Piaget's fundamental assumption about children was that they are mentally active as well as physically active from the moment of birth, and that their activity greatly contributes to their own development.
His approach to understanding cognitive development is often labeled constructivist, because it depicts children as constructing knowledge for themselves in response to their experiences.
Three of the most important of children's constructive processes, according to Piaget, are generating hypotheses, performing experiments, and drawing conclusions from their observations. If this description reminds you of scientific problem solving, you are not alone: the "child as scientist" is the dominant metaphor in Piaget's theory.
This example also illustrates a second basic Piagetian assumption: children learn many important lessons on their own, rather than depending on instruction from adults or older children.
This incident also highlights a third basic assumption of Piaget's: children are intrinsically motivated to learn and do not need rewards from other people to do so. When they acquire a new capability, they apply it as often as possible. They also reflect on the lessons of their experience, because they want to understand themselves and everything around them.
1. The stage model depicts children's thinking as being more consistent than it is. According to Piaget, once children enter a given stage, their thinking consistently shows the characteristics of that stage across diverse concepts. Subsequent research, however, has shown that children's thinking is far more variable than this depiction suggests. For example, most children succeed on conservation-of-number problems by age 6, whereas most do not succeed on conservation-of-solid-quantity problems until age 8 or 9 (Field, 1987). Piaget recognized that such variability exists but underestimated its extent and failed to explain it.
2. Infants and young children are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized. Piaget employed fairly difficult tests to assess most of the concepts he studied. This led him to miss infants' and young children's earliest knowledge of these concepts. For example, Piaget's test of object permanence required children to reach for the hidden object after a delay; Piaget claimed that children do not do this until 8 or 9 months of age. However, alternative tests of object permanence, which analyze where infants look immediately after the object has disappeared from view, indicate that by 3 months of age, even these young infants at least suspect that objects continue to exist (Baillargeon, 1987; 1993).
3. Piaget's theory understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development. Piaget's theory focuses on how children come to understand the world through their own efforts. From the day that children emerge from the womb, however, they live in an environment of adults and older children who shape their cognitive development in countless ways. A child's cognitive development reflects the contributions of other people, as well as of the broader culture, to a far greater degree than Piaget's theory acknowledges.
4. Piaget's theory is vague about the cognitive processes that give rise to children's thinking and about the mechanisms that produce cognitive growth. Piaget's theory provides any number of excellent descriptions of children's thinking. It is less revealing, however, about the processes that lead children to think in a particular way and that produce changes in their thinking. Assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration have an air of plausibility, but how they operate is unclear.
-consists of the knowledge that people accumulate over their lifetime.
-It includes factual knowledge (e.g., knowing the capitals of different
countries or the teams that won the Super Bowl in the past 5 years),
-conceptual knowledge (e.g., the concepts of justice, mercy, and equality),
-procedural knowledge (e.g., knowing how to tie a shoe or play an Xbox game),
-attitudes (e.g., likes and dislikes regarding political parties or anchovies),
-reasoning strategies (e.g., knowing how to take an argument to its logical extreme to show its inadequacy), and so on.
-Long-term memory can thus be thought of as the
totality of one's knowledge, whereas working memory can be regarded as the subset of that knowledge that is being processed at a given time.
-long-term memory can retain an unlimited amount of information for unlimited periods.
Executive functions involve the control of cognition.
Three major types of executive functions are
-inhibiting tempting actions that would be counterproductive;
-enhancing working memory through use of strategies,
such as repeating a phone number that would otherwise be forgotten; and
-being cognitively flexible, for example, taking someone else's perspective in an argument despite its differing from one's own.
As these examples suggest, executive functioning integrates information from working memory and long-term memory to accomplish goals.
-preschoolers have great difficulty inhibiting the impulse to quickly respond to commands that are not preceded by the critical phrase in such games, whereas early elementary school children are much better at inhibiting the impulse to act immediately (Dempster, 1995; Diamond, Kirkham, & Amso, 2002; Sabbagh et al., 2006).
-Strategies for controlling working memory tend to develop a little later, largely in the first few years of elementary school
During kindergarten and the first few years of elementary school, children's knowledge of single-digit addition improves greatly. One reason is that children discover new strategies, such as counting-on (e.g., solving 2 + 9 by thinking "9, 10, 11"). Another source of improvement is faster and more accurate execution of all the strategies that children know (e.g., retrieval of answers from memory, counting from one, and counting-on). A third source of improvement is that children choose among strategies increasingly adaptively (e.g., using counting-on most often on problems with a large difference between the addends, such as 2 + 9, and counting from one on problems such as 7 + 8, which are difficult for them to solve correctly by using the other strategies they know
-in which more competent people provide a temporary framework that supports children's thinking at a higher level than children could manage on their own (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976). Ideally, supplying this framework includes explaining the goal of the task, demonstrating how the task can be done, and helping the child with the most difficult parts of the task. This, in fact, is the way parents tend to teach their children
The higher the quality of the scaffolding—that is, the more that instructional efforts are directed at the upper end of the child's capabilities—the greater the learning (Conner, Knight, & Cross, 1997; Gauvain, 2001).
-One example of the impact of culturally specific content comes from a study of analogical reasoning, a process in which experience with previously encountered problems is applied to new problems.
-In the study (Chen, Mo, & Honomichl, 2004), American and Chinese college students were asked to solve two problems. One problem required a solution analogous to the strategy of leaving a trail of white pebbles to follow home from the woods in "Hansel and Gretel," a tale well known to the American students but unknown to the Chinese. The American students were far more successful in solving that problem, and many of them alluded to the fairy tale even though they had not heard it in many years. The other problem required a solution analogous to that in a fairy tale that was well known to the Chinese students but unknown to the Americans. In this case, the Chinese students were vastly superior in solving the problem, and many alluded to the relevant fairy tale.
-Children's memories of their own experiences also reflect their culture. When 4- to 8-year-olds from China and the United States were asked to describe their earliest memories, their descriptions differed in ways that reflected their culture's attitudes and values (Wang, 2007).
-Chinese culture prizes and promotes interdependence among people, especially among close relatives. European American culture, in contrast, prizes and promotes the independence of individuals. Consistent with these cultural emphases, the Chinese children's reports of their earliest memories included more references to other people than did those of American children, and the American children's reports included more references to the child's own feelings and reactions.
-Thus, the attitudes and values of a culture, as well as its artifacts and technologies, shape the thoughts and memories of people in that culture.
a class of theories that focus on how change occurs over time in complex systems.
-As suggested by the second term in the label, dynamic-systems theories depict each child as a well-integrated system, in which many subsystems—perception, action, attention, memory, language, social interaction, and so on—work together to determine behavior. For example, success on tasks viewed as measures of conceptual understanding, such as object permanence, is influenced by perception, attention, motor skills, and a host of other factors
-For example, dynamic-systems research has shown that improved reaching allows infants to play with objects in more advanced ways, such as organizing them into categories or interesting configurations (Spencer et al., 2006; Thelen & Corbetta, 1994).
-Dynamic-systems research also has shown that the onset of crawling changes infants' relationships with family members, who may be thrilled to see their baby attain an important motor milestone but also find themselves having to be much more watchful and controlling to avoid harm to the child and to the objects in the child's path.
-Thelen and colleagues (1993) repeatedly observed the reaching efforts of four infants during their first year. Using high-speed motion-capture systems and computer analysis of the infants' muscle movements, they found that because of individual differences in such factors as the infants' physiology, activity level, arousal, motivation, and experience, each child faced different challenges in his or her attempts to master reaching.