TR

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