Stages
Sensori-motor (0-2 years)
The child lacks
internal schemas or representations. The child's understanding of its
world is directly through its senses from moment to moment. It is so
called because it senses its environment and carries out movement (motor)
to react to it. At this stage that is all the child can do!
Features:
Egocentricism.
The child has no concept of 'self' so is unable to distinguish itself from
its environment. Unlike some of the other concepts Piaget believed that
egocentricism gradually reduces as the child gets older.
Research
evidence
See three mountains
task in preoperational stage.
Lacks object permanence.
Child assumes
that objects no longer exist if they’re not visible.
Research
evidence
Piaget carried out
research on his own children. They would be shown an attractive object
that would then be hidden from view. Children up to the age of 8 months
don’t bother to look for it assuming it to no longer exist. After 8
months children will continue to search for hidden objects.
Evidence
against
Bower & Wishart
(1972) showed objects to children between the ages of 1 and 4 months.
Lights were switched off so that the objects were no longer visible but
the child could be seen, by infrared camera, continuing to search for the
object.
Baillargeon and DeVos
(1991) employed an ingenious experiment using long and short carrots.
It relies on the concept that children will
spend longer looking at events that they consider to be impossible. In
this case, even though the carrots were not visible for a crucial stage of
the experiment children as young as three months old realised that they
still existed and spent longer puzzling over the ‘impossible situation.’
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Young children glance at this one but seem to realise
there's nothing unusual about it. |
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However, they spend significantly longer looking at
this one, suggesting that they realise its impossible. That is
they realise that the carrot should still be visible in the space. |
Clearly this casts
doubt on Piaget’s assertion that children didn’t develop object permanence
until 8 months of age!
Pre-Operational Stage (2 to 7 years)
Child is still
dominated by the external world, rather than it's own thoughts. However,
it now forms some simple internal representations of its world (schemas)
through its increasing ability to use language. The stage is called
'pre-operational' since the child is unable to perform operations (such as
heart by-passes and key hole surgery; well you know what I mean!). An
'operation' according to Piaget, is a mental rule for manipulating objects
or ideas into new forms, and then, crucially, being able to manipulate
them back again. Since preoperational children are unable to reverse
things mentally they are unable to do this.
Features:
Egocentricism
Child remains
egocentric but this now refers more to its inability to see things from
other people's perspectives, as famously demonstrated by the 'Three
Mountains' task.
Research
evidence
Piaget & Inhelder’s
‘Three Mountains Task.’ Children would be seated at a table with a 3D
model of three mountains in front of them. A doll would be placed in
various positions around the table and the child shown photos of various
views. They would be asked to choose the picture that best fitted the
view as seen from the doll. To complete this task successfully children
would have to imagine the view as seen by the doll. The researchers found
that children below the age of 7 had problems completing the task, tending
to choose the photo that showed their view of the mountains. Think of the
young girl in the video explaining her new toy to her grandfather on the
phone and assuming that because she could see it so could her granddad.
Evidence to
contradict Piaget
Hughes (1975)
repeated the three mountains task using a situation he thought would be
more familiar to the child, i.e. the naughty boy hiding from the
policeman. Hughes found that 90% of children aged 3 to 5 could complete
the task successfully, concluding that it was lack of understanding rather
than egocentricism that was causing the problems for Piaget's
participants.
Animism
This is related to
egocentricism and is the tendency to attribute feelings to inanimate
objects so for example the child may apologise for hurting its teddy bear
or decide to punish one of its toys for being naughty. I’ll restrain from
any adult humour here!
Realism
Believing that
psychological events, such as dreams, are real.
Lack of Conservation
The inability to
realise that some things remain unchanged despite looking different.
Piaget concentrated on conservation of number and volume. Piaget put this
down to the child's inability to pay attention to more than one
characteristic of a situation at a time and to its inability to reverse
operations in its head (e.g. to visualise the water being poured back into
the original container).
Piaget believed that
conservation of number develops first. He demonstrated this by the use of
counters. Children are shown 2 rows each with the same number of counters
and realise the 2 rows contain the same number. If the researcher
rearranges one of the rows by spacing the counters out the child believes
there are more.
Conservation of
volume, as demonstrated by pouring liquid from small wide beakers into
tall thin measuring cylinders, develops later, at the very end of the
preoperational stage.
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Evidence
against
McGarrigle &
Donaldson (1974) showed that children as young as 4 could conserve number
if the situation is given meaning.
It is also important
to note that Piaget concentrates almost entirely on mathematical skills
and logic. Between the ages of 7 and 11 children acquire a vast number of
other new skills that Piaget chose to ignore.
McGarrigle &
Donaldson (1974) repeated Piaget’s conservation experiment on 6-year-old
children. The child is shown 2 rows
of equal numbers of counters. The
child agrees that the 2 rows are the same.
If the researcher then messes one of the rows up, without altering the
number of counters, only 16% believe that the number of counters is still the
same. So far just as Piaget would have
predicted. However, when a naughty teddy bear messes up the row of counters 62%
of children in this age group are able to conserve!
This shows that children are better able to conserve than Piaget
proposed. M & D assume that in the
original condition it appears to the child that the researchers are intending to
alter the number of counters, or that they are asking a trick question.
In the teddy condition there is a reason for the counters just to be
messed up so the situation has meaning.
Rose & Black (1974)
believed asking the child the same question twice was confusing. ‘Are
there the same number of buttons in each row?’ The buttons would then be
rearranged and the question repeated. Perhaps the children believe this
to be a trick question. Samuel & Bryant (1984) repeated the counters
experiment but only asked the question once, after the counters had been
rearranged. This produced more correct answers!
General
evaluation points on this stage:
Piaget’s research has
generated lots of research into this particular stage, but it has been
inconclusive or at odds with Piaget’s original work:
Piaget often
under-estimated the age at which children could perform activities.
Wheldall & Poborca (1980) believe that children are unable to perform
conservation tasks because they don't understand the question.
Variations in an
experimental procedure can produce very different findings. Some studies
conclude that children are still egocentric others that they have out
grown this characteristic.
Piaget’s original
studies were often poorly thought through and for example were not suited
to the age range of the children he was studying. Instructions may have
been confusing or the tasks themselves too complex. For example ‘Three
Mountains’ task which was manageable when re-worked by Hughes in a more
familiar format.
Concrete Operations Stage (7 to 11
years)
The child is now able
to carry out operations on its environment and develops logical thought.
However, it still requires concrete examples, being unable to think in
abstract terms. Less importance is attached to information from our
senses as we use thought and imagination more.
Features
Reversibility
refers to the ability to mentally picture an action being carried out in
reverse. This is essential for conservation, e.g. imagining the water
being poured back into the original beaker.
Conservation
made possible by the ability to decentre. Conservation of number is first
(5 to 6 years), followed by conservation of weight (7 to 8 years) and
finally conservation of volume by 11 years of age.
Transitivity
is only
possible with concrete examples. For example 'Jackie is fairer than
Sarah, Jackie is darker than Nicola. Who is the darkest?' The concrete
operational child would not be able to work this one out mentally, it
would require dolls or pictures of the three girls. Similarly A > B > C.
This would not be possible since it requires abstract thought rather than
concrete examples.
Research
Evidence
Piaget's own studies
demonstrated that children in this age group were able to conserve
successfully.
Other studies have
broadly backed Piaget’s findings for this stage, although he has been
criticised for failing to consider other cultures.
· Jahoda
(1983) found that children as young as 9 years old in Zimbabwe could
understand abstract economic concepts if they’d worked in their parents’
business.
· Price-Williams
(1969) showed conservation in children as young as 6 years old who had
been raised in pottery making factories.
Formal Operational stage (11 years
onwards)
Piaget used the term
‘formal’ since children in this stage can concentrate on the form of an
argument without being distracted by the content (Jarvis 2001). For
example if x is greater than y but less than z. The child can now work
this out without needing to know what x, y and z refer to. Smith et al
(1998) provide the following example:
‘All green birds have
two heads. I have a green bird called Charlie. How many heads does
Charlie have?’ A child in the earlier stages would be bogged down by the
content, i.e. birds have one head. Formal thinkers can concentrate on the
structure (or form) of the question in this context.
Piaget maintained
that everyone would reach this stage eventually, even if it took us until
20. However, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this is not the
case and that certainly it tends to occur later than Piaget predicted.
Bradmetz (1999), in a
longitudinal study showed that out of 62 children tested at the age of 15,
on a series of Piagetian tasks, only one had reached formal thought!
Features
Abstract thought
The child can now
think in abstract terms so no longer requires concrete examples to solve
problems.
Hypothetical thought
The child is able to
consider things that it has no experience of and consider imaginary
scenarios.
Hypotheses testing
Faced with a problem
the formal thinker will approach it logically, produce a list of
possibilities and test each one systematically. (Think of GCSE science
coursework).
Solve syllogisms
These are a form of
reasoning in which a conclusion is reached from a number of statements.
For example:
When B is
larger than C, X is smaller than C. But C is never larger than B.
True or
false, X is never larger than B?
Other features
This level of thought
also allows for an appreciation of values and ideals (necessary for more
advanced moral thinking).
Research
evidence
Piaget would set
children the task of finding what determines the frequency of swing of a
pendulum. Concrete thinkers normally believe that it is the push that the
experimenter gives it. When they test possibilities they fail to control
other variables. The formal thinker on the other hand considers all
possible variables such as push, length of string, weight of bob etc.
They carefully isolate variables and control confounding variables.
Evidence
against
1.
Some psychologists argue that formal
operational thought is not as important to everyday life as Piaget seems
to have concluded. Since most problems we face have no one obvious right
answer, logical thought is not always necessary.
2. It
seems many adults never actually reach Piaget’s description of formal
thinking.
3. Gladwin
(1970) argues that the tests Piaget used are inappropriate for testing
non-western culture. The Pulawat navigators of Polynesia demonstrate
formal thinking when navigating in their canoes but fail western tests
designed to test their formal thinking.
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