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

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.

Substages of Preoperational thought  Preconceptual (2-4 years)  Intuitive (4-7 years)

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.”

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

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?”

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

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

Is egocentrism really related to development of formal operations?  Elkind thought both kinds of egocentrism should increase dramatically from the ages of and end between as the switch from concrete to formal operations became complete.  Data not consistent with this. Egocentrism is more common in 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.

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.