Early Childhood: Piaget

Advances in Mental Representation

• As children move from the sensorimotor to the preoperational stage (years 2 to 7), representational activity increases
• Understand things exist without seeing it • Still cannot logically reason (hence, pre – operational)
• Play-based

Make-Believe Play

• Through pretending, young children practice and strengthen new representational schemes
• Development of make-believe:
  • Play becomes more imaginative, less self-centered, gradually more complex
  • Sociodramatic play:
  • Make-believe with others that is under way by the end of the second year
  • Increases rapidly in complexity in early childhood
• Play not only reflects but also contributes to children’s cognitive and social skills
• Many studies reveal that make-believe predicts a wide variety of cognitive capacities
• Benefits of make believe play:
  • Leads to gains in social competence.
  • Strengthens cognitive capacities:
  • Sustained attention
  • Inhibition of impulses
  • Memory
  • Logical reasoning
  • Language and literacy
  • Imagination, creativity, perspective taking
  • Imaginary companions enhance pretend play.
• Ways of enhancing make believe play
  • Provide sufficient space and play materials
  • Encourage children’s play without controlling it
  • Offer a variety of realistic materials as well as materials without clear functions
  • Ensure that children have many rich, real-world experiences to inspire positive fantasy play
  • Help children solve social conflicts constructively

Symbol-Real World Relations

• Symbolic function substage
  • Occurs roughly between the ages of 2 and 4.
  • Child gains the ability to mentally represent an object that is not present. (e.g. I want ice cream!)
  • Dual representation: viewing a symbolic object as both an object and a symbol

Limitations of Preoperational Thought

• Egocentrism: failure to distinguish others’ symbolic viewpoints from one’s own
• Young children have difficulty understanding that other people feel, think, and understand things differently than they do.
  • Not selfish but rather developing ability to perspective take, and understand that other people can’t see what they see etc.
• Piaget demonstrated egocentrism using his three-mountains problem:
  • Children in the preoperational stage did not differentiate between their own point of view and that of another person.
• Animism: preoperational children also may give human characteristics, such as thought and intention, to inanimate things
• According to Piaget and others, children at the preoperational stage cannot yet conserve. These tasks are mastered gradually over the concrete operational stage.
• Children in Western nations typically acquire conservation of number, mass, and liquid sometimes between 6 and 7 years and conservation of weight between 8 and 10 years.

Intuitive Thought

• Beginning around age 4-7, many children enter the “why” stage, also referred to as intuitive thought.
• They have some understanding of what they are seeing and experiencing, but now they ask “why?” about anything and everything as they try to figure out the world around them.
• Piaget believed young children are beginning to put together logical explanations but are still influenced more by what they experience through their senses than by logical reasoning.
• Observed limitations of thinking: Since not fully logical, children at this age often create causal links where none exist.
• Intuitive substage: children seem so sure about their knowledge and understanding, yet often can’t provide explanations.
  • Trouble answering “what if” scenarios
• Believed preschoolers’ bias prevents them from accommodating, or reflecting on and revising their faulty reasoning
• Piaget interested in studying the limitations of their thinking
  • Conservation, centration
  • Conservation: the understanding that the basic quantity of something (its amount, volume, or mass) remains the same even if its appearance changes.

Education

• Three educational principles derived from Piaget continue to influence teachers and classrooms:
  • Discovery learning involves opportunities for spontaneous interaction with the environment
  • Sensitivity to children’s readiness to learn builds on children’s current thinking, challenging their incorrect ways of viewing the world
  • Acceptance of individual differences means planning for activities for individual children and small groups

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