Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)

1. Preoperational Stage (2-7 years) • Explosion in use of mental symbols • Piaget focused mainly on deficiencies in thought • Children are capable of thinking about the past • Can manipulate mental symbols • Use language

2. Language and Cognition • Does language promote cognition, or does cognition promote language? • Most developmentalists thought that language promotes cognition. • Piaget thought that cognition came first and guided the development of language.

3. Substages of Preoperational thought • Preconceptual (2-4 years) • Intuitive (4-7 years)

4. Preconceptual substage • Characterized by three traits • Animism: attributing lifelike qualities to inanimate objects • Precausal or transductive reasoning: assuming that correlations represent causation • Egocentrism: Tendency to view world from own perspective

5. Intuitive substage • An extension of preconceptual thought, but children are somewhat less egocentric and better able to classify objects on the basis of size, shape, and color • Thinking is called “intuitive” because a child’s understanding of objects is still based on their most salient perceptual feature (the way they appear to be) rather than logical properties.

6. Conservation Error (preoperational stage) • Conservation: inability to recognize that properties of an object or substance don’t change when the appearance is altered in a superficial way. Two reasons for this: • Compensation: can’t focus on more than one aspect of a problem at a time • Reversibility: they can’t mentally undo, or reverse, an action

7. Research about preoperational stage • Egocentrism: Piaget badly overestimated this error • Animism: not as common as Piaget thought; more likely to occur with objectst hat move • Precausal reasoning: children aren’t as precausal as Piaget thought • Conservation: Piaget thought it couldn’t be taught, but it can • Piaget’s problems were too complex, and he required verbal justifications, which are hard.

8. Concrete Operations (7-11) • Children can start justifying their answers at this stage • Can apply knowledge of concrete schemas only to those things that are real or logical to them • Can mentally represent series of actions and can draw accurate maps

9. Concepts understood by concrete operators • Relational logic: simultaneously compare two objects on a dimension such as length • Transitivity: If A is bigger than B and B is bigger than C, then A is bigger than C (as long as it’s with concrete objects) • Seriation: ability to mentally arrange items along a quantifiable dimension such as height/weight • Can’t really do algebra at this stage because they can’t deal with abstract ideas

10. Piaget’s view of education • Children should be formally educated starting around age 6-7 • Children learn best by constructing their own knowledge • Teachers should back off and let kids learn at own pace, with little intervention • Spend less time lecturing, more time with “hands-on” activities • Believed in discovery-based education

11. Goal of education (Piaget) • To produce creative people who could think for themselves, not recite facts based on rote memorization

12. Vygotsky’s view • Agreed that kids should be actively involved in learning • Placed less emphasis on discovery-based learning and more emphasis on collaboration with teachers and peers • Child can’t master tasks on his own. • Recall the terms “scaffolding,” and “zone of proximal and current development.”

13. Formal operations (11-12 and up) • Mental actions are performed on ideas and propositions • Can reason about hypothetical and abstract concepts • Can easily engage in systematic problem-solving and creative tasks

14. Personal and social implications of formal thought • Can consider many possible solutions to abstract problems; can function like scientists • Allows adolescent to create identity for herself and advance in moral reasoning • Allows one to think about abstract questions such as “What freedom means” and “What would have happened if the South had won the Civil War?”

15. Negative side of formal operations • Adolescents get very idealistic and become frustrated with imperfect world • Creates frustration with parents, government, and other authority figures; may be responsible for the “generation gap” • Can become almost as egocentric as children in the preoperational stage

16. Egocentrism in formal operations (David Elkind) • Imaginary audience: feeling that you’re constantly on stage; everyone is critical of you and is looking at you • Personal fable: belief in the uniqueness of one’s self and one’s thinking; no one’s ever felt the way you do; leads to feelings of immortality

17. Is egocentrism really related to development of formal operations? • Elkind thought both kinds of egocentrism should increase dramatically from the ages of 13-15 and end between 15-16 as the switch from concrete to formal operations became complete. • Data not consistent with this. Egocentrism is more common in 13-15 year olds, but most are not at formal operations during this age range. • Egocentrism is probably related not to formal operational thought but to adolescent’s new social-perspective taking abilities.

18. Does everyone attain formal operational thought? • No. Some researchers have found that only 33% of adults function consistently at formal operational thought. • Adults may be especially deficient in math and logic; may be because they’re not motivated or interested in those topics. • College students may show formal operations in their major but not in other studies. • Some may reach “postformal thought.” Found especially in grad students and professors.