Cognitive Development by Jean Piaget - Stages, Schemata, Assimilation, and Accommodation

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT Jean Piaget While working for Alfred Binet, the creator of the first intelligence test, Piaget noticed that children gave similar answers to some questions, even though they may be wrong. This lead to her theory of cognitive development. Piaget described that children view the world through schemata, cognitive rules we use to interpret the world. Assimilation: The process of incorporating our experiences into existing schema. Sometimes, information does not fit in to or violets our schemata, so we must accommodate and change our schemata. Piaget theorized that our thinking progresses through four stages: 1. Sensorimotor Stage (<2 years old): Babies begin experiencing the world strictly through their senses and begin to develop their first cognitive schemata that explain the world we are experiencing through our senses. Babies also learn object permanence in this stage. 2. Preoperational Stage (2-7 years old): Children begin to use symbols to represent real-world objects and use this to learn language. In this stage, children are limited in the ways they can think about relationships between objects. Also, children in this stage are Egocentric, meaning that they cannot look at the world from anyone’s perspective but their own. 3. Concrete Operations (8-12 years old): Children learn to think more logically about the complex relationships between different characteristics of objects. Children also learn the concepts of conservation, the realization that the properties of objects remain the same even when there shapes change, etc., in this stage. 4. Formal Operations (12-adulthood): In this stage, we can manipulate objects and contrast ideas in our minds without physically seeing them. Hypothesis testing is an example of abstract reasoning. Also in this stage we learn metacognition, the ability to think about the way we think. We can trace our thought processes and evaluate the effectiveness of how we solved a problem. Criticisms of Piaget: Information-Processing Model Most developmental psychologists agree that Piaget underestimated children and that they go through the stages faster than Piaget predicted. Information-processing model: A more continuous alternative to Piaget’s theory. This points out that our abilities to memorize, interpret, and perceive gradually develop as we age rather than developing in distinct stages. MORAL DEVELOPMENT Laurence Kohlberg Kohlberg’s stage theory showed that our ability to reason about ethical situations changes over our lives. He used the Heinz dilemma, which describes a man names Heinz making a moral choice about weather to steal a drug to save his wife’s life. The responses were placed into three levels: Preconventional – The youngest children’s reasoning was limited to how it affected themselves to avoid punishment. They chose not to steal the drug to stay out of trouble. Conventional – Children in this stage were able to see the situation from other points of view. They might say that Heinz should steal the drug to save his wife so that others would see him as a hero. Postconventional – In this stage, the morality of societal rules are examined and one might say the Heinz should steal the drug because his wife’s right to live outweighs the store owner’s right to personal property. Criticisms of Kohlberg Carol Gilligan pointed out the Kohlberg’s test was more based on boys and she theorized that the way that boys and girls come to moral conclusions in incorrect. She stated that boys have a more absolute view that works applies in every context while girls pay attention to situational factors and relationships of the people before making a decision. Recent research does not support this theory.