Course 3506
Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget was a Swiss researcher. His earliest academic work
was in the field of biology. He gradually developed an interest
in epistemology -- the study of knowledge. Piaget probed the
ideas of what it means to know and how we come to know. Part of
this he did through studying his own children from infancy. In
effect, he examined how they made sense of the world around them
-- how they built their knowledge of the world. Without an
explicit intention to do so, Piaget found himself studying, then
becoming acknowledged as an expert in, human development. Piaget
became convinced that children experience the world differently
than adults. He thought that this was not due to a mere lack of
experience, but because children think in qualitatively different
ways than adults. He drew these thoughts together into a theory
of stages of development.
Piaget identified four main stages of development:
- Sensorimotor Intelligence (0 – 2 years)
– during this time span, a child is primarily
concerned with motor behaviour. The young child is
pre-verbal during most of this time and so lacks the use
of signs and symbols to mediate thought and is, in fact,
incapable of conceptual thought. The young child deals
with objects as objects, but has no internal
representation of the objective world when not
experiencing it. The notion that things exist when the
child cannot see them is foreign to a child in this
stage. It is not just a matter of "out of sight
– out of mind" but more "out of sight
– out of existence." Piaget said that children
in the sensorimotor stage lack the concept of object
permanence. This idea slowly develops during
this stage accompanied by primitive concepts of space,
time, causality, and intentionality.
As a child slowly gains control of his or her motor
capabilities, connections will be made between actions
and results. Initially, an infant can do very little, so
most of the things going on in his or her world are
caused by others. Even at the early stages of seemingly
random waving of arms and legs, a child may make contact
with an object and see something interesting happen as a
result. For instance, the toy bear suspended above a
baby's crib may bounce up and down if the baby's foot
contacts it. At first, no connection is likely to be
made. However, if this happens several times, the child
may start to realize, "Hey. I made
that happen." Thus the seeds for a concept of
causality are sown along with the important business of
learning to use one's limbs effectively. Thus motor
development becomes more than a matter of locomotion. The
bases for cognitive concepts are formed alongside the
abilities to grasp, throw and crawl. Really, the
development during the first year or so of life is
nothing short of phenomenal. The change from a helpless
babe-in-arms to a little person who can walk, say some
words and scoop up food on a spoon and then get it to the
mouth will never be equalled in any other short period of
a person's lifespan.
- Preoperational thought (2 – 7 years) –
This stage sees the beginning of conceptual intelligence.
Children begin to use signs and symbols (mainly words and
images) to mediate their adaptation to the world.
Vocabulary explodes as words are learned. Grammar is also
internalized during this period. Without anyone giving
them explicit instruction, children learn the basic
grammars of their languages. In English this may be
noticed as children learn the rules for regular verbs. A
child will pick up the convention that the past tense of
a regular verb is formed by adding "ed" to the
end of the verb. Of course, a child at this stage does
this without any technical terminology to describe the
process and learns in terms of sounds, not letters. The
learning becomes evident when the child applies the
regular verb rule to an irregular verb. While the child
can quite correctly say "I looked for my shoe",
she will also say "That girl hitted me" or
"The dog bited him." There is some
social-arbitrary knowledge to be picked up about
irregular verbs, but an amazing piece of pattern
recognition and abstraction has been accomplished. And
every child learns this for herself or himself.
The development of memory shows that children in this
stage are starting to form internal representations of
the world and therefore are less tied to immediate
experience than they were during the sensorimotor period.
However, during the preoperational period children make
no distinction between the general and the particular.
They use a type of logic that seems to fall somewhere
between deductive and inductive logic. It is called
"transductive logic" and
consists of reasoning from the particular to the
particular. An obvious and clear deductive logical
argument will mean nothing to a child during this stage.
Children in the preoperational thought stage have
difficulty knowing whether two objects seen at different
times are the same object or two different ones. For
instance, during a drive in the country a child may see a
Holstein cow in a field. A few miles later another
Holstein may be seen and the child may think that it is
the same cow. A type of intuitive thought develops during
this stage, but children lack the notion of conservation
– the notion that quantities do not change if
nothing is added to or taken away from them. For
instance, a child who has not developed conservation may
see a quantity of milk poured from a short, wide glass
into a narrow, tall glass. The child will likely conclude
that there is more milk in the tall glass than there was
in the short glass. A child at this stage tends to centre
on one dimension of a situation and reason about it only
with the information drawn from that dimension. This
tendency is called perceptual centration
and to some extent we never entirely grow out of it.
Another roadblock to logical thought for children at this
stage is the phenomenon of egocentrism.
The technical use of this term is similar to the way that
we use it to refer to adults but it is not quite the
same. Egocentrism in children shows up in their belief
that what they can see, anyone else can see. A child
looking at a book may be sitting across the room from a
parent. When the child sees a picture of an unfamiliar
animal in a book, he may point at it and say,
"Daddy, what's this?" oblivious to the fact
that the parent cannot see the picture and so couldn't
possibly answer the question. This phenomenon also shows
up in what is called parallel play where
children play beside each other, but don't actually
interact. They have the belief that they are playing
together, but there is no social interaction until,
perhaps, one of them decides to use a toy that is being
used by the other! this pattern of play is common during
the preoperational stage.
- Concrete Operational Thought (7 – 11 years)
– In Piagetian terminology, an "operation"
is a mental act which was formerly an action with reversible
properties. Another way of saying this is that
an operation is an internal action which can return to
its starting point. For instance, in this stage children
develop an awareness that a number of quarters and a
number of dimes may be grouped together and counted as a
number of coins. The process is reversible because the
total group of coins can be separated again into a group
of quarters and a group of dimes.
Another capability that develops during the concrete
operational stage is decentration. Thus,
children become capable of thinking about more than one
aspect of a situation at a time and so can reason that
yes, this glass is taller than that one, but that one is
wider than this one, so maybe they hold the same amount
of juice. In this way, children are able to apply mental
operations to problems such as conservation and reason
that quantities are the same when nothing has been added
to or taken from them. During this stage, operations are
carried out on concrete objects and
children start to reason in ways that seem logical to
adults. This is a very "hands-on" sort of
reasoning which can be heavily dependent on the use of
objects to reason with. In schools, this type of
reasoning is supported through the provision of
manipulatives.
- Formal Operational Thought (11 – 16 years)
– In this stage, children gain a freedom from the
need for direct perception and action. They are able to
use their new logical powers to consider hypothetical
situations. Mental experiments can be carried
out. For instance, a child can be presented with the
verbal problem: George is taller than Fred; George is
shorter than Bert; who is the shortest of the three? At
the concrete operational stage, a child would have to
make a drawing or in some other way use concrete
materials to aid the thinking process. At the formal
operational stage, a child could figure the problem out
in the head. Also at this stage, adolescents can consider
hypothetical situations which may be contrary to fact and
still reason accurately about the situations. At earlier
stages, children would be overwhelmed by the facts and
thus be unable to consider the hypothetical situation.
Another feature of formal operational thought is the
ability to design systematic plans for investigating
phenomena. Piaget studied how children approached
investigating what determined the speed with which a
pendulum would swing. Variables that could be manipulated
were the weight of the pendulum bob, the length of the
pendulum, the height from which the weight is released,
and the amount of push given to the weight as it is
released. Children in the formal operational stage tended
to test the effects of one variable at a time, while
those at the stage of concrete operations tended to make
changes to the values of two or more variables from one
test to another.
It is important to realize that the ages associated with the
stages of development are only suggestive and not
normative. There will be variation among children in
when they move into different stages and there will also be
variation within any given child for development of subcomponents
of particular stages. The value of the stages is NOT to label
children as being in some way deficient. It is to help us to
understand why children act and reason as they do. In this way we
can avoid placing requirements upon them that they cannot meet.
Piaget's main argument was that the order of the stages is the
same for all children.
Piaget was a constructivist. He believed that we don't simply
"imbibe" knowledge, but that we construct it. Knowledge
is constructed from our active experience. Piaget talked about
three kinds of knowledge that people construct:
Physical knowledge
We experience the physical world around us through our senses.
We touch, taste, listen to and so on, the objects that we
encounter. We construct knowledge of the world from our physical,
sensory experience through a process called empirical
abstraction. From the experience we build
concepts. Some objects are hard, some are wet, some are loud.
These concepts are abstract, but they are rooted in our physical
experience.
Logico-mathematical knowledge
We can use concepts to think about the physical world. we also
use them to think about other concepts. This sort of thinking
leads to constructing and organizing patterns of ideas. The
knowledge built from such thinking is said to be logico-mathematical
knowledge. When children learn to think about arithmetic
properties of objects, they can come to understand concepts such
as addition and subtraction. (Note: this is a process of thought,
not the memorization of tables of arithmetic "facts.")
The physical properties of objects that may be used in exploring
the concepts are unimportant. For instance, it matters little if
a child learns addition through manipulating pennies, buttons or
toothpicks. It is the mental manipulation that is important.
Logico-mathematical knowledge is said to be produced through a
process of reflexive abstraction, where
"reflexive" is used in the sense of "turned back
on itself." Thus, while empirical abstraction is tied to
physical experience, reflexive abstraction need not be. A child
may learn basic number concepts from physical objects, but go on
to think about divisibility at an abstract level leading to
concepts such as odd and even numbers, numbers divisible by five,
and prime numbers.
Social-arbitrary knowledge
This is knowledge that must be learned from other people. It
is culturally defined and may vary greatly from one culture to
another. A very simple example is the different use of the thumb
when "counting on your fingers" in Europe and in North
America. What to say when you are introduced to a stranger, how
to look at an authority figure and other social conventions are
also examples of social-arbitrary knowledge. It is very important
for teachers in a multi-cultural society to have an awareness of
some of the differences in social-arbitrary knowledge that their
students will bring to the classroom.
Return to the Developmental Theory
Page
Return to the Course 3506 Home Page