Chapter 11 Paiget and Beyond Test 4 Study Guide o Piaget s theory emphasizes the development of more advanced reasoning o Studies of learning and strategic thinking emphasize growth in problem solving skills o Models of information processing emphasize changes in the sequential processing of information o The Concrete Operational Period Age 7 12 Concrete operations the third stage of cognitive development according to Piaget when mental activities become more logical with respect to actual objects and materials Conservation the understanding that some characteristics of objects don t change despite changes in form or appearance Children s thinking is qualitatively different from the preoperational period o Hallmarks of Concrete Operational Thinking Five interrelated competencies Classification the ability to divide or sort objects into different sets and subsets and to consider their interrelationships Class inclusion a logical operation that recognizes that a class or group can be part of a larger group o Attribute blocks in math classes help learn the above TWO Seriation the ability to arrange items in a sequenced order according to particular properties o Require children to be able to recognize two way relations Transitive inference builds on seriation requires that two relations are combines to derive a third relation Reversibility the understanding that relations can be returned to their original state by reversing operations as long as nothing has been added or taken away o Key to understanding conservation Horizontal decalage differences in performance on conceptually related Piagetian tasks o Experiences that Foster Advances in Concrete Operations Piaget believed that concrete operational thinking is a natural outgrowth of children s opportunities to manipulate materials and objects and to experiment with these materials He did not think that logical operations needed to be explicitly taught Other researchers find that concrete operations can be fostered by particular experiences Formal schooling fosters concrete operation thinking Math reversibility and transitive inference Language Arts class inclusion Piaget s overarching goal was to describe the structure or organization of children s thinking in different developmental periods More recently others have sought to understand how children process info o Learning and the Development of Strategic Thinking The Microgenetic Approach Changes in strategic thinking within a session and across sessions are documented using a research strategy called microgenetic analysis o Research strategy that involves frequent detailed observations of behavior Microgenetic analyses have been applied to a wide variety of domains including mathematical reasoning scientific thinking and memory Research Findings In contrast to Piaget s stage like theory microgenetic studies show that individual children s behavior is much more variable at any given time Individual variability in performance is greatest during periods of rapid learning In general as children learn their strategic thinking is characterized by a greater reliance on more advanced strategies improved choices among strategies and improved execution of strategies over time Information Processing o Info processing approach provides an additional perspective to understanding cognitive development in middle childhood o Researchers are studying how children come to attend to relevant info retain the info and then use that info to reason and solve problems o Processing Speed Ways to study processing speed and accuracy Visual matching Cross out Kail and Ferrer found that children s processing speed showed greater improvements in middle childhood than adolescence Similar to the pattern of development of gray matter in the temporal region of the brain Development of most info processing abilities is especially rapid during the school years and tends to plateau in adolescence o Working Memory Conscious short term representations of what a person is actively thinking about at a given time short term memory Can be measured with the digit span test a research procedure in which people are asked to repeat in order a series of rapidly presented items 2 YO 2 items 5 YO 4 items 7 YO 5 items 9 YO 6 items Adults 7 items Chunking helps remember more items such as phone numbers Can be seen as 10 items individually or 3 items when chunked Info that is mentally encoded and stored potentially with no time limits o Long Term Memory Different forms Declarative memory memory of facts Procedural memory memory of complex motor skills Verbatim memory detailed memories of specific events Gist memory a generalized rather than specific memory of common occurrences Several factors influence whether or not a piece on info held in working memory is moved to long term memory Length of time info is actively attended to Steady increases in memory found between age 6 and 18 with sharper increases between 6 and 11 Memory Strategies Mental or behavioral activities that can improve recall and recognition of material Simplest is rehearsal or repetition Practice distributed over several days is more effective than cramming Written notes can also improve memory Explicitly relating new information to prior knowledge increases the likelihood that new material is remembered Organize pictures or words into meaningful categories o Creates chunks and category labels act as retrieval cues Microgenetic Analyses of Memory Strategies Recent microgenetic analysis of individual children s performance suggest that the development of strategies is not the result of slow steady growth A memory that is a distortion of an actual experience or a confabulation of an imagined one Deese Roediger McDermott DRM procedure an experimental task that demonstrates the creation of false memories Misinformation paradigm research that demonstrates that memories can be changed when misleading information is provided after the fact The wording of questions can create and modify memories over time Gist memories are more likely to be distorted Researchers are studying ways to improve interview techniques to decrease the likelihood of distortions or false memories Becoming more important as children are being called to the stand in high stakes legal proceedings False memories are affected by the amount of time that transpired between the event and the interview the number of times the child is interviewed and by having a highly biased interviewer Lamb devised a