Chapter 9 COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN THE PRESCHOOL YEARS PIAGET S PREOPERATIONAL STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT o Piaget refers to the period from 3 6 years of age as the preoperational stage of o He uses the term operational to refer to the logical systems of thought which development emerge in middle childhood o the second year of life as a major turning point in cognitive development marked to represent or by the advent of the symbolic function the ability to use symbols stand for perceived objects and events o The symbolic function takes several distinct forms as the child moves into the third year of life deferred imitation symbolic or pretend play mental images and language THE SYMBOLIC FUNCTION o In deferred imitation children observe the behavior of a model and imitate that behavior when the model is no longer present only when it becomes adaptive to do so o In symbolic or pretend play children pretend that an object is something other than what it really is Research has identified a number of distinct cognitive skills required to initiate and sustain pretend play Each of the pretend skills follows a unique course of development Substituting Objects Substituting Other Agents for Oneself older children are capable of shifting context performing routine behaviors outside of their typical setting During their third year children become increasing able to transform virtually any object into the props needed for their pretend play episodes and they become progressively less dependent on realistic props during the preschool years developmental progression in how children use agents in their pretense Children go from using themselves as agents to making dolls for example more human letting it walk and talk and gain persona pretense begins with single acts children coordinate such acts into sequences of increasing length and complexity through the preschool years Researchers have observed a Although Sequencing and Socialization of Pretend Episodes THE ADVENT OF PRECONCEPTS o The symbolic function is also expressed in the ability to form mental images internal representations of external objects or events For the first time the child can integrate experiences from the past into the present to plan for the future o The three forms of symbolic function mentioned thus far deferred imitation pretend play and images express private idiosyncratic meanings derived from personal experience o The private and idiosyncratic nature of the symbolic function in young children limits their ability to communicate their thoughts to others challenging caregivers interpretive skills and patience o Piaget believed that preschool age children tend to focus their attention on minute and often inconsequential aspects of their experience a process he referred to as centration o Cent rated perception results in unsystematic samplings of isolated bits of information from any given experience Ex Carlos s experience while visiting a zoo Somewhat overwhelmed by the novelty and complexity of the day s events Carlos unsystematic sampling of centrated perceptions included a lion s head popcorn cages o Piaget suggested that such collections of images derived from centrated perception merge into preconcepts disorganized illogical representations of the child s experiences o Although preconcepts provide a less than adequate representation of children s experiences they do establish a foundation for the eventual emergence of logical concepts in the subsequent stage of cognitive development TRANSDUCTIVE REASONING THINKING WITH PRECONCEPTS o preconcepts severely limits the quality of preschool age children s reasoning and problem solving o In induction we derive general principles from particular examples o in deduction we use general principles to predict particular outcomes o Piaget believed that preoperational children are incapable of thinking inductively or deductively Instead they think by transduction reasoning within the unsystematic collections of images which constitute their preconcepts EGOCENTRISM o one of the major limitations of preoperational thought is the child s inability to conceptualize the perspective of other individuals a quality he called egocentrism IRREVERSIBILITY o irreversibility the notion that preschoolers cannot mentally reverse their transductive sequences of thought o significant liability in problem solving during this period REASONING IN SPECIFIC CONTENT DOMAINS o CLASSIFICATION Classification refers to the tendency to group objects on the basis of particular sets of characteristics Adult classification systems are organized on the basis of class inclusion that is a class must be smaller than any more inclusive class in which it is contained Three stage developmental progression o Stage 1 children 5 years old and younger had no overall plan for sorting but produced graphic collections or pictures made with objects For instance a child might arrange several of the forms into a rectangle and refer to it as a house o Stage 2 children 6 8 years sorted in a more organized way producing a series of collections of objects each based on a different dimension of similarity Piaget called these non graphic collections o Stage 3 children later childhood to early adolescence understood the relationship the rule of class inclusion Children at this stage successfully classified using multiple dimensions there is evidence that children begin to spontaneously sort objects into different categories by the end of the second year of life o QUANTITATIVE REASONING Quantitative reasoning refers to the ability to estimate the amount of things and changes in the amounts of things in terms of number size weight volume speed time and distance Quantity Number A critical point in the development of quantitative reasoning is reached when children become aware that things in nature exist in specific amounts and that those amounts only change when certain actions such as addition and subtraction are carried out EX Conservation comeuntil7 8 but research has shown that preschool children can conserve number if the task is kept simple EX Lining up beans and spacing them in one row and keeping them closer in another row Earlier children might think that the narrow equals less Piaget thought that conservation of numbers didn t Counting o To give a child credit for counting ability the child must be able to systematically assign numbers to items in an array using the following five principles The one to one principle One and only
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