DEP3103 EXAM2

Piaget's change processes

— assimilation, accommodation, and organization — can't account for patterns of children's changes observed today

Concrete Operational Achievements

-Conservation Decentration Reversibility -Classification Pass the "Class Inclusion" Problem -Seriation Ability to order items along a quantitative dimension Transitive inference: seriate mentally

The Barry "Manilow t-shirt" study

-Gilovich, Medvec, & Savitsky (2000) -If you wore a Barry Manilow t-shirt to class, what percentage of your fellow students would notice? Students estimated 50% In reality, only 23% noticed the shirt

decicion making

c. Teenagers encounter many complex situations involving competing goals, while not yet having enough knowledge to consider the pros and cons of many experiences and to predict their own reactions. d. Adolescents also often feel overwhelmed by their expanding range of academic and social options. e. Over time, adolescents learn from their successes and failures; as a result, their confidence and decision-making performance improve.

Directions

(1) Between 7 and 8 years, children start to perform mental rotations, aligning the self's frame of reference to match that of a person in a different orientation. (2) Unlike 6-year-olds, who focus on the end point of a route without describing exactly how to get there, 8- to 10-year-olds can give well-organized directions for getting from one place to another by imagining another person's movements along a route. Children's mental representations of familiar large-scale spaces, such as their neighborhood or school, are called cognitive maps.

Piaget's stages of cognitive development

(1) Sensorimotor stage (birth-2 years): Cognitive development begins as the baby uses the senses and movements to explore the world. (2) Preoperational stage (2-7 years): The baby's action patterns evolve into the symbolic but thinking of the preschooler. (3) Concrete operational stage (7-11 years): Cognition is transformed into the more organized, logical reasoning of the school-age child. (4) Formal operational stage (11 years on): Thought becomes the abstract, systematic reasoning system of the adolescent and adult. Piaget was among the first theorists to stress the importance of children's readiness to learn—presenting children with appropriately challenging tasks while not overwhelming them by trying to hurry them to higher levels.

Formal Operational Stage

-11 and up -Capacity for abstract, systematic, scientific thinking -Hypothetico-deductive reasoning Deducing hypotheses from general theory Possibility à reality Not as limited Pendulum problem -According to Piaget, around age 11, young people enter the formal operational stage. 1. They develop the capacity for abstract, systematic, scientific thinking. 2. They are able to "operate on operations," coming up with general, logical rules through internal reflection, without needing concrete things or events as objects of thought.

Concrete Operational Stage

-7 to 11 years -Major turning point in cognitive development -More logical, flexible & organized -According to Piaget, the concrete operational stage, from about 7 to 11 years, marks a major turning point in cognitive development, when thought becomes far more logical, flexible, and organized, more closely resembling the reasoning of adults than that of younger children.

consequences of abstract thought

-Idealism and Criticism -Problems with Decision Making Inexperience Overwhelming options -Self-Consciousness & Self-Focusing Sensitivity to criticism Personal fable Imaginary audience

limitations of concrete operational thought

-Operations work best w/ concrete objects Problems w/ abstract ideas -Continuum of Acquisition Mastery gradual -Culture & schooling have a big impact 1. The important limitation of concrete operational thinking is that children think in an organized, logical fashion only when dealing with concrete information that they can perceive directly, but until age 11 or 12, their mental operations work poorly when considering abstract ideas—ones not apparent in the real world. 2. School-age children master Piaget's concrete operational tasks step by step, not all at once, following a continuum of acquisition (or gradual mastery) of logical concepts—another indication of the limitations of concrete operational thinking. 1. Piaget believed that brain development combined with experience in a rich and varied external world should lead children everywhere to reach the concrete operational stage. 2. Culture and schooling also profoundly affect children's task performance.

Personal fable

-Teenagers' belief that others are observing and thinking about them leads to an inflated opinion of their own importance—a feeling of being special and unique.

Deductive Reasoning

-Younger child struggles Not consistent with their own reality -Adolescent able to use "propositional thought" Ex: "Either the swan is black or it is not black" EVEN THOUGH a child has never seen a black swan

imaginary audience

-adolescents' belief that they are the focus of everyone else's attention and concern, which makes them extremely self-conscious and sensitive to public criticism.

Spatial Reasoning

-mental rotations -Directions improve -Cognitive maps

propositional thought

1. Another characteristic of the formal operational stage is propositional thought—adolescents' ability to evaluate the logic of propositions (verbal statements) without referring to real-world circumstances. 2. In contrast, children can evaluate the logic of statements only by considering them against concrete evidence in the real world.

hypothetico-deductive Reasoning

1. At adolescence, young people become capable of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. When faced with a problem, they start with a hypothesis, a general theory of all possible factors that might affect an outcome, from which they deduce logical, testable inferences. 2. Unlike concrete operational children, who start with reality—the most obvious predictions about a situation—and cannot think of other alternatives, adolescents begin with possibility and proceed to reality, developing hypotheses and testing them experimentally in a systematic fashion. Around age 11, children enter Piaget's formal operational stage, becoming capable of abstract, systematic, scientific thinking, including the ability to form hypotheses based on a general theory and to evaluate the logic of verbal propositions. Language is increasingly important at this stage. However, many college students and even many adults are not fully formal operational. People are most likely to think abstractly in situations in which they have had extensive experience while relying on intuitive judgments in other situations. Cultural influences also play a major role in whether people develop the ability to solve hypothetical problems.

Classification

a. Between ages 7 and 10, children pass Piaget's class inclusion problem, indicating their awareness of classification hierarchies and ability to focus on relations between a general category and two specific categories at the same time—that is, on three relations at once.

idealism and criticism

a. In adolescence, the capacity for abstract thinking opens up the world of the ideal and the notion of perfection. b. The disparity between teenagers' idealism and adults' more realistic view creates tension between parent and child. c. Overall, teenage idealism and criticism lead to a greater capacity to work constructively for social change and to form positive, lasting relationships.

self consciousness and self focusing

a. Piaget believed that in adolescence, a new form of egocentrism arises, in which adolescents have difficulty distinguishing their own and others' perspectives, so that they develop two distorted images of the relationship between self and others. (1) The first is the imaginary audience—adolescents' belief that they are the focus of everyone else's attention and concern, which makes them extremely self-conscious and sensitive to public criticism. (2) The second cognitive distortion is the personal fable. Teenagers' belief that others are observing and thinking about them leads to an inflated opinion of their own importance—a feeling of being special and unique.

Seriation

a. Six- or 7-year-olds are able to order items along a quantitative dimension, such as length or weight—an ability known as seriation. b. The concrete operational child can also seriate mentally, an ability called transitive inference, which involves integrating three relationships at once.

Conservation

a. The ability to pass conservation tasks provides clear evidence of operations. b. Older children engage in decentration, recognizing that a change in one aspect of an object is compensated for by a change in another aspect—an explanation that also illustrates reversibility, the capacity to imagine the object returning to its original appearance.