An example of this process is when a child develops a schema for a bird. The child later see’s a plane and assumes that it is a bird therefore assimilating the plane to his/her bird schema. Once the child has been corrected and informed that the plane is not a bird but a plane, the child can develop a new schema for the plane and has therefore accommodated for the new schema and has reached cognitive harmony, equilibrium.
According to Piaget, the variant cognitive structures and invariant functions, can be broken down into stages of intellectual development whereby the child moves through each stage in sequence and at the approximate ages Piaget describes for each stage. The speed at which children move through these stages is influenced by the biologically determined maturational process, a process which cannot be hurried as the child has to be maturationally ready for each stage.
Piaget names the first stage in this development as the Sensorimotor stage which occurs in babies and children from the age of birth until two years old. According to Piaget, the child experiences the world through immediate perceptions and physical activity only, without any thought as we know it.
It is not until the child is around eight months old that it has any concept of object permanence. An understanding that objects continue to exist even when they are not visible. Prior to this, the child’s thinking is dominated by the ‘here and now’ – a stage which Piaget refers to as pre object permanence. Once a child is able to anticipate the future and think also about the past, the sensorimotor stage is over.
The second stage in Piaget’s theory on Cognitive development is called the Preoperational stage and occurs within children aged two years up to seven years old. It is the transition to operational thinking. (‘Operation’ as discussed above) The child is now capable of language development and symbolic thought although the childs’ intellectual capabilities are still dominated by perceptions ie. his or hers.
Piaget illustrated that there were three stages of limitations to development of the preoperational stage;
Firstly, Egocentrism which is an inability to see an object or situation from anything but one’s own point of view. For example, a little girl will say she has a sister but will deny that her sister has a sister.
Secondly, Centration, whereby the child may focus upon one feature of the environment, while ignoring others, however relevant. This is demonstrated in Piagets theory of Conservation. Conservation is an understanding that objects remain the same in relation to some fundamental characteristic such as number, mass or volume, even though there are changes in shape or arrangement. Piaget states that preoperational children cannot grasp the concept of conservation.
Thirdly, Irreversibility, which is when conservation experiments show the inability of preoperational children to work backwards mentally.
The third stage of Piagets theory on Cognitive development is the Concrete Operations stage which occurs in children aged seven to eleven years old. The main features of this stage are the acquisition of reversible thinking and the ability to decentre. Children confronted with conservation tasks were now capable of understanding the concept of invariance and that it can be reversed. Their thinking is no longer dominated by one feature of the situation. According to the findings of Piaget the understanding of conservation takes place in a definite order; conservation of number is capable by age six to seven and conservation of volume is capable at eleven and twelve years.
During the Concrete Operations stage, the child is less egocentric and is able to handle concepts such as classification, the ability to group objects together logically in terms of their common characteristics and seriation, the ability to arrange things in order.
The child can manipulate and experiment with real objects in order to solve problems logically but still has difficulty dealing with verbal problems.
In Piaget’s fourth and final stage, Formal Operations, which he states occurs in children age eleven and upwards, Piaget claims that the child now has the ability to reason in the abstract without having to rely on concrete objects or events. S/He is able to solve problems systematically testing out propositions and consider their interrelatedness.
Piaget is clear in that he believes that all of these stages of cognitive development occur at around the ages he has specified, although he makes exceptions for factors such as intelligence, cultural background and socio-economic factors.
- To what extent are Piaget’s findings supported by other Psychological studies?
Piaget has been supported and criticised by many psychologists, mostly for his methodology. The primary criticisms lie in that Piaget used the clinical interview method but had no set questions nor standard method of presentation and this was left open to interpretation that the children could have been ‘led’ to their answers.
Bryant in particular claimed that the design of the tasks eg. The conservation task, was too difficult. He claimed that should Piaget have reworded his questions and used more realistic examples the children would have demonstrated more capability. Bryant believed that Piaget had underestimated the language and memory skills of the children and that a slight rewording would have been less intimidating and produced more likely results.
Piaget used the Conservation Task in preoperational children. The task involved showing a child a sequence of buttons spread out equally in two rows. The child is asked if they agree that both rows contain the same amount of buttons. The child agrees. One row is then left the same whilst the other row is bunched together. Although the child can see that no buttons have been removed, when asked again if the rows contain the same amount of buttons, the child disagrees. This is Piaget’s example of how preoperational children are incapable of conservation.
In 1974 McGarrigle and Donaldson claimed that they disproved Piaget’s theory. They used a ‘naughty teddy’ to re-arrange the buttons as in Piaget’s Conservation task, but found that once the task was given a game-like status, over 70% of the children taking part gave the right answer. But then in a formal conservation task the same amount of children were just as likely to get it wrong as to get it right.
There have been many explanations for why the two studies varied so.
Greco argued that the children gave the wrong answers in the formal conservation test because small children do not understand the word ‘more’ in the same way that psychologists do. The child could recognise that each row had the same number of buttons in it but due to one row being longer than the other, that row had ‘more’. ‘More’ suggesting ‘more length’ than volume.
Rose and Blank also came up with an explanation as to why McGarrigle and Donaldson’s study differed so from the findings of Piaget. They said that a child is only ever asked the same question twice if they have previously answered the question wrong. In answering the second question wrong they are presuming that they are right. Here the child uses its social knowledge rather than cognitive abilities.
McGarrigle suggested that the child may have assumed that the experimenter (an important adult) had rearranged the buttons therefore, they must be right.
Althought many psychologists have criticised Piaget, Eames et al failed to replicate the ‘naughty teddy’ findings and suggested that the experimenters may have been responsible for the discrepancy.
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Outline one other theory of cognitive development.
Piaget has been supported and criticiced by many psychologists, but the two most recognised supporters are Vygotsky and Bruner.
Vygotsky viewed the importance of the role of other more knowledgeable people in a child’s cognitive development. According to Vygotsky, children acquire the mechanisms of thinking and learning as a result of social interactions. He believed that an ‘expert’ person, whether experienced older child or adult provides a framework or scaffold of information and learning that the child can feed from. The adult provides the props and verbal promts in order for the child to develop.
Vygotsky’s theory is characterised by the importance of language. Through social interaction the child develops language and through the development of language, cognitive development occurs. Language allows the individual to organise his/her perceptions and thought processes.
Vygotsky stated that there were three major elements in the process towards fully developed cognitive ability;
1. The child responds purely through action. No language or thought is required
2. The child reflects upon their own thought processes through langage and uses strategies such as talking themselves through a problem.
3. Understanding is reached through social settings ie. Parents, Teachers, Peers, etc.
According to Vygotsky every child has a zone of proximal development and it is through scaffolding and social settings that a child is able to reach cognitive ability. The zone of proximal development is the area between a child’s actual development and the potential development level which is achieved by the help of adults and peers.
Unlike Piaget, Vygotsky did not believe that children should be ‘ready’ before they are able to progress cognitively.
D. Compare and contrast the two theories including their application to education.
Like Piaget, Vygotsky claimed that children developed cognition through a series of stages, and that cognition is dependent on stimulation from the environment, social influences and social interactions.
Piaget strongly believes that cognitive development follows an inherited sequence of stages whereby interactions with the environment are necessary to develop further. He believes that although these factors do have a small significance, cognition is largely unaffected by environmental and cultural differences. Knowledge is acquired through interactions within the environment, represented internally which develop operations on the environment which are internalised and organised into schemata. Piaget believes that experience preceeds language as well as expression such as symbolic play, drawing, etc. Language is just a cognitive tool used for thinking and reflecting.
In contrast to Piaget, Vygotsky places a high emphasis on language and social interactions for the development of cognitive ability. Vygotsky claims that language is a social phenomena, as is thinking a cognitive phenomena.
Piaget does not believe that the child can go onto the next cognitive stage unless they are maturationally ready, whereas Vygotsky claims that using a childs zone of proximal development can help the child to mature cognitively faster.
In conclusion, although both Psychologists put forward theory’s which can be applied and agreed with regarding cognitive development of children. Both theory’s claim that cognitive development cannot be progressed without an external factor stimulating factor. Does development comes from a series of inbuilt stages which are completed via interactions within our environment, or is development stimulated from from external factors before we are necessarily cognitively ready?
These theories applied to the education of children have both been proven to work. It is apparent that within schools, if a stimulating environment is provided, children have shown to perform better and progress at faster rates with comparison to the previous methods of teaching – via rote in dull conservative class rooms. Class rooms that are bright and pasted with letters, words, pictures and photo’s, seating arrangements that encourage children to socialise and interact within themselves and tasks and lessons that are not just necessarily rote learning but involve play and experimentation. This is the modern day class room which includes aspects of both theories put forward by Piaget, Vygotsky and other psychologist alike.
Conclusively, the evidence suggests that both theories can be applied to cognitive child development and that the decision as to which one is right or wrong lies somewhere between the two.
Bibliography.
Introductory Psychology – Malim and Birch 1998 Macmillan Press
Foundations of Psychology – Nicky Hayes 1996 Thomas Nelson and Sons
