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Summary 1.5 Changing man - problem 4: The sun is tired
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This is my personal summary of problem 4 of block 5: developmental psychology
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Problem 4 – The sun is tiredCognition: The inner processes and products of the mind that lead to ‘’knowing’’. It includes
all mental activity – attending, remembering, learning, perceiving, symbolizing, categorizing,
planning, reasoning, problem solving, creating, and fantasizing.
Piaget’s Cognitive-Developmental theory
- Child’s own role: Piaget argued that development occurs because children actively
seek out information from their environments.
- Constructivist approach: Piaget viewed children as discovering, or constructing,
virtually all knowledge about their world through their own activity.
- Schemes: According to Piaget, specific psychological structures called schemes –
organized ways of making sense of experience - change with age. Two processes
account for this change in schemes from childhood to adulthood:
o Adaptation: Building schemes through direct interaction with the
environment. It consists of two complementary activities:
Assimilation: We use current schemes to interpret the external world.
Accommodation: We create new schemes or adjust old ones after
noticing that our current way of thinking does not capture the
environment completely.
The balance between these two activities varies over time:
- Equilibrium Not much change occurs.
- Disequilibrium A lot of change occurs.
- Equilibration: Piaget’s view of intelligence as a back-and-forth
movement between equilibrium and disequilibrium.
o Organization: Once children form new schemes, they rearrange them, linking
them with other schemes to create a strongly interconnected system.
Piaget’s stages of development
Piaget’s stages have three important characteristics:
1. The stages provide a general theory of development, in which all aspects of cognition
change in an integrated fashion, following a similar course.
2. The stages are invariant; they occur in a fixed order, and no stage can be skipped.
3. The stages are universal; they are assumed to characterize children everywhere.
Piaget and education
1. Discovery learning: Instead of presenting ready-made knowledge verbally, teachers
provide a rich variety of activities designed to promote exploration and discovery.
2. Sensitivity to children’s readiness to learn: Teachers do not try to speed up
development by imposing new skills before children indicate that they are ready.
3. Acceptance of individual differences: Piaget’s theory assumes that all children go
through the same sequence of development, but at different rates.
, Stage 1 - The sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years): New babies aren’t quite sure what
happens to objects when they leave their sight. During their first year, however, infants will
learn an important concept: object permanence, things continue to exist even though they
cannot be seen. Piaget divided the sensorimotor stage into six substages (see table):
Sensorimotor substage Typical adaptive behaviors
Simple reflexes Coordination of sensation and action through reflexive behaviors
(birth to 1 month)
Primary circular reactions Simple voluntary motor habits centered around the infant’s own
(1 to 4 months) body; limited anticipation of events
Secondary circular reactions Actions aimed at repeating interesting effects in the surrounding
world; imitation of familiar behaviors; object-oriented
(4 to 8 months)
Coordination of secondary Intentional, or goal-directed behavior; ability to find a hidden
circular reactions object in the first location in which it is hidden (object
(8 to 12 months) permanence); improved anticipation of events; imitation of
behaviors slightly different from those the infant usually performs
Tertiary circular reactions Exploration of the properties of objects by acting on them in
(12 to 18 months) novel ways; imitation of novel behaviors; ability to search in
several locations for a hidden object (accurate A-B search);
starting point for curiosity and interest in novelty.
Mental representation Internal depictions of objects and events, as indicated by sudden
(18 months to 2 years) solutions to problems; ability to find an object that has been
moved while out of sight (invisible displacement); deferred
imitation; and make-believe play
Stage 2 - The preoperational stage (2 to 7 years): Children begin to think symbolically and
learn to use words and pictures to represent objects. They gain more and more insight into
symbol-real-world relations. However, in the beginning they still have trouble with dual
representation – viewing a symbolic object as both an object in its own right and a symbol.
They transition from a sensorimotor approach to an approach based on mental
representations, such as images, concepts, and make-believe play.
During this stage, drawing also progresses through the following sequence: From scribbles to
the first representational forms and finally to more realistic drawings. In cultures with rich
artistic traditions, cultural practices can enhance a young child’s drawing progress.
According to Piaget, children at this age are not yet capable of operations – mental schemes
or representations of actions that obey logical rules. Rather, their thinking is rigid,
egocentric, animistic and limited; They still tend to think about things in very concrete terms.
Piaget’s famous conservation tasks reveal these deficiencies of preoperational thinking:
Their understanding is centered on one aspect of a situation, they are easily distracted by
perceptual appearance, they ignore the dynamic transformation between the initial and final
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