Research Paper By Karrie – The Puck: Cognitive Abilities In Children

 Cognitive Abilities In Children

A research paper by Puck

Applying Piaget

Certainly, one of the most important topics that those attempting to understand the cognitive abilities of children is Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. A full understanding of the theory will require mastering the differences between the stages. This paper has been written to help the grasping of the stages. Seven vignettes are provided, each one describes some event in the life of a particular child. Read each and then, apply these to real life situations.

1) When asked what the saying “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink” means, Patrice said that it meant that you can provide someone with an opportunity, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will take advantage of it.

– Formal operational stage

– Thinking of a hypothetical situation

– Has to think of representations for the horse and water

– formal operational stage, stage of human cognitive development, typically beginning around ages 11 or 12, characterized by the emergence of logical thinking processes, particularly the ability to understand theories and abstract ideas and predict possible outcomes of hypothetical problems. During the formal operational stage, the ability to systematically solve a problem in a logical and methodical way emerges. Children at the formal operational stage of cognitive development are often able to plan quickly an organized approach to solving a problem.

2) Twin brothers go “trick or treating” one Halloween. They went to the same houses and got exactly the same candy at each house. Yet, by the time the evening was over, Reggie was very upset. Because his bag was bigger than his brother’s, it didn’t seem to him that he had as much candy.

Pre-operational Stage (could not make out transformations)

During this stage (toddler through age 7), young children are able to think about things symbolically. Their language use becomes more mature. They also develop memory and imagination, which allows them to understand the difference between past and future in order to engage in make-believe. The pre-operational stage is divided into two substages: the symbolic function substage (ages 2-4) and the intuitive thought substage (ages 4-7). Around the age of 2, the emergence of language demonstrates that children have acquired the ability to think about something without the object being present.

3) Andrea and her younger sister were playing with the coins their grandmother had given each of them during a recent visit. While they were playing, Andrea proposed a trade. She would give her little sister a big coin (a nickel) in exchange for a little coin (a dime). Her sister agreed just as Andrea thought she would. She was pretty sure that her sister didn’t understand that a dime was worth more than a nickel.

Concrete Operational Stage

(Can’t recognize that the coin is bigger but not worth as much as dime)

From ages 7 to 11, children are in what Piaget referred to as the concrete operational stage of cognitive development (Crain, 2005). This involves mastering the use of logic in concrete ways. The word concrete refers to that which is tangible; that which can be seen, touched, or experienced directly.

4) While watching television with his dad, Bryce kept trying to grab the remote control. Finally, his dad hid the remote control behind his back. That didn’t seem to bother Bryce a bit, he just started reaching for the family cat.

Sensorimotor Stage (object permanence – can’t recognize that remote still exists even after it disappears)

In the sensorimotor stage, children repeatedly experiment with their senses through various methods in many different environments. This period is characterized by rapid cognitive growth. Another important hallmark of the sensorimotor stage is that children learn the concept of cause and effect.

5) When Duane headed out on his “big expedition,” he wasn’t that worried about getting lost. He knew that he would just have to go back the same way he had come.

Concrete Operational Stage (reversal)

The child learns that some things that have been changed can be returned to their original state. Water can be frozen and then thawed to become liquid again. But eggs cannot be unscrambled. Arithmetic operations are reversible as well: 2 + 3 = 5 and 5 – 3 = 2

6) A tornado had touched down just up the road from Jennifer’s house. Luckily no one was hurt, but a couple of homes were heavily damaged. The storm left quite an impression on Jennifer. She kept asking her mother why the storm had to be so mean.

Pre-operational Stage (intuitive thought – not using logic)

The Intuitive Thought Substage, lasting from 4 to 7 years, is marked by greater dependence on intuitive thinking rather than just perception(Thomas, 1979). At this stage, children ask many questions as they attempt to understand the world around them using immature reasoning.

7) Donna’s new hair style was not all that she anticipated. She felt ugly and she didn’t want to go to school. Her mother tried to convince her that it would be alright and that her friends would understand. It didn’t help. Donna, in tears, said that her mother couldn’t possibly understand how she felt; then she slammed her bedroom door.

Formal Operational Stage (she went back to egocentrism)

Formal operational stage, stage of human cognitive development, typically beginning around age 11 or 12, characterized by the emergence of logical thinking processes, particularly the ability to understand theories and abstract ideas and predict possible outcomes of hypothetical problems. During the formal operational stage, the ability to systematically solve a problem in a logical and methodical way emerges. Children at the formal operational stage of cognitive development are often able to plan quickly an organized approach to solving a problem.

Cognition refers to thinking and memory processes, and cognitive development refers to long-term changes in these processes. One of the most widely known perspectives about cognitive development is the cognitive stage theory of a Swiss psychologist named Jean Piaget. Piaget created and studied an account of how children and youth gradually become able to think logically and scientifically.

The Sensorimotor Stage: Birth to Age 2

In Piaget’s theory, the sensorimotor stage occurs first, and is defined as the period when infants “think” by means of their senses and motor actions. As every new parent will attest, infants continually touch, manipulate, look, listen to, and even bite and chew objects. According to Piaget, these actions allow children to learn about the world and are crucial to their early cognitive development.

The infant’s actions allow the child to represent (i.e., construct simple concepts of) objects and events. A toy animal may be just a confusing array of sensations at first, but by looking, feeling, and manipulating it repeatedly, the child gradually organizes her sensations and actions into a stable concept: toy animal. The representation acquires a permanence lacking in the individual experiences of the object, which are constantly changing. Because the representation is stable, the child “knows,” or at least believes, that the toy animal exists even if the actual toy animal is temporarily out of sight. Piaget called this sense of stability object permanence, a belief that objects exist whether or not they are actually present. Object permanence is a major achievement of sensorimotor development and marks a qualitative transformation in how older infants (24 months) think about experience compared to younger infants (6 months). During much of infancy, of course, a child can only barely talk, so sensorimotor development initially happens without the support of language. It might therefore seem hard to know what infants are thinking. Piaget devised several simple, but clever, experiments to get around their lack of language, and these experiments suggest that infants do indeed represent objects even without being able to talk (Piaget, 1952). In one, for example, he simply hid an object (like a toy animal) under a blanket. He found that doing so consistently prompts older infants (18-24 months) to search for the object but fails to prompt younger infants (less than six months) to do so. (You can try this experiment yourself if you happen to have access to a young infant.) Something motivates the search by the older infant even without the benefit of much language, and that “something” is presumed to be a permanent concept or representation of the object.

The Pre-operational Stage: Age 2 to 7

In the pre-operational stage, children use their new ability to represent objects in a wide variety of activities, but they do not yet do it in ways that are organized or fully logical. One of the most obvious examples of this kind of cognition is dramatic play, or the improvised make-believe of preschool children. If you have ever had responsibility for children of this age, you have likely witnessed such play.

Children engaged in imaginative activities are thinking on two levels at once—one imaginative and the other realistic. This dual processing of experience makes dramatic play an early example of metacognition or reflecting on and the monitoring of thinking itself. Because metacognition is a highly desirable skill for success in school, teachers of young children (preschool, kindergarten, and even first or second grade) often make time and space in their classrooms for dramatic play, and sometimes even participate in it themselves to help develop the play further.

The Concrete Operational Stage: Age 7 to 11

As children continue into elementary school, they become able to represent ideas and events more flexibly and logically. Their rules of thinking still seem very basic by adult standards and usually operate unconsciously, but they allow children to solve problems more systematically than before, and therefore to be successful with many academic tasks. In the concrete operational stage, for example, a child may unconsciously follow the rule: “If nothing is added or taken away, then the amount of something stays the same.”

This simple principle helps children understand certain arithmetic tasks (such as adding or subtracting zero from a number) as well as perform certain classroom science experiments (such as ones that involve calculating the combined volume of two separate liquids).

Piaget called this period the concrete operational stage because children mentally “operate” on concrete objects and events. They are not yet able, however, to operate (or think) systematically about representations of objects or events. Manipulating representations is a more abstract skill that develops later, during adolescence.

Concrete operational thinking differs from pre-operational thinking in two ways, each of which renders children more skilled as students. One difference is reversibility, or the ability to think about the steps of a process in any order. Imagine a simple science experiment, for example, such as one that explores why objects sink or float by having a child place an assortment of objects in a basin of water. Both the pre-operational and concrete operational child can recall and describe the steps in this experiment, but only the concrete operational child can recall them in any order (e.g., chronological, reverse chronological, etc). This skill is very helpful for any task involving multiple steps—a common feature of tasks in the classroom. In teaching new vocabulary from a story, for another example, a teacher might tell students:

1) Every time you come across a word you don’t know, write it down.

2) Then find and write down the definition of that word before returning to the story.

3) After you have a list of all the words you don’t know, have a friend test you on your list.”

These directions involve repeatedly remembering to move back and forth between a second step and a first—a task that concrete operational students—and most adults—find easy, but that pre-operational children often forget to do or find confusing. If the younger children are to do this task reliably, they may need external prompts, such as having the teacher remind them periodically to go back to the story to look for more unknown words.

The other new feature of thinking that develops during the concrete operational stage is the child’s ability to decenter or focus on more than one feature of a problem at a time. There are hints of decentration in preschool children’s dramatic play, which requires being aware on two levels at once—knowing that a banana can be both a banana and a “telephone.” But the decentration of the concrete operational stage is more deliberate and conscious than a preschoolers’ make-believe. Now the child can attend to two things at once quite purposefully, ie chew bubble gum and walk at the same time.

Suppose you give students a sheet with an assortment of subtraction problems on it, and ask them to do this:

“Find all of the problems that involve two-digit subtraction and that involve borrowing from the next column. Circle and solve only those problems.”

Following these instructions is quite possible for a concrete operational student (as long as they have been listening!) because the student can attend to the two subtasks simultaneously—finding the two-digit problems and identifying which actually involve borrowing. (Whether the student actually knows how to “borrow” however, is a separate question.)

In real classroom tasks, reversibility and decentration often happen together. A well-known example of joint presence is Piaget’s experiments with conservation, the belief that an amount or quantity stays the same even if it changes apparent size or shape (Piaget, 2001; Matthews, 1998). Imagine two identical balls made of clay. Any child, whether pre-operational or concrete operational, will agree that the two indeed have the same amount of clay in them simply because they look the same. But if you now squish one ball into a long, thin “hot dog,” the pre-operational child is likely to say that the amount of clay has changed—either because its shape is longer or because it is thinner, but at any rate because it now looks different. The concrete operational child will not make this mistake, thanks to new cognitive skills of reversibility and decentration: for him or her, the amount is the same because “you could squish it back into a ball again” (reversibility) and because “it may be longer, but it is also thinner” (decentration). Piaget would say the concrete operational child “has conservation of quantity.”

The Formal Operational Stage: Age 11 and Beyond

In the last of the Piagetian stages, the child becomes able to reason not only about tangible objects and events, but also about hypothetical or abstract ones. Hence, it has the name formal operational stage—the period when the individual can “operate” on “forms” or representations. With students at this level, the teacher can pose hypothetical (or contrary-to-fact) problems: “What if the world had never discovered oil?” or “What if the first European explorers had settled first in California instead of on the East Coast of the United States?” To answer such questions, students must use hypothetical reasoning, meaning that they must manipulate ideas that vary in several ways at once, and do so entirely in their minds.

The hypothetical reasoning that concerned Piaget primarily involved scientific problems. His studies of formal operational thinking therefore often look like problems that middle or high school teachers pose in science classes. In one problem, for example, a young person is presented with a simple pendulum, to which different amounts of weight can be hung (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958). The experimenter asks: “What determines how fast the pendulum swings: the length of the string holding it, the weight attached to it, or the distance that it is pulled to the side?”

The young person is not allowed to solve this problem by trial-and-error with the materials themselves, but must mentally reason a way to the solution. To do so systematically, he or she must imagine varying each factor separately, while also imagining the other factors that are held constant. This kind of thinking requires facility at manipulating mental representations of the relevant objects and actions—precisely the skill that defines formal operations.

As you might suspect, students with an ability to think hypothetically have an advantage in many kinds of school work: by definition, they require relatively few “props” to solve problems. In this sense they can in principle be more self-directed than students who rely only on concrete operations—certainly a desirable quality in the opinion of most teachers. Note, though, that formal operational thinking is desirable—but not sufficient for—solving all academic problems, and is far from being the only way that students achieve educational success. Formal thinking skills do not ensure that a student is motivated or well-behaved, for example, nor does they guarantee other desirable skills, such as ability at sports, music, or art. The fourth stage in Piaget’s theory is really about a particular kind of formal thinking: the kind needed to solve scientific problems and devise scientific experiments. Since many people do not normally deal with such problems in the normal course of their lives, it should be no surprise that research finds that many people never achieve or use formal thinking fully or consistently, or that they use it only in selected areas with which they are very familiar (Case & Okomato, 1996). For teachers, the limitations of Piaget’s ideas suggest a need for additional theories about development—ones that focus more directly on the social and interpersonal issues of childhood and adolescence.

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Reference materials used :

• 2.1 Cognitive Development: The Theory of Jean Piaget
• Cognitive Development – Piaget’s Preoperational Stage
• 11.2: Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development – Concrete Operational Thought
• What Is the Sensorimotor Stage?
• Piaget Stages of Development
• Piaget’s Formal Operational Stage of Cognitive Development

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