations.
The first sign of this capacity is
deferred imitation, the repetition
of other people’s behavior a
substantial time after it occurred.
II. PREOPERATIONAL STAGE
• A mix of impressive cognitive
acquisitions and equally
impressive limitations
• Symbolic representation, the use of one object to stand for another,
which makes a variety of new behaviors possible
• A major limitation is egocentrism, the tendency to perceive the world
solely from one’s 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
1
Procedures Used to Test Conservation
18
PIAGET’S THREE-MOUNTAIN TASK
1
EGOCENTRIC CONVERSATIONS
FURTHER RESEARCH
McGarrigle & Donaldson (1974)
• Repeated Piaget’s conservation experiment on 6-year-old
children
• A child is shown 2 rows of equal numbers of counters,
and child agrees that the 2 rows are the same
• If the researcher then messes one of the rows up, without
altering the number of counters, only 16% believe that the
number of counters is still the same. So far just as Piaget
would have predicted
• However, when a naughty teddy bear messes up the row
of counters 62% of children in this age group are able to
conserve!
• This shows that children are better able to conserve than Piaget
proposed. M & D assume that in the original condition it appears
to the child that the researchers are intending to alter the number of
counters, or that they are asking a trick question. In the teddy
condition there is a reason for the counters just to be messed up so
the situation has meaning.
III. 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
2
INHELDER AND PIAGET’S 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
IV. 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 – It would be different for everyone
IMPLICATIONS FOR EDUCATION
• Piaget’s view of children’s cognitive development suggests
that children’s 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
2
CRITIQUE OF PIAGET’S THEORY
• QUESTION: What could some of these be?
• Although Piaget’s theory remains highly influential, some weaknesses are now
apparent
•
The stage model depicts children’s 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)
CRITIQUE OF PIAGET’S THEORY
• Piaget’s theory understates the contribution of the social world to
cognitive development
• Piaget’s tasks are culturally biased
• Schooling and literacy affect rates of development
• e.g. Greenfield’s study of the Wolof
• Formal operational thinking is not universal
• e.g. Gladwin’s study of the Polynesian islanders
• Piaget’s theory is vague about the cognitive processes that give rise to
children’s thinking and about the mechanisms that produce cognitive growth
CRITICAL REACTIONS
TO PIAGET’S THEORY
• Concept of “stages”
(qualitative change or quantitative accumulation?)
(can stages be a maturational process?)
• Do all individuals reach formal operations?
• Preoperational thought: inferior or qualitatively
different?
• View that inner speech disappears is disputed
by Vygotsky
• Undue emphasis on logic?
(Thinking is not so orderly or organized; it is
constantly in flux, restless, and contradictory)
• Do children really learn best on their own?
WHAT CRITICAL ELEMENTS SEEM TO BE
DE-EMPHASIZED IN PIAGET’S THEORY OF
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT?
1. SOCIAL, HISTORICAL, AND CULTURAL FORCES
INFLUENCE INDIVIDUALS AND THEIR LEARNING.
2. CRITICAL ROLE OF LANGUAGE
3. IMPORTANCE OF ASSISTED LEARNING
Vygotsky
Piaget
1. Learning and development
2. Cognitive development is mainly the result of:
3. The role of language and private speech:
4. How do children learn best?
CONCEPTUAL DIFFERENCES
BETWEEN
VYGOTSKY
and
PIAGET
1. LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT
LEARNING RESULTS IN
DEVELOPMENT
LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT
ARE INDEPENDENT,
AND DEVELOPMENT IS A
PREREQUISITE FOR LEARNING
see Vygotsky’s
Mind in Society
CONCEPTUAL DIFFERENCES
BETWEEN
VYGOTSKY
and
PIAGET
2. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
IS PRIMARILY A FUNCTION OF
SOCIO-CULTURAL
INTERACTION
Adult-child interaction
. . . but see Cole and Wertch’s
Beyond the Individual-Social
Antimony in Discussions of Piaget
and Vygotsky for discussion of
Piaget’s acknowledgement of the
critical role of social and cultural
forces on cognition
INDIVIDUAL
CONSTRUCTION
Active agency
CONCEPTUAL DIFFERENCES
BETWEEN
VYGOTSKY
and
PIAGET
3. ROLE OF LANGUAGE AND PRIVATE SPEECH
LANGUAGE = CRITICAL
EGOCENTRIC SPEECH
BECOMES THOUGHT THAT
IS SELF-REGULATING
ONCE LANGUAGE DEVELOPS,
COGNITION IS LANGUAGE
COGNITION CRITICAL EGOCENTRIC SPEECH
DISAPPEARS AS SOCIAL
SPEECH DEVELOPS
COGNITION MEDIATES
LANGUAGE
“Language is a very difficult thing to put into words.” Voltaire
CONCEPTUAL DIFFERENCES
BETWEEN
VYGOTSKY
and
PIAGET
4. HOW DO CHILDREN LEARN BEST?
SOCIAL INTERACTION
INDIVIDUAL CONSTRUCTION
• INSTRUCTION DEPENDENT
• STAGE DEPENDENT
• ASSISTED LEARNING (ZPD)
• SELF-DIRECTED,
SELF-INITIATED**
• SCAFFOLDING
• COGNITIVE SELF-INSTRUCTION
[guided by inner speech]
• EXPERIMENTATION
• INDEPENDENT MASTERY
• EXPLORATION, DISCOVERY
COGNITIVE SELF-REGULATION
LEARNING OUTCOMES
Reading
● Siegler, Deloache & Eisenberg, Chapter 4
● See .pdf handout for further reading
● Piaget Quiz
http://psychology.about.com/library/quiz/bl_piaget_quiz.htm
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