Piaget On Development

• Heteronomous Morality: Young children judge in terms of the “objective,” the results you can point to. Subjective intention is not related to morality. It’s what happens (objectively) that makes and act good or bad. Obedience to authority defines what is good. Rules are seen as absolute and one should obey them at all times under all circumstance. They young also believe in “immanent justice” – that justice inheres in or resides in the physical world, nature will punish wrongdoers.
• Moral judgements become more autonomous as peers discuss and disagree on what is right and wrong.

I. The Development of Thinking: Children experiment with objects and events in their environment and construct schemas

• Sensori-motor Stage (Infancy, 0-2 years)
  • Discovery of the relationship between actions and the consequences of those actions.
  • Differentiation of self and objects.
  • Development of object permanence – the awareness that an object continues to exist even when it is not present.
• Preoperational Stage (Early childhood, 2-6 years)
  • The child learns to use language and to represent objects by images and words.
  • The child classifies objects by a single feature; for example, groups together all the red blocks regardless of shape or all the square blocks regardless of color.
  • The child does not yet comprehend certain mental routines for separating, combining, and otherwise transforming information in a logical manner.
  • The child has not yet attained conservation – the understanding that the amount of a substance remains the same even when its form changes.
  • Perceptual and Cognitive Egocentrism: Preoperational children are unaware of perspective other than their own – they believe that everyone else perceives the environment the same way they do.
• Concrete Operational Stage (Middle childhood, 7-11 years)
  • Although children are using abstract terms, they are doing so only in relation to concrete objects.
  • The child can think logically about objects and events
  • The child achieves conservation of number, mass, and weight
  • The child classifies objects according to several features and can order them in series along a single dimension, such as size
  • Cognitive Egocentrism
• Formal Operational Stage (Adolescence and Adulthood, 12 years on)
  • The person can think logically about abstract propositions and test hypotheses systematically.
  • The person becomes concerned with the hypothetical, the future, and ideological problems.

II. The Clinical Method: Emphasis on the reasoning which underlies children’s thoughts, ideas, or actions.

• Observing naturally occurring examples of children’s thinking and infants’ intelligence
• Interviewing children about their thoughts and ideas
• Presenting infants and children with tasks or stimuli in a systematic way

III. How development occurs:

• Cognitive development occurs through the activity of the child, not through passive absorbing of knowledge. It is the active exchange between child and environment that promotes intellectual growth.
• Piaget states that intellectual growth occurs because of a basic underlying tendency (internal motivation) for the individual to adapt to his or her environment.
• Assimilation and Accomodation --> “Interactionist”
  • The child’s internal cognitions must interact with the environment for normal development to occur.
  • Children experiment with objects and events in their environment and construct schemas – theories about how the physical and social worlds operate.
  • Upon encountering a novel object or event, the child attempts to assimilate it – that is, to understand it in terms of a preexisting schema. If the new experience does not fit the existing schema, the child modifies the schema and thereby extends his or her theory of the world.

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