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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

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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