1. ACTIVITY 1) How do you make the light bulb light up?
Battery
Wire
You have:
a light bulb
a battery
a wire
1) How do you make the light bulb light up?
2) What prior knowledge can you bring to bear on this task?

2. Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget was a developmental psychologist: He was interested primarily in how people’s learning and knowing change as they grow.
Piaget was most interested in the thinking process that a child used to produce an answer or solve a problem.
Piaget thought of himself as a genetic epistemologist: He wanted to study how knowledge develops in humans, and how a person’s relationship with knowledge changes over time.
Genetic = the genesis (beginning) of a mode of development
Epistemology = the theory of knowledge

3. Piaget’s Methods
Piaget used a clinical method for analyzing children: He posed problems to children & observed how they found solutions.
His interviews were unusual: Instead of asking a standard set of questions, he improvised questions as the child began to solve the problem.
Piaget thought that this process would ensure that each child understood the problem in the same way, even if the wording changed within each interview.

4. Piaget’s Concept of Knowledge
Knowledge is a process. People do not really know something until they act on it, either physically or mentally.
Development is a process of constructing new ideas about how the world works: A child sees and understands “reality” differently from an adult.
For young children, knowing something means physically acting on it: A two year old knows that he can pick up, press, throw, and taste an apple. That is all he knows about the apple.
Older children can use symbols (words or figures) within their minds to represent physical objects or relationships.
We can solve the abstract problem in our heads, but a young child would have a much easier time with it if he could manipulate 7 objects.

5. Assimilation & Accommodation
Remember: People have a certain set of schemes with which they understand events in the world.
When a person begins to understand a new event, he/she can either assimilate it into an existing scheme or accommodate that existing scheme so that the new event fits.
Assimilation=fitting the new information to an existing scheme
Whose Line is it Anyway – Props
We have schemes for different objects. The game Props is really just making the prop fit into existing schemes!
Accommodation=changing the scheme to fit the new information
Learning to Drive that Darn Manual Car Again!
Assuming we know how to drive an automatic, we will have to change our scheme for driving in order to be successful with the manual transmission.

6. Development
As children develop, their schemes change in response to:
Heredity, and the time schedule for growth and change.
Physical experience with objects & problem-solving in the world.
Social transmission from parents, school, society…
Equilibrium (which Piaget added because he believed that something maintained balance among the other three factors).
As children’s schemes change, they enter different stages of development. 

7. Stage One: Sensori-Motor
~ Birth  2 years old
Infants first relate to the world only through reflexes
e.g. Sucking on a bottle
Then they begin to make many repetitive movements, practicing grasping objects and making other simple motions.
At first, they have NO concept of object permanence.
e.g. Once a toy moves out of sight, infants assume it is completely gone.
They begin to recognize simple cause and effect & object permanence at the end of this stage.

8. Stage Two: Pre-Operational Thought
~ 2 years old  7 years old
Children develop language in this period, first egocentric* & then more social.
Egocentric– running self-commentary that accompanies action
Children focus on one characteristic of an object at a time.
Imagining that both the height & width of a glass of water affect the amount of water is difficult for them.
Imagining that increased space between pieces may make one row look longer than another is difficult.
Thus, children have trouble with conservation.
Conservation of liquid
Conservation of number

9. Conservation of Liquid Conservation of Number
Children have trouble understanding that the same amount of water is in each container.
Will say the taller one has more because they can only focus on one dimension – height.
Children have trouble understanding that both rows have the same number of circles
Will say that the longer one has more because they only focus on length.

10. Stage Three: Concrete Operations
~ 7 years old  11 years old
Children begin to perform operations that are directly related to objects (but they do not necessarily have to see or touch the objects.)
They can solve problems with imagined objects
e.g. If Alice has 2 apples & I give her 7 more apples, how many does she have now?
Children begin to develop the concepts of conservation & reversability. They can comprehend processes.
e.g. They can understand that there may be the same amount of clay in one large ball and five smaller balls made from the large one. •
= • • • • •

11. Stage 4: Formal Operations
Lasts from age 11 ...
Abstract Thought: no longer limited by what they directly see and hear; can engage in “pure thought independent of actions.”
They can imagine the past, present, and future conditions of a process and form hypotheses about possibilities.
They can solve problems involving complex reasoning with concepts like transitivity:
Edith has fairer hair than Susan; Edith has darker hair than Lily. Who has the fairest hair of the three?
Piaget believed that the most obvious difference between adolescents & adults is that adolescents expect the world to conform to logic (bc they have just acquired the potential for logical reasoning).

12. Tenets of Piaget
Piaget thought that children could never accomplish reasoning tasks that were above their level of development. (discrete stages)
He thought that all children developed in the same ways, regardless of differences in environment or exposure to problems.
He believed that children behaved like solo scientists: he didn’t see social interaction playing a strong role in development.

13. Constructivism & Conceptual Change
Constructivist thinkers believe that children learn best when a lesson begins with their own understanding & “scaffolds” to a new concept.
e.g. Children believe that hats and sweaters make heat; extensive experimentation can begin to show them otherwise.
Children base their thinking on their own experiences – they find it difficult to learn a concept contrary to their beliefs.
Children’s textbook learning often doesn’t “stick” because the text concepts are not their own.
Hands-on lessons can be structured in a way that forces them to confront & modify those beliefs, but the process of accommodation (conceptual change) not an easy one.

14. Activity Watch the film on Constructivism…
Was your solution to the ‘lighting the light bulb’ problem correct?
Why or why not? (in terms of how you learned the topic)