Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development (AQA A Level Psychology): Flashcards

Equilibration is the process of escaping disequilibrium by adapting schemas through assimilation or accommodation until balance is restored; this drive is what motivates children to learn.

Preschool children have well-organised schemas about familiar events, constructed from their own experience, which they use to plan, reflect and enact behaviours and ideas.

Children aged 9-12 working in groups of four to discuss the movement of objects down a slope increased their knowledge after discussion but did not converge on the same conclusions.

Abstract reasoning is achieved via symbols and inductive reasoning rather than the analytical, deductive reasoning used in the West.

It was instrumental in encouraging discovery learning: children need to explore and discover for themselves rather than being told what to think by adults.

Children's cognitive development had previously been overlooked, and his ideas prompted a great deal of research that provided hugely valuable insight into children's thinking.

It does not consider the role of language in a child's cognitive development.

Children vary greatly in intellectual curiosity, and his sample of clever, middle-class children at his university nursery, plus his reliance on informal observation, limit the validity of his universal claims.

Piaget saw adults and peers mainly as sources of information, whereas Vygotsky argued learning is a social process in which children achieve far more when supported by peers or an expert adult, so Piaget's individualist account is incomplete.

It was based on observations of middle-class Swiss children, which may not reflect development in other cultures or socio-economic contexts, as cross-cultural differences in milestones show.

It is maturational, emphasising innate biological processes (nature), but it also acknowledges that environmental experience shapes schemas through assimilation and accommodation, showing interactionist elements.

The stages are sensorimotor (birth to 2), pre-operational (2-7), concrete operational (7-11) and formal operational (11+).

Object permanence is the understanding that an object still exists even when it cannot be seen; it is the key marker of the sensorimotor stage, usually acquired at around 8 months.

A toy is hidden at location A several times, then at location B; a child who keeps searching at A fails, while a child who searches at B shows their reinforced movement can be overridden by knowledge that the toy still exists elsewhere.

False.

It is the most-researched, as children show the most developmental milestones in this stage and are more receptive to taking part in research than babies.

Children are egocentric, cannot conserve and lack class inclusion; passing tasks that test these abilities marks the transition out of the stage.

Egocentrism is lacking the ability to see the world from another person's perspective.

Conservation is the ability to appreciate that objects or materials remain the same even when their appearance changes.

Class inclusion is the ability to classify objects into two or more categories, understanding that a subcategory sits within an overarching category.

He showed equal quantities (e.g. liquid in identical glasses), asked which had more, transformed one while the child watched (e.g. pouring into a taller glass) and asked again; a child who says one now has more fails, one who says they are the same passes.

The child must perform a reverse operation, mentally going back to see both materials as the same in capacity even though one's transformed appearance makes it look different.

In the Three Mountains Task, a doll was placed opposite the child on a 3D model and the child chose a picture of what the doll could see; 4-year-olds chose their own view, while by 7-8 children chose the doll's view.

To pass the Three Mountains Task, a child must be able to decentre, which shows more mature and sophisticated thinking.

He showed a set such as five daffodils and three poppies and asked 'Are there more daffodils or more flowers?'; answering 'more daffodils' fails, while 'more flowers' passes, showing the child understands daffodils are a subcategory of flowers.

Children can conserve volume, mass and number, decentre and classify objects more accurately, and perform logical mental operations such as mathematics, though they may lack a systematic approach to problem-solving.

Increasingly systematic and sophisticated mental operations, abstract thought, relativism and the ability to debate and manipulate ideas and principles.

In a syllogism such as 'All yellow cats have two heads. Charlie is a yellow cat. How many heads does Charlie have?' (Smith et al., 1998), younger children are distracted by the content, whereas formal operational children reason from the form and answer 'two'.

Asking 4-8-year-olds only one question, after the transformation, produced fewer conservation errors even at age 4, suggesting asking twice cues children to change their answer, so Piaget's procedure may explain his findings.

Once familiar with the task, 90% of children as young as 3½ could hide a boy doll where two policeman dolls could not see him, suggesting the Three Mountains Task underestimated decentring and children succeed in contexts that make 'human sense'.

Asking 'more black cows or more sleeping cows?' with the cows lying down led to 48% of pre-operational children passing the class inclusion task, compared with 25% on the standard Piagetian version.

It sets out benchmarks that educators and health professionals can use to assess progress and flag any developmental delays.

False.

Piaget changed how researchers think about children by showing that the way children think is fundamentally different from adults.

Children do not develop synchronously, achieving milestones at different times, and development varies across individuals and particularly across cultures.

The procedures can themselves be confounding variables, e.g. few children who have grown up in a non-mountainous region can easily describe a mountainous landscape.

It applies universal stages to all children, ignoring individual differences such as personal experience, language ability and cultural background that are better explained through idiographic approaches.

They rely on Western cultural knowledge, disadvantaging children from non-Western or rural backgrounds, and studies such as Dasen (1994) show cognitive abilities develop differently across cultures, challenging the universality of the stages.