Chapter 9COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN THE PRESCHOOL YEARS- PIAGET’S PREOPERATIONAL STAGE OF DEVELOPMENTo Piaget refers to the period from 3-6 years of age as the preoperational stageof developmento He uses the term "operational" to refer to the logical systems of thought which emerge in middle childhoodo the second year of life as a major turning point in cognitive development, marked by the advent of thesymbolic function- the ability to usesymbols to represent or stand for perceived objects and eventso 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, andlanguage.- THE SYMBOLIC FUNCTIONo Indeferred 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 soo 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:- older children are capable of shifting context, performing routine behaviors outside of their typical setting- Substituting Objects 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- Substituting Other Agents for Oneself Researchers have observed adevelopmental 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.- Sequencing and Socialization of Pretend Episodes Although pretense begins with single acts, children coordinate such acts into sequences of increasing length and complexity through the preschool yearso 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 thepresent 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 experienceo 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.- THE ADVENT OF PRECONCEPTSo Piaget believed that preschool-age children tend to focus their attention on minuteand often inconsequential aspects of their experience, a process he referred to as centrationo 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 PRECONCEPTSo preconcepts severely limits the quality of preschool-age children's reasoning and problem solvingo In induction, we derive general principles from particular examples.o in deduction, we use general principles to predict particular outcomeso 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- EGOCENTRISMo 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- IRREVERSIBILITYo irreversibility - the notion that preschoolers cannot mentally reverse their transductive sequences of thoughto significant liability in problem solving during this period- REASONING IN SPECIFIC CONTENT DOMAINSo 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 collectionso 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 lifeo 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 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 - Number: Piaget thought that conservation of numbers didn’t 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.- Countingo To give a child credit for counting ability,
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