Piaget: Intellectual development

Question 1

What are Piaget stages of intellectual development?

Answer 1

• sensorimotor stage (0-2 years)
• Pre-operational stage (2-7 years)
• Stage of concrete operations (7-11 years)
• stage of formal operations (11+ years)

Question 2

What is the sensorimotor stage (0-2 years)?

Answer 2

• according to Piaget a baby early focus is on physical sensations and on developing some basic physical co-ordination
• children learn by trial and error that they can move other objects
• the baby also develops an understanding during the first two years that other people are separate objects and acquires some basic language
• by around eight months the child is capable of understanding object permanence
• this is the understanding that objects still exist when they are out of sight
• Piaget observed babies looking at objects as they were removed from sight throughout the first year
• Piaget noted that before eight months they would continue to look for it
• this lead Piaget to believe that it was from this age that children understood that objects continue to exist when removed from view

Question 3

What is the pre-operational stage (2-7 years)?

Answer 3

• by the age of two a toddler is mobile and can use language but still lacks reasoning ability which means that they display some characteristic errors in reasoning
• there are three stages with in this stage conservation, egocentrism and class inclusion

Question 4

What is conservation?

Answer 4

• the basic mathematical understanding that quantity remains constant even when the appearance of object changes
• Piaget demonstrated this in a number of situations like in his number conservation experiments Piaget placed two identical rows of counters side by side
• even young children correctly reasoned that each row of counters had the same number however when the counters in one row were pushed together pre-operational children struggled to conserve and usually said there were fewer counters
• in his liquid conservation procedure Piaget found that when two containers are placed side by side with the contents at the same height, most children spotted that they contain the same volume however if the liquid is poured into a taller thinner vessel younger children typically believed there was more liquid in he taller vessel

Question 5

What is egocentrism?

Answer 5

• it means that to see the world only from ones own point of view
• Piaget and inhaler described how egocentrism was demonstrated in the three mountains task in which children were shown three model mountains each with a different feature a cross, a house or snow
• a doll was placed at the side of the model so it faced the scene from a different angle to the child
• the child was asked to choose what the doll would see from a range of pictures
• pre-operational children tended to find this difficult and often chose the picture that matched the scene from their own point of view

Question 6

What is the stage of concrete operations (7-11 years)?

Answer 6

-Piaget found that from around the age of seven most children can conserve and perform much better rezoning abilities - what Piaget called operations - these are strictly concrete operations as they can be applied only to physical objects in the Childs presence

Question 7

What is the stage of formal operations?

Answer 7

• Piaget believed that from about 11 years of age children became capable of formal reasoning which means that children become able to focus on the form of an argument and not to be distracted by its content
• formal reasoning can be tested by means of syllogism like all yellow cats have two heads, I have a cat called Charlie, how many heads does Charlie have the correct answer is two
• Piaget found that younger children became distracted by the content and answered that cats do not really younger children became distracted by the content and answered that cats do not really have two heads
• Piaget believed that once children can reason formally they are capable of scientific reasoning and become able to appreciate abstract ideas

Question 8

What are the evaluation points of Piaget’s stages of intellectual development?

Answer 8

• when counters were moved by naughty teddy, 60% of preoperational children could conserve
• a study of 5 year olds found that they could carry out class inclusion if the task was explained to them showing ZPD
• 90% of pre operational children were able to hide a boy doll from police dolls
• abilities both under and overestimated as children are capable of greater cognitive abilities through the help of more expert individuals

Question 9

How does Piaget’s dubious questioning when studying conversion disprove Piaget’s stages of intellectual development?

Answer 9

• it has been suggested that children taking part in Piaget’s conservation experiments were influenced by seeing the experimenter change the appearance of the counters or liquid in other words they believed that they were meant to think the quantity had changed otherwise why would the experimenter change the appearance then ask them if it was the same
• McGarrigle and Donaldson set up a number conservation experiment in which the counters appeared to be moved by accident
• in a control condition they replicated the strand Piaget task with 4-6 year olds and like Piaget they found that most children answered incorrectly however when a naughty teddy appeared and knocked the counters closer together 62% correctly said there was the same number as before which suggests that children aged 4-6 could conserve, as long as they were questioned which suggests that Piaget was wrong about conservation in the pre-operational stage

Question 10

How does that fact that Piaget’s conclusions on class inclusion is dubious a weakness of Piaget’s theory of intellectual development?

Answer 10

• Piaget concluded from his studies of class inclusion that pre-operational children were simply unable to understand that an object can be a member of two classes at the same time like a pug can be both a dog and an animal
• the observation that children struggle with this type of question has been replicated by siegler and svetina, however this study also provided evidence that children were in fact capable of understanding class inclusion
• siegler and svetina tested 100 5-year olds from Slovenia, who each undertook three sessions of ten class-inclusion tasks, receiving an explanation of the task after each session
• in one condition they received feedback that there must be more animals than dogs because there were nine animals but only six dogs
• a different group received feedback that there must be more animals as dogs were a subset of animals
• the scores across the three sessions improved more for the latter group, suggesting that they had acquired a real understanding of class inclusion
• this is contrary to what Piaget believed - that children under seven could not understand class inclusion

Question 11

How is children’s ability to decentre a weakness of Piaget’s theory?

Answer 11

• Piaget believed that younger children were only able to see the world from their own, personal perspective and that the ability to decentred or see the world from multiple viewpoints increased gradually with age yet some later research has challenged Piaget conclusions
• hugest tested the ability of children to see a situation from two peoples viewpoints using a model with two intersecting walls and three dolls, a boy with two police officers
• one familiarised with the task children as young as 31/2 years were able to position the boy doll where one police officer would not see him 90% of the time and four year olds could do this 90% of the time when there were two police officers to hide from
• studies like this pose a problem for Piaget because they suggest that he underestimated younger children ability to decentre

Question 12

What is class inclusion?

Answer 12

• early in the pre-operational stage children begin to understand classification - the idea that objects fall into categories
• most pre-operational children can classify pugs, bull terriers and retrievers as dogs however Piaget and inhaler found that children under the age of seven struggle with the more advanced skill of class inclusion, the idea that classifications have subsets
• so when they showed 7-8 year pictures of 5 dogs and two cats and asked if there were more dogs or animals and they answered that there were more dogs
• he interpreted this as meaning that younger children cannot simultaneously see a dog as a member of the dog class and the animal class

Question 13

what are the characteristics of each stage of intellectual development?

Answer 13

• the sensory-motor stage: object permanence
• the pre-operational stage: egocentrism, animism, not conservation
• the concrete operations stage: conservation, no abstract thinking, class inclusion
• the formal operations stage: abstract thinking, hypothetical thinking

Question 14

what is abstract thinking?

Answer 14

-Abstract thinking is the ability to think about objects, principles, and ideas that are not physically present. It is related to symbolic thinking, which uses the substitution of a symbol for an object or idea.

Question 15

what is hypothetical thinking?

Answer 15

-Hypothetical thinking is defined as the exploration of possibilities and outcomes of different states of the world without an event actually occurring.

Question 16

how is the fact that Piaget under and overestimates the intellectual stages of development?

Answer 16

• Piaget may have underestimated younger children and overestimated the abilities of adolescents
• modern studies have shown that at least with the right kind of adult help pre-operational children have or are capable of developing a good understanding of conservation and class inclusion
• later studies of egocentrism that have located scenes in contexts familiar to children have found pre-operational children to be less egocentric than is suggested by the three mountains study