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What are some elements of a high-quality toy?
Simple: easy to understand
Interactive: things children can do
Open-ended: allows children to use their imagination
What are some skills that children learn and elaborate through play?
Communication
Imagination/creativity
Self-concept
Emotion regulation
Piaget Review
Which stage is associated with infancy? sensorimotor stage
How do children learn and think at this stage? through their senses and physical actions to explore their environments and develop an understanding of cause and effect
In what ways is learning limited? it is based on physical interactions so they cannot grasp abstract concepts, lack object permanence, and mainly learn through trial and error, which restricts their understanding of the world to
Which stage is associated with early childhood? preoperational stage
How do children learn and think at this stage? through symbolic representation, using words, images, and pretend play to understand the world around them
In what way is learning limited? children are unable to take on another’s perspective and can only focus on one particular aspect of a situation
How does Piaget think about maturation and development? maturation comes before development
What is an “operation”?
According to Piaget an “operation” is a mental action or process that allows a child to manipulate information logically, combining different schemas in a reasonable way to solve problems
Knowing is doing
Concrete Operational Stage
Typically around age 7 to 11
Achieve mastery of operations
“Concrete thinking” = centered on physical reality
Abstract and hypotheticals are out of reach
Movement between pre- and concrete operational stages is similar to other types of development
Vacillating at first, relying on dominant strategy when encountering novelty, eventually moves toward concrete operations all the time
Major advances
Decentration
Identity
Conservation
Classification
Reversibility
Seriation
Inductive Reasoning
Decentration, Identity, and Conservation
Less egocentric, can take multiple aspects of a situation into account (decentration)
Schemes become more complex to account for potential changes/transformations/operations
Characteristics of objects don’t change if the object is altered (identity), and changing one quality is accounted for by compensations in another (conservation)
Classification
Understanding the use of hierarchies, classes, and subclasses
Think: roses, daises, and peonies are all types of flowers
Reversibility
Transformations on objects can be “undone”
If ice melts into water when heated, then water can be frozen into ice when cooled
Important for understanding elementary math operations
Seriation
The ability to organize objects by a certain characteristic like color, length, mass, etc.
Inductive Reasoning
Multiple premises believed to be true are combined to reach a conclusion
Sometimes called “bottom-up processing”
Make broad generalizations out of a specific observations
I take a candy out of the bag…it’s chocolate. I take another candy out…it’s chocolate. Another candy…chocolate again! All the candies must be chocolate
First day at the new school, I met two kids who were nice. Everyone at this school must be nice
My dad yells a lot when he’s mad. So does my friends dad. All dads yell a lot when they’re mad
Lev Vygotsky
Russian psychologist, writing around the same time as Piaget
Never had any contact with Piaget (communism)
His work was suppressed, so we didn’t know a lot about his theories until the 1980s, when he became very popular in the US
Thinking about the same problems from a completely different perspective
Conclusion are nearly all in opposition to Piaget’s fundamental thoughts
Social constructivist theory: children actively construct their knowledge through social interactions with others, meaning learning is heavily influenced by the social environment and collaborative experiences with peers and adults
Sociocultural Learning: Mind in Society
Learning can never be separated from cultural context
Cognitive capacities are developed in and shaped by the places where children spend time (e.g., home, school, church, etc.)
Knowledge is created and reinforced through interactions with relative experts and the use of cultural tools
Language is a cultural tool
Speech is Vygotsky’s most important cultural tool
Children lean from this speech around them, both socially and solitarily
Egocentric/private speech: verbal behavior directed at the self rather than others, with a purpose of enhancing concentration and performance
Eventually, speech is internalized
Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)
Vygotsky’s term for the distance between a child’s ability to solve a problem alone and how much better they can do when guided by a more skilled social partner
Scaffolding: the process by which more skilled social partners structure tasks to boost children’s performance
Conflicting Thoughts
PIAGET
Development precedes learning
Children must have reached a certain level of maturity before they can learn certain things
Cognitive constructivist
Children manipulate their own environment and thus acquire knowledge
Teachers inhibit learning by forcing children into a passive role
Learning is individual and stage-like
You think before you speak
VYGOTSYK
Learning precedes development
Children cannot develop/reach the next level of mastery unless they first engage in social learning
Social constructivist
Children are active in learning through interactions with social partners
Teachers enhance learning by scaffolding children and helping them reach the next level of mastery
Learning is relational and incremental
You speak before you think