Early Childhood: Piaget

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

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

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

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.

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.

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