Lecture Notes and E-text notes for Unit 3, CHD2220 Piaget’s Preoperational Stage of Development (3-6 years old) • Before this was tertiary circular reactions or schemas which were all about movement and behavior. • “operational” refers to the logical systems of thought which emerge in middle childhood. • He emphasizes on children’s limitations rather than their strengths, very frustrating. • Piaget identified the end of the 2nd year of life as a major turning point in cognitive development marked by the advent of the symbolic function- the ability to use symbols to represent or stand for perceived objects and events. First symbols are mental images. • Deferred imitation: children observe the behavior of a model and imitate that behavior when the model is no longer present. • Symbolic or pretend play: children pretend that an object is something other than what it really is. It transforms virtually any situation into an unlimited world of make believe. • Research has identified a number of distinct cognitive skills required to initiate and sustain pretend play: • Shifting Context: performing routine behaviors outside of their typical setting. • Substituting objects: during the 3rd year children become able to transform any object into the props needed for their pretend play episodes and become less dependent on realistic props during the preschool years. • Substituting other agents for oneself: children use agents in their pretense, later in the 2nd year children use dolls in pretend play as passive agents and then later use them as active agents. • Sequencing and socialization of pretend episodes: children coordinate such acts into sequences of increasing length and complexity through the preschool years. Also they begin to incorporate behavioral patterns for agents reflecting conventional roles ex. police catch bad people • Mental images: internal representations of external objects or events enabling children to think about objects when they are not physically there. • The result of retracing is an image in the head. • This is a very slow and gradual process because some kids are not as explorative as others so they will have fewer images they can construct; also neglectand abuse can slow it down. • The child can integrate experiences from the past into the present to plan for the future. • The private and idiosyncratic nature of the symbolic function in young children limits their ability to communicate their thoughts to others making it challenging. The advent of preconcepts • Centration: the process of young children focusing their attention on minuteand inconsequential aspects of their experience; incapable of seeing the big picture. • The collection of images, derived from centrated perception, merge into preconcepts: disorganized, illogical representations of the child’s experiences. • Syncretism is the tendency for the brain of a child to give together all the bits and pieces of information which produces preconcepts. • They establish a foundation for the eventual emergence of logical concepts inthe subsequent stage of cognitive development • Emotions influence the quality of learning and the quality of perception. • Early preconcepts can get frozen or stuck from anxiety, fear, or surprise and will never get better. Everyone has certain phobia and we don’t understand why. Transductive reasoning: thinking with preconcepts • Induction: we derive general principles from particular examples. Ex. boy recognizing that teachers favored girls in class might induce general principle that girls are teachers pets • Deduction: we use general principles to predict outcomes. • Piaget believed that preoperational children cannot think inductively or deductively. • Instead they think by transduction, reasoning within the unsystematic collection of images which constitute their preconcepts. • Egocentrism: the child’s inability to conceptualize the perspective of other individuals. They are unable to see the world as others see it. • Three Mountain Problem: children between 4-12 yrs. old were shown a 3d model of a mountain scene. He also placed a doll in different locations and told them to draw in its point of view. Most children couldn’t and drew the same exact picture of the doll. • Children under 8 yrs. old identified their own view as that of the doll but later modified experiments have shown that children as young as 3 were able to accomplish it. • Irreversibility: the notion that preschoolers cannot mentally reverse their transductive sequences of thought. This is why it is hard to teach math to them. • Irreversibility of thought can be a significant liability in problem solving suchas they take things apart but can’t put it back together or find their way to a location but can’t find their way back 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- a class must be smaller than any more inclusive class in which it is contained. • Piaget asked children to sort geometric forms into size, shape, and color he found a three- stage developmental progression: • Stage 1: Children (5-8 years old and younger) had no overall plan for sorting,but produced graphic collections, or pictures made with objects. Putting objects intoa form ex a house • Stage 2: Children (6-8 years old) - 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. • Stage 3: children (later childhood) – understood the relationship the rule of class inclusion. • More recent research supports the idea that systematic classification of objects comes much earlier in development than Piaget believed. There is evidence of children sorting by 2nd year. • Language labels are one of the important elements in a child’s emerging ability to classify objects 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: critical point in development when children become aware that
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