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Piagets Theory of Cognitive Development: Pre-operational Stage

Piagets Four Stages of Cognitive Development

Definition
Piaget believed that operations were required by children beyond the sensorimotor stage to enable mental activity as opposed to purely physical actions. Pre-operation because the child has not yet mastered these operations. The preoperational child makes a shift from physical action of sensory motor period to the use of symbol systems such as words, images, and signs. The most important milestone of this period, is the development of language. It is estimated that the vocabulary of children between 2-4 expands from 200-2000 words.

Vialle, W. (2000): Handbook of child development

Definition
The label preoperational emphasizes that the child does not yet perform operations (which are internalized actions) that allow children to do mentally what they could formerly do only physically. Operations are reversible mental actions. Mentally adding and subtracting numbers are examples of operations. Preoperational thought is the beginning of the ability to reconstruct in thought what has been established in behaviour. The preoperational stage, which lasts from approximately 2 to 7 years of age, is the second Piagetian stage. In this stage, children begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings. Symbolic thought goes beyond simple connections of sensory information and physical action. Stable concepts are formed, mental reasoning emerges, egocentrism is present, and magical beliefs are constructed. Preoperational thought can be divided into sub-stages: the symbolic function sub-stage and the intuitive thought sub-stage.
Santrock, J. (2000). Child Development: An Introduction

Symbolic Function Sub-stage 2-4 years Intuitive Thought Sub-stage 4-7 years

Key terms of the Pre-operational Stage


Egocentrism Animism Symbolism Moral realism Conservation

Filders University (2010). Mental development and Education: Faculty of Education, Humanities and Law Retrieved from: http://ehlt.flinders.edu.au/education/DLiT/2000/Piaget/stages.htm

The Symbolic Function Sub-stage


The child at this stage gains the ability to mentally represent an object that is not present. Young children use scribbled designs to represent people, houses, cars, clouds, and so on; they begin to use language and engage in pretend play. However, although young children make distinct progress during this sub-stage, their thought still has several important limitations, two of which are egocentrism and animism.
Santrock, J. (2000). Child Development: An Introduction

Symbolic Function Sub-stage


Children's artistic abilities increase during these young years. "The unintended irregularities of children's drawings suggest spontaneity, freedom and directness. There are four stages which children progress through and they are: 1. placement, which depicts scribbles but within a small area, 2. shape, showing different diagrams of shapes, 3. design, which mixes two shapes in one design, and 4. pictorial, depicting recognizable images.
-Santrock, J. (2000). Children, pg. 258

Molly at Age Two and a Half

Anna at Age 4 Years 11 Months scribbling stage, has drawn a tricolored house.

How it Helps Writing

Symbolic Function Sub-stage


Cognition at the preoperational stage is no longer limited to the immediate space and time, but the child can represent objects that are not in the immediate spaciotemporal field. As a result, the interplay between assimilation and accommodation becomes more complex because it involves both perceptual and representational levels of functioning, and can thus represent absent objects as well as present objects. The development of the semiotic function requires that the child laboriously reconstruct, on the new representational plane, the practical concepts of the object, space, causality, and time that had been constructed and only practically understood at the sensorimotor stage; Piaget termed this process as the vertical decalage.
Salkind, N. (2008). Encyclopedia of Educational Psychology. pg. 800

Symbolic Function Sub-stage


Egocentrism: is the inability to distinguish between ones own perspective and someone elses perspective. Piaget and Barbel Inhelder (1969) initially studied young childrens egocentrism by devising the three-mountains task. The child walks around the model of the mountains and becomes familiar with what the mountains look like from different perspectives, and he can see that there are different objects on the mountains. The child is then seated on one side of the table on which the mountains are placed. The experimenter moves a doll to different locations around the table, at each location asking the child to select from a series of photos the one photo that most accurately reflects the view the doll is seeing. Children in the preoperational stage often pick their own view rather than the dolls view. Preschool children frequently show perspective skills on some tasks but not others.
-Santrock, J. (2000) : Child Development: An Introduction

Symbolic Function Sub-stage


'Moral realism' is another aspect of egocentrism, this is the belief that the child's way of thinking about the difference between right and wrong, is shared by everyone else around them. One aspect of a situation, at one time, is all that they are able to focus on, and it is beyond them to consider that anything else could be possible. Due to this aspect of the stage, children begin to respect and insist on obedience of rules at all times, and they are not able to take anything such as motives into account.
Filders University (2010). Mental development and Education: Faculty of Education, Humanities and Law Retrieved from: http://ehlt.flinders.edu.au/education/DLiT/2000/Piaget/stages.htm

Three Mountain Task

Symbolic Function Sub-stage


Animism, another limitation of preoperational thought, is the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities and are capable of action (Gelman & Opfer, 2004; Opfer & Gelman, 2011). A young child might show animism by saying, Why are the trees following us? while in a vehicle. A young child who uses animism fails to distinguish the appropriate occasions for using human and nonhuman perspectives.

-Santrock, J. (2000) : Child Development: An Introduction

The Intuitive Thought Sub-stage


This the second sub-stage of preoperational thought. Children at this stage begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the answers to all sorts of questions. Although the child is starting to develop his own ideas about the world he lives in, his ideas are still simple, and he is not very good at thinking things out. He has difficulty understanding events that he knows are taking place but which he cannot see. His fantasized thoughts bear little resemblance to reality. He cannot yet answer the question What if? in any reliable way. For example, he has only a vague idea of what would happen if a car were to hit him. He also has difficulty negotiating traffic because he cannot do the mental calculations necessary to estimate whether an approaching car will hit him when he crosses the road. The childs questions signal the emergence of interest in reasoning and in figuring out why things are the way they are.

-Santrock, J. (2000) : Child Development: An Introduction

The Intuitive Thought Sub-stage


An example of young childrens limitation in reasoning ability is the difficulty they have putting things into correct categories. Preoperational children are seldom capable of using the properties of objects consistently to sort them into appropriate groupings.

-Santrock, J. (2011). Educational Psychology

The Intuitive Thought Sub-stage


Many of the preoperational examples show characteristics of thought called centration, which involves focusing (or centering) attention on one characteristic to the exclusion of all others. Centration is most clearly present in preoperational childrens lack of conservation (the idea that some characteristics of an object stays the same even though the object might change in appearance.

The Intuitive Thought Sub-stage


Piagets Conservation Task

In Piagets theory, failing the conservation-ofliquid task is a sign that children are at the preoperational stage of cognitive development. The preoperational child fails to show conservation not only of liquid but also of number, matter, length, volume, and area. According to Piaget, preoperational children also cannot perform operations (mental representations that are reversible). For example, a young child may know that 4+2=6, but may not understand that the reverse 6-2= 4 is true.
-Santrock, J. (2011). Child Development: An Introduction

It has been found that some children often vary in their performance on different conservation tasks. So that different children at different ages in this stage may have attained conservation skills of mass, volume and length at different ages from their peers. Thus, a child might be able to conserve volume but not number. Some developmentalists do not believe Piaget was entirely correct in his estimate of when childrens conservation skills emerge. For example, Rochel Gelman (1969) showed that when the childs attention to relevant aspects of the conservation task is improved, the child is more likely to conserve. Gelman has also demonstrated that attentional training on one dimension, such as number, improves the preschool childs performance on another dimension, such as mass. Thus, Gelman suggests that conservation appears earlier than Piaget thought and that attention is especially important in explaining conservation.
-Santrock, J. (2011). Educational Psychology

Applying Piagets Theory to Education


1. Take a constructivist approach. Piaget emphasized that children learn best when they are active and seek solutions for themselves. The educational implication of Piagets view is that, in all subjects, students learn best by making discoveries, reflecting on them, and discussing them, rather than blindly imitating the teacher or doing things by rote. 2. Facilitate, rather than direct, learning. Effective teachers design situations that allow students to learn by doing. These situations promote students thinking and discovery. Effective teachers listen, watch, and question students, to help them gain better understanding. They dont just examine what students think and the product of their learning. Rather, they carefully observe students and find out how they think, pose relevant questions to stimulate their thinking, and ask them to explain their answers. 3. Consider the childs knowledge and level of thinking. Students do not come to class with empty minds. They have many ideas about the physical and natural world. They have concepts of space, time, quantity, and causality. Teachers need to interpret what a student is saying and respond in a way that is not too far from the students level. Also, Piaget suggested that it is important to examine childrens mistakes in thinking, not just what they get correct, to help guide them to a higher level of understanding. 4. Turn the classroom into a setting of exploration and discovery. The teachers emphasize students own exploration and discovery. The classrooms are less structured than what we think of as a typical classroom. Workbooks and predetermined assignments are not used.

-Santrock, J. (2011). Child Development: An Introduction

SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHERS


For Piaget, the engine that drives cognitive development is the experience of disequilibration, that is, a sense of cognitive conflict that results when current cognitive schemes are incapable of resolving contradiction. Disequilibration is induced in classrooms that are marked by robust peer activities. Piaget and others have suggested that children learn how to take the perspectives of others better through interacting with their peers than with adults. Hence classroom activities that emphasize cooperative learning, peer group discussion, and cross-age teaching are well-suited to introduce instances of cognitive conflict that require better appreciation of the perspective of others.
http://www.education.com/reference/article /egocentrism/

Best Practices for a Piagetian Classroom


1. Allow children to experiment freely with materials (this will help them to understand more clearly their properties). 2. Use Imitation Games/Role Play 3. Ask children to make comparisons in objects (taller, shorter, heavier longer) in characters after reading a short story or rhyme about opposites.

4. Give children experience in ordering operations. This will help them with sequencing story elements later on. 5. Have children draw scenes with perspectives (or feelings) from different characters in a short story or rhyme 6. Ask children to justify their answers when they draw conclusions about a character or prediction from a short story or rhyme. This will help them to think logically. 7. Observe the students interests and natural participation in activities to determine the course of learning.

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