ES 2212: Theorising Early Childhood

Week 8: Piaget (2)

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last updated 08.11.11.

 

 

Introduction

 

The question of the relationships between mind and biological organisation is one which inevitably arises at the beginning of a study of the origins of intelligence (Piaget, 1953: 1).

 

Adaptation is the mechanism for preservation and survival of a species: it represents the equilibrium between the organism and the environment (Piaget, 1953). Intelligence is the significant adaptation that defines the human species i.e. the biological mechanism which allows us to operate effectively in our environment.

 

Biological organisation of the human organism enables an intellectual evolution which leads to the discovery, and use of, rational concepts

 

Life is a continuous creation of increasingly complex forms and a progressive balancing of these forms with the environment. To say that intelligence is a particular instance of biological adaptation is thus to suppose that it is essentially an organisation and that its function is to structure the universe just as the organism structures its immediate environment (Piaget, 1953: 3-4).

 

Unlike other organisms, human potential is not restricted to adapting materially to the features of the environment

 

The organism adapts itself by materially constructing new forms to fit them into those of the universe, whereas intelligence extends this creation by constructing mentally structures which can be applied to those of the environment (Piaget, 1953: 4).

 

John Bruner's explanation dominate the early accounts of Piaget and Vygotsky in English. Brunner, in general, does a good job, but often inserts his own explanations and characterisations that shift the meaning of the work of these theorists towards an address to his own intended audience: American academics, i.e., in the same way as does Steven Pinker. In relation to a particularly complex piece of Piaget's theorising - the capacity for logico-mathemtical thought - we get this account of abstraction and the growth of symbol use: a process of ‘invariant growth of logic’ (Bruner, 1997), where the mind’s logical operations constitute a ‘logical calculus whose scope and power grows through decentration from immediate action’ (Bruner, 1997: 66).

Campbell (2006), on the other hand, refers to this development as a process of ‘reflective abstraction’: coming to know the properties of one’s actions - which sounds much closer to Locke's notion of 'reflection'. In fact, Locke is surprisingly helpful here, even if he does get into a muddle. Fairly early on in the Essay he introduces the distinction between 'primary' and 'secondary' qualities, in which the primary qualities, such as weight, height, breadth, volume, and duration are treated as being more like abstractive understandings from our experience, which is said to be typically dominated by a shifting mix of secondary qualities, such as colour, texture, smell, etc. It is this distinction that I think, Brunner is referring to when he talks of 'decentration from immediate action' - the action reference locating his comments more obviously within Piaget's work..

 

If you can cast your mind back to Plato, you may remember his interest in there being forms that underpin our normal, everyday experiences of the world. For Plato, while the everyday world could only offers confused and incomplete perceptions of the forms, through meditation and religious experience it was possible to understand a little better this spiritual underpinning of all human life. Much later in time, after Rousseau had written Émile, Emmanuel Kant wrote in his Critique of Reason about the mind being furnished with a structure such that the world could only appear to us through the set of 'lenses' that God supplied the human form with. In other words, he rejected the absolute empiricism that Locke had become associated with, insisting instead that there were a limited set of a priori ways in which, for us at least, the world had to be, i.e., we could not think other than the ways these 'transcendental' ideas allowed. Kant also tried to explain how knowledge could grow and develop, and it was largely through his writing about this that the term 'schemata' entered the philosophical, and later scientific, vocabularies. For Kant there had to be some means by which experience could become intelligible only by reference to one or more of his transcendental notions - roughly corresponding to Locke's primary qualities with the addition of various notions of quantity and relation. Kant's schemata (plural of schema) offered an intermediary stage by which this fusion could take place. For Kant, then, each schema corresponded to a particular aspect of the mind's search for intelligibility from amongst its experiences, and each of these is best thought of - not as a finished reference object - but more like a rule for producing a particular type of sensory organisation. Clearly, this is very close indeed to Piaget's starting position.

A Piagettian schema is, essentially, a concept that encapsulates the child's existing level of understanding of itself, its actions, and its knowledge, in relation to its recognition of an object - either in its environment or within its processes of thinking.

As such, they are therefore contingent, dynamic, and continually open to two processes that Piaget is particularly associated with - both of them being aspects of adaptation to an environment.

The simplest of these is the idea of assimilation, in which new material is incorporated into an existing schema so that its 'definition' (its field of possible reference) is broadened without there being any significant change to its operations in thought and action, i.e. we learn about a new breed of dog. We 'stereotype' a newcomer to our circle of friends as belonging to a 'racial' group.

The second is rather different - termed accommodation, it describes those events where an existing schema can no longer be adjusted any further so that a new schema (or new schemata) has (have) to be generated in order to bring the new object of thought into a coherent set of possible relations with the child's existing schemata, e.g., I now learn that the 'Asian' I met briefly last week is now my brother's new girlfriend.

Piaget is clear that the inevitable product of our investigation and interaction with any environment will involve shifting from assimilation to accomodation and then back again in a continual spiral 'upwards' so that we reach the highest point of complex relationship we are capable of in an environment which will have itself become correspondingly complex to our understanding.

One therefore has to think very carefully what Piaget's term 'equiliberation' is to mean - certainly not a static state of affairs so long as we live! But having got an overview of these basic mechanisms, there is now the added complication that our capacity to carry through this upward spiral of ever more complex understandings is limited in childhood by developmental stages, which Piaget assumes correspond to particular 'survival settings' that the species has found to be appropriate for particular developmental configurations of mental and physical embodiment, i.e., for particular steps along the way to maturity and adulthood.    

 

 

Developmental Stages N.B. do not make any extended reference to these in your essay!

Piaget stated that children’s cognitive development progresses through a fixed sequence of stages, but (contrary to popular understanding) Piaget did not state unequivocally that the ages are fixed. Note, and as discussed last week, he assumes that these are global changes to the totality of a child's thinking, i.e., they are not specific to a particular type of thinking or a particular sense, etc.

 

The age ranges he indicates simply denote the times during which an average child can be expected to display the intellectual behaviours that are characteristic of the particular stage. The ages at which the stages occur can vary with the nature of both an individual’s experience and his/her hereditary potential (Piaget, 1952: p. 255)

 

 

Sensori-Motor Stage (0-2years)

Child experiences world through immediate perceptions and physical activity

Concept formation is determined by his/her senses and actions

Child’s thinking is immediate, overt and physical, and occurs as a result of direct interaction with the environment

Child’s thinking is dominated by the ‘here and now’: unable to anticipate the future and think about the past

 

Pre-operational Stage (2-7 years)

Beginning of long period of transition to operational thinking

Subdivided into two sub-stages, the Pre-conceptual and the Intuitive

 

Verbal or cogiative intelligence is based on practical or sensorimotor intelligence which in turn depends on acquired and recombined habits and associations (Piaget, 1953: 1).

 

Intellectual capacities still mainly dominated by perceptions rather than a reasoned understanding of situations and events

Thinking is highly subjective and focuses on single features of situations.

Consequently the child’s thinking is unsystematic

 

a) Pre-conceptual sub-stage (2-4 years)

The child becomes increasingly able to use symbols to stand for actions and to represent these actions to him/herself (i.e. internalise actions)

But the child is unable to use concepts as adults do because s/he

·        cannot form generic concepts correctly (e.g. all men are classed as ‘daddy’)

·        cannot make transitive inferences (e.g. Stephanie is taller than Catherine, Catherine is taller than Marie, therefore Stephanie is taller than Marie)

·        relies exclusively on ‘transductive’ reasoning that moves from the particular to the particular (e.g. There was TV time at playgroup today, so there must always be TV time at playgroup)

 

In short – the child cannot see the ‘bigger picture’

 

 

b) Intuitive Sub-Stage (4-7 years)

The focus of most study by Piaget, and the one that has most influence on educational theory and practice

Pre-operational thinking is characterised by child’s egocentrism: the inability to see anything other than their own point of view, and their tendency to inappropriately project this point of view upon their understanding of the world

Campbell (2006) refers to this as a ‘cognitive limitation’: it generates a tendency for children to focus erroneously on specific features of a situation/problem and ignore other features which may be more relevant to achieving a successful solution

Egocentrism restricts the child’s ability to generate possibilities systematically or test hypotheses that requires consideration of multiple possibilities, and consequently the child has a restricted ability to be critical, logical or realistic in his/her thinking

 

 

Concrete Operational Stage (7-11years)

Increasing ability to solve problems in a logical way, although child still needs to manipulate real objects to facilitate this thinking

 

Now able to reverse thinking and to de-centre: able to classify (group objects together in terms of their common characteristics) and to seriate (arrange objects in rank order )

 

Ability to appreciate logical truths and use these to solve problems, e.g. appreciation that identifying fixed relationships between objects or qualities of objects can help problem solving

(If A is equal to B in some attribute, and B is equal to C, then it must be true that A is also equal to C or if A is longer than B, and B is longer than C, then it must be true that A is longer than C)

 

Appreciation that certain classes are related together in a hierarchical manner such that they fit into each other

(Oranges belong to the larger class of citric fruits, which is a sub-class the class called fruits, which is a sub-class of food)

 

Recognition that specific objects or attributes can belong to more than one class, or more than one relationship at a time

(A tennis ball is small, round and light but a bowling ball is small, round and heavy)

 

However, the child continues to have a tendency to describe rather than explain the environment

 

 

Formal Operational Stage (11years onwards)

Emergence of the ability to reason in the abstract, increasingly resembling the thinking of an adult

Ability to transcend the concrete (here and now) and think about what might be: movement from the real to the possible

 

Ability to create systems of laws and rules for problem-solving, indicating a progression from understanding individual concepts or categories in isolation, to seeing how they may be interdependent in some circumstances

 

Four characteristics of formal operations

·        Ability to reason about hypothetical situations

·        Systematic and exhaustive search for hypotheses

·        Higher-order rules (ways of using abstract rules to solve a whole class of problems)

·        Ability to detect inconsistency in propositions

 

 

Significance of Piaget’s work

The development of knowledge is a biological developmental process, where knowledge is attained and developed through empirical exploration of an environment, in which what counts as 'empirical' for the child is conditioned by its stage of cognitive growth.

Knowledge consists of cognitive structures, which are propensities to interact with one’s environment in particular ways - again, contingent on the stage of the child's development.

We are not born with these structures, nor do we simply absorb them from our environment (compare this with Rousseau's position).

 

cognitive structures naturally change in the course of being used, and both the organism and the environment are involved in this process of change (Campbell, 2006: 8).

 

It is not merely that we as adults think faster, or know more: we really do think differently from babies and children ( Campbell , 2006: 12).

 

 

Implications for Education

 

Positive Outcomes

·        Concept of ‘readiness’

·        Important that teachers are sensitive to the child’s level of development and ability to understand and deal with concepts of varying kinds

·        Active involvement in a stimulating environment

·        Assertion that active involvement in learning leads to greater understanding and retention

·        Children require a rich and varied learning environment

·        Use of concrete materials to facilitate learning

·        Children’s thinking should be based, initially, on manipulation of concrete materials, gradually building up to more abstract reasoning

 

 

Negative Outcomes

·        Emphasis on the spontaneity of development, with an associated assertion of the limited nature of learning derived from teaching

·        Tendency for the maturational element in development to be over-emphasised at the expense of action, social interaction and equilibration