Ch 9 Cognitive and Language Development in Early Development Piaget s Preoperational Stage of Development Piaget s Preoperational Stage 3 6 years Operational logical thinking that emerges in middle childhood Preoperational preschoolers inability to think logically advanced forms of thinking The Symbolic Function 2nd year children start using symbolic function Symbolic Function the ability to use symbols to represent or stand for perceived objects and events 3rd year Starts to become deferred imitation symbolic pretend play mental images and language 1 Deferred Imitation children observe the behavior of a model and imitate that behavior when the model is no longer present Maintains behavior over long periods of time and only uses the behavior when it is adaptive to do so 2 Symbolic or Pretend Play children pretend than an object is something other than it really is Symbolic play transforms virtually any situation into an unlimited world of make believe for preschool children with pervasive effects on their social and emotional development Shifting Context performing routine behaviors outside their typical setting Substituting Objects children often substitute one object for another in pretend play Substituting Other Agents for Oneself children using agents in their pretense 3rd year doll becomes own agent as the child pretends that the doll initiates and sustains actions Sequencing and Socialization of Pretend Episodes pretense begins with single acts but children coordinate acts into sequences of increasing length and complexity preschool years Patterns begin to reflect CONVENTIONAL ROLES 3 Mental Images internal representations of external objects and events Gives the ability to think about objects even when they are not physically there and events before during and after their occurrence ALL 3 FORMS OF SYMBOLIC FUNCTION EXPRESS PRIVATE AND IDIOSYNCRATIC MEANINGS DERIVED FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCES The Advent of Pre Concepts Centration preschoolers tending to focus their attention on minute and inconsequential aspects of their experience Centrated perception results in unsystematic samplings of isolated bits of information from any given experience Preconcepts Piaget s suggestion that these collections of images derived from centrated perception merge into disorganized illogical representations of the child s experiences 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 According to Piaget the disorganized and illogical nature of preconcepts severely limits the quality of preschool age children s reasoning and problem solving Induction derive general principles from particular examples Deduction use general principles to predict particular outcomes Piaget believed that preoperational children are incapable of thinking inductively or deductively Transduction reasoning within the unsystematic collection of images which constitute their preconceptions HOW TO DEAL WITH TRANSDUCTIVE REASONING provide lots of repetitive experience with real objects and events reduce complexity to bite size pieces and encourage exploration Egocentrism Irreversibility Egocentrism major limitations of preoperational thought child s inability to conceptualize the perspective of other individuals o Difficulty seeing the world as others see it Piaget s Experiment 3 Mountain Problem o Children shown images of mountains and then asked children where dolls point of view is o Children use their own vantage point to describe Irreversibility the notion that preschoolers cannot mentally reverse their transductive sequences of though Significant liability in problem solving during this period explaining why preschoolers have a way of taking things apart but not being able to put them back together finding their way to distant locations but not being able to find their way back and climbing to the top of structures but not being able to climb back down Reasoning in Specific Content Domains 1 Classification refers to the tendency to group objects on the basis of particular sets of characteristics Class Inclusion adult classifications are based on the idea that a class must be smaller than any more inclusive class in which it is contained Piaget s 3 stage developmental progression 1 Children 5 years have no overall plan for sorting and produce graphic collections pictures made with objects 2 Children 6 8 years sort in a more organized way producing series of collections of objects based on a different dimension of similarity non graphic collections children are not able to classify on two dimensions simultaneously 3 Children in later childhood to early adolescence understand the relationship of the rule of class inclusion Children at this stage successfully classified using multiple dimensions for example separating small red squares large from large blue circles Language labels are one of the important elements in a child s emerging ability to classify objects in the environment 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 Critical point reached when children become aware that things exist in specific amounts and are only changed when addition subtraction are carried out QUANTITY NUMBER COUNTING principles Piaget studied via CONSERVATION certain things remain unchanged despite transformations changes in other attributes preschoolers have difficulty Piaget s experiment with beans showed children s understanding of number Young preoperational children show no understanding of 1 1 correspondence Conservation of number not achieved until concrete operational stage 7 8 years old Gelman with MICE experiment preschoolers were sensitive to changes in number of task was kept simple Just because a child can conserve quantity and number does not mean that they can count Must be able to systematically assign numbers to items in an array using the following five 1 The one to one principle One and only one distinctive number name must be assigned to each item in the array No item should be counted more than once and no number used more than once 2 The stable order principle Number names must be assigned in a stable repeatable order This principle is being followed as long
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