Piaget

Piaget

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  JEAN PIAGET- COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT DR YASHASREEPOUDWAL K.J. SOMAIYA HOSPITAL
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  INTRODUCTION • Jean Piaget(1896-1980) was one of the 20th century’s most influential researchers in the area of developmental psychology. • He originally trained in the areas of biology and philosophy and considered himself a “genetic epistemologist.” (genetic= development, epistemology = study of knowledge) • Piaget wanted to know how children learned through their development in the study of knowledge. • Piaget’s theory is based on the idea that the developing child builds cognitive structures (schemes used to understand and respond to physical environment). • He believed the child’s cognitive structure increased with development. • based on his observations of his own three children.
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  • Born: August9, 1896 Neuchâtel, Switzerland • Died: Sept. 16, 1980 ( Age 84) Geneva, Switzerland. • Education: Received Ph.D., from University of Neuchatel in 1918. • Wife: Married to Valentine Chatenay in 1923 • Children: 3 children namely Jacqueline, Lucienne and Laurent whose intellectual development from infancy to language was studied by Piaget. Jean Piaget (1896-1980): History
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  o The termcognition is derived from the Latin word “cognoscere” which means “to know” or “to recognise” or “to conceptualise”. o It refers to the mental processes an organism learns, remembers, understands, perceives, solves problems and thinks about a body of information. What is Cognition?
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  KEY CONCEPTS:
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  SCHEMA • an internalrepresentation of the world. • A schema describes both the mental and physical actions involved in understanding and knowing. • mental or cognitive structures which enables a person to adapt and to organise the environment. Schemas are categories of knowledge that help us to interpret and understand the world. • Piaget called the schema the basic building block of intelligent behavior – a way of organizing knowledge (includes both a category of knowledge and the process of obtaining that knowledge). • For example, at birth the schema of a baby is reflexive in nature such as sucking and grasping. The sucking reflex is a schema and the infant will suck on whatever is put in its mouth such as a nipple or a finger. •
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  ASSIMILATION • using anexisting schema to deal with a new object or situation. The process of taking in new information into our previously existing schema’s is known as assimilation. • A child sees a Zebra for the first time and immediately calls it a Donkey. Thus, the child has assimilated into his schema that this animal is a Donkey. • To the child, the object (Zebra) has all the characteristics of a Donkey– it fits in his Donkey schema – so the child concludes that the object is a Donkey. The child has integrated the object (Zebra) into his Donkey schema.
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  ACCOMODATION • Another partof adaptation involves changing or altering our existing schemas in light of new information, a process known as accommodation. • Accommodation involves altering existing schemas, or ideas, as a result of new information or new experiences. New schemas may also be developed during this process. • The boy who had assimilated the Zebra as a Donkey will eventually accommodate more information and thus realize the different characteristics between a Zebra and a Donkey. The child will learn that the Donkey is not a Donkey but a Zebra, an accommodated ability.
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  EQUILIBRATION • Piaget believedthat cognitive development did not progress at a steady rate, but rather in leaps and bounds. • Equilibrium is occurs when a child's schemas can deal with most new information through assimilation. • However, an unpleasant state of disequilibrium occurs when new information cannot be fitted into existing schemas (assimilation). • Equilibration is a balance between assimilation and accommodation. Disequilibrium is an imbalance between assimilation and accommodation • . Equilibration helps explain how children are able to move from one stage of thought into the next.
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  Assimilation Equilibrium Accommodat ion Disequilibriu m Equilibration
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  ADAPTATION • Assimilation andaccommodation are the two sides of adaptation, Piaget’s term for what most of us would call learning through which awareness of the outside world is internalized. • Although one may predominate at any one moment, they are two sides and inseparable and exist in a dialectical relationship
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  Cognitive Structure Organisation Adaptation Assimilation Accommodation
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  STAGES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT 1.Sensorimotor Stage 2. Preoperational Stage 3. Concrete Operational Stage 4. Formal Operational Stage
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  General Characteristicsof thisStages: These four stages have been found to have the following characteristics: 1. Each stage is a structured whole and in a state of equilibrium. 2. Each stage derives from the previous stage and incorporate and transform to prepare for the next and no going back. 3. The stages follow an invariant sequence. There is no skipping stages. 4. The stages are universal. Culture does not impact the stages. Children everywhere go through the same stages no matter what their cultural background is. 5. Each stage is a coming into being. There is a gradual progression from stage to stage.
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  1. SENSORIMOTOR STAGE The first stage of Piaget’s theory starts from birth to approximately age 2 and is centered on the infant trying to make sense of the world. During this stage, the child's knowledge is limited to sensory perceptions and simple motor activities. e.g. looking, sucking, grasping.  It can be divided into 6 separate sub-stages.
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  1.Reflexes (0-1 month): •In the first month of life, infants’ behaviors reflect innate reflexes—automatic responses to particular stimuli. • The child understands the environment purely through inborn reflexes such as suckling, grasping, knee-jerking. These are the reactive functions that infants essentially exit the womb with. These behaviors are typically, quickly reinforced to provide food when hungry, grab things in the environment, and pull away from potentially threatening sensations. For instance, if you put a nipple or pacifier in or near a newborn’s mouth, she will automatically suck on it. • The infant soon begins to modify some reflexes to better accommodate to the environment—for instance, by learning to distinguish between a nipple and the surrounding areas of a breast or bottle.
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  2. Primary CircularReactions (1-4 months): • It involves coordinating sensation and new schemas. • In the first few months of life, infants’ behaviors are focused almost exclusively on their own bodies (in Piaget’s terminology, the behaviors are primary) and are repeated over and over again (i.e., they are circular). • Infants also begin to refine their reflexes and combine them into more complex actions. For example: A child may such his or her thumb by accident and then later intentionally repeat the action. These actions are repeated because the infant finds them pleasurable.
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  3. Secondary CircularReactions (4-8 months): • In this stage the child become more aware of and more responsive to the outside world (their behaviors become secondary), • they begin to notice that their behaviors can have interesting effects on the objects around them. • The child becomes more focused on the world and begins to intentionally repeat an action in order to trigger a response in the environment. For example: A child will purposefully pick up a toy in order to put it in his or her mouth.
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  4. Coordination ofReactions (8-12 months): • The child starts to show clearly intentional actions. The child may also combine schemas in order to achieve a desired effect. • After repeatedly observing that certain actions lead to certain consequences, infants gradually acquire knowledge of cause-effect relationships. For example: 1. A child might realize that a rattle will make a sound when shaken. • Another acquisition at this sub-stage is object permanence, means knowing that an object still exists, even if it is hidden. According to Piaget, Object Permanence is a child's awareness or understanding that objects continue to exist even though they cannot be seen or heard.
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  5. Tertiary CircularReactions (12-18 months): • Piaget believed this marks the developmental starting point for curiosity and interest in novelty. • Beginning sometime around their first birthday, infants show increasing flexibility and creativity in their behaviors, and their experimentation with objects often leads to new outcomes. .
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  6. Early RepresentationalThought (18-24 months): • Piaget proposed that in the latter half of the second year, young children develop symbolic thought, the ability to represent and think about objects and events in terms of internal, mental entities, or symbols. • To some degree, mental prediction and planning replace overt trial-and-error as growing toddlers experiment and attempt to solve problems. • The capacity for mental representation is seen in the emergence of deferred imitation, the ability to recall and copy another person’s behaviors
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  2. Preoperational Stage (2to 7 yrs) (Toddler and Early Childhood) • This stage begins when the child starts to use symbols and language. This is a period of developing language and concepts. So, the child is capable of more complex mental representations (i.e. words and images). • He is still unable to use ‘operations’, i.e. logical mental rules, such as the rules of arithmetic. It is divided into two sub-stages: 1. Preconceptual stage (2 to 4 years): Here, cognitive development becomes increasingly dominated by symbolic activity. The child can use symbols to stand for actions; a toy doll stands for a real baby. Language also develops during this stage. 2. Intuitive stage (5 to 7 years): This stage is characterized by the way in which children base their knowledge on what they feel or sense to be true, yet they cannot explain the underlying principles behind what they feel or sense.
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  • The followingare the key features of this stage: 1. Egocentrism: The child’s thoughts and communications are typically egocentric (i.e. about themselves or his/her point of view) E.g.:” If I can’t see you, you can’t see me!”. It is the inability to see the world through anyone else’s eyes except on his own. It is well explained by Piaget as Three Mountain Task.
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  2. Animism: Treatinginanimate objects as living ones. E.g.: Children bathing, dressing and feeding their dolls as if they are alive.
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  3. Centration: Itrefers to the tendency to focus on only one aspect of a situation, problem or object, and so cannot see the big picture. Centration is noticed in conservation: the awareness that altering a substance's appearance does not change its basic properties. Children at this stage are unaware of conservation. They are unable to grasp the concept that a certain liquid be the same volume regardless of the container shape.
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  3. Concrete OperationalStage (7 to 12 yrs of age) (Childhood and earlyAdolescence) characterized by the appropriate use of logic. Important processes during this stage are: 1. Seriation: the ability to sort objects in an order according to size, shape or any other characteristic. Eg.: if given different- shaded objects, they may make a colour gradient. 2. Transitivity: the ability to recognize logical relationships among elements in a serial order. Eg.: if A is taller than B and B is taller than C, then A must be taller than C. 3. Classification: the ability to name and identify sets of objects according to appearance, size or other characteristic, including the idea that one set of objects can include another
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  4. Decentering: wherethe child takes into account multiple aspects of a problem to solve it. For example, the child will no longer perceive an exceptionally wide but short cup to contain less than a normally-wide, taller cup. 5. Reversibility: the child understands that numbers or objects can be changed, then returned to their original state 6. Conservation: understanding that quantity, length or number of items is unrelated to the arrangement or appearance of the object or items. 7. Elimination of Egocentrism: the ability to view things from another's perspective. However, in this stage child can solve problems that apply to actual (concrete) objects or events only, and not abstract concepts or hypothetical tasks.
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  4. Formal OperationalStage (from12yrsandup)(Adolescence andAdulthood) This is the most complete stage of development. In this stage, the individual’s 1. thought becomes increasingly flexible and abstract, i.e., can carry out systematic experiments. 2. ability to systematically solve a problem in a logical and methodical way. 3. Understand that nothing is absolute; everything is relative. 4. Skills such as logical thought, deductive reasoning, and systematic planning develop inductive as well as deductive logic. 5. Understand that the rules of any games or social system are developed by man by mutual agreement and hence could be changed or modified. 6. The child’s way of thinking is at its most advanced, although the knowledge it has to work with will change.
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  APPLICATIONS • Jean Piaget’stheories are imbedded into the school system in the sense that the curriculum is based on his stage theory. • The curriculum is designed to teach students at the first stage and progressively teach new learning to change the schemas in order to move students through each stage.