DEVELOPMENT OF THINKING

To read up on the development of thinking, refer to pages 325–347 of Eysenck’s A2 Level Psychology.

Ask yourself

  • Why do children of 3 believe in Father Christmas (or the equivalent) whilst an 8-year-old is unlikely to?
  • Do children from different cultures use fundamentally different ways of seeing the world and symbolising it? Does it make a really fundamental difference to your thinking if you have never been taught to read or write?
  • Do children learn better if they discover things for themselves or is it better to explain things to them?

What you need to know

PIAGET’S THEORY / VYGOTSKY’S THEORY / BRUNER’S THEORY / APPLICATIONS OF PIAGET, VYGOTSKY, AND BRUNER TO EDUCATION
  • Description and evaluation
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  • Description and evaluation
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  • Description and evaluation
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  • Piaget’s theory
  • Vygotsky’s and Bruner’s theories
  • CASE (Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education)

PIAGET’S THEORY

Piaget suggested that children pass through various stages in their cognitive development. The main assumptions of his stage theory are:

  • All children pass through the same sequence in the same order—the order is invariant.
  • Each stage has its own characteristics, which are distinct from those in other stages.
  • Within any single stage, the cognitive operations (the abilities of the child) form an integrated whole.

The following table illustrates these:

Name of Stage / Age
(approximate) / Characteristics / Key features
The sensori-motor stage / 0–2 year / Children deal with the environment by using their senses and by actions (manipulating objects). Sensori-motor development (learning to co-ordinate one’s senses with one’s motor responses) is basically intelligence through action. They live in the “here and now”.
They are incapable of true object permanence. In the early part of this stage children do not recognise that an object exists even when they cannot see it. In the later stages they develop perseverative search—searching for an object in the place where it was found some time earlier rather than in the place in which it was last seen. This shows some features of object permanence but full object permanence is only achieved towards the end of the sensori-motor stage. / Learning through senses and actions
Living in the “here and now”
Lack of true object permanence
The pre-operational stage / 2–7 years / Children are now capable of symbolic thought—of recognising that one object stands for another. They can now begin to understand language and to engage in pretend play.
They are still incapable of logical thinking shown by the fact that they cannot conserve (cannot understand that objects remain the same regardless of changes in appearance). This in turn is due to the fact that they lack an important cognitive operation of reversibility. This involves the ability to undo or reverse mentally some operation that has been carried out.
They are egocentric: they cannot see things from another’s point of view. / Symbolic thought
Lack of conservation
Egocentrism
The concrete operational stage / 7–11/12 years / Children become capable of some logical thought—of some “operations”. The term “operations” is used to describe internally consistent mental rules used in thinking. They become capable of conservation.
They can use the various cognitive operations only with respect to specific concrete situations, usually ones with which they are familiar, which are real and can be seen. / Can perform certain “operations”
The formal operational stage / 11/12 upwards / The person can think logically about potential events or abstract ideas as well as concrete ones, so their thinking can go beyond the limitations of immediate reality. / Can reason hypothetically


The psychological processes involved in Piaget’s theory are as follows:

Schemas

As children explore their environment and interact with it, they gradually organise everything that they know about a particular object or activity into a schema. A schema contains all the information, experience, ideas, and memories an individual has about an object or sequence of events.
Many early schemas are inaccurate. For example, a young child’s thinking is characterised by animism, the belief that all natural phenomena and inanimate objects, such as rocks, are alive.
As the child matures and their cognitive abilities develop, so their schemas are modified: they become more complex and more accurate. This is done as follows.

Equilibration

Children constantly come across information that does not quite fit into their existing schemas. For example, a child may think all dogs are called “Woof” because their dog is. They gradually realise this is not true. This puts the child in a state of disequilibrium. Disequilibrium occurs if new information does not fit into an existing schema; the individual is then motivated to change the schema or form a new one to fit the information. Once this has been satisfactorily accomplished, a state of equilibrium is reached.
Schemas are changed by the use of two processes: assimilation and accommodation.

Assimilation

Assimilation refers to the process whereby new experiences or information are incorporated into an existing schema without changing any other part of it or requiring a new schema to be formed.
Young babies soon develop a schema for picking things up. If an infant has developed a schema for picking up a rattle, he or she may use the same schema—the same grasp—to pick up other objects such as a toy car, a furry toy, and other small objects. This is the process of assimilation.

Accommodation

However, this grasp isn’t good enough to pick up very small or very large objects so eventually the schema will change. This brings us onto the second process: accommodation.
Accommodation refers to the process whereby new experiences or information cannot be incorporated into an existing schema without either changing the schema in a fundamental way or creating a new schema.
If the infant tries to pick up a very small object using the same grasp schema as he or she used for the rattle, this may not be successful. So the infant changes the schema—perhaps by using finger and thumb instead of the whole hand—in order to grasp this new small object. The grasp schema has been changed by the process of accommodation.

Operations

Operations are the rules by which the child understands the world. Piaget believed that the reason children think in different ways at different stages is because the operations they are capable of performing change as they grow older. Only in the last two stages, the concrete operational and the formal operational stages, are they capable of performing logical operations.

RESEARCH EVIDENCE

Piaget used the clinical interview to research the development of thinking in children. There is a focus of interest (the same materials and first question are consistent). After that the questions depend on what the child replies.
Research evidence will be divided into for and against, depending on whether it supports or contradicts Piaget’s stages.

Sensori-motor

For: Piaget showed that young infants under about 8 months do not look for a hidden object. After this, they will look in the last place it was found even though it has, in front of the child, been moved again.
Against: Baillargeon and Graber (1988; see A2 Level Psychology page 330)—Children show surprise when a toy is lifted from behind a screen from which it was previously moved.

Pre-operational

Conservation
For: Piaget and colleagues carried out conservation tasks in which the child is asked if two quantities (such as the number of counters, water in two jars) are the same before a transformation is made (one row of counters is spread out or the water from one glass is poured into a taller, thinner one). Pre-operational children believe there is now more of one lot than another.
Against: McGarrigle and Donaldson (1974; see A2 Level Psychology pages 331–332) used “naughty teddy” to move a row of counters. Conservation was shown by 70% of 6-year-old children compared to only 40% in the standard condition. (It is worth noting, however, that many children thought the rows were the same when naughty teddy did add or take away a counter, so this study can also be criticised.)
Wheldall and Poborca (1980; see A2 Level Psychology page 331) found that 28% of 6- to 7-year-olds conserved using the standard task but 50% conserved with a non-verbal version.
Price-Williams, Gordon, and Ramirez (1969; see A2 Level Psychology page 333): Children showed conservation in familiar tasks more than in ones that were not familiar to them (even if conservation was the same, e.g. for volume). This points to the importance of cultural experience, which Piaget underplayed.
Egocentrism
For: Piaget used the three mountains task and found that children under 8 years nearly always chose the photograph that corresponded to their own point of view.
Against: Hughes (1975; see A2 Level Psychology page 333) used the “policeman doll” study and found that 90% of children aged 3½–5 succeeded on this task. The task was simpler, more interesting, and more meaningful than the three mountains task—any of these factors could have been responsible for the higher percentage.
Concrete and formal operations
For: Piaget’s studies of conservation and egocentrism showed that children can now conserve and are not egocentric.
Piaget used the pendulum task (see A2 Level Psychology page 330) to differentiate concrete and formal operational thinkers and this was successful in demonstrating that children in the formal operations stage can think hypothetically and can test hypotheses in a systematic way (testing the length of the string, then the weight, etc. while keeping the others constant).
Against: Bradmetz (1999; see A2 Level Psychology page 334) assessed formal operational thought in 15-year-olds and found only 1 of 62 showed evidence of it.

EVALUATION
  • Piaget has provided an astonishingly complex and detailed overall theory of cognitive development. He has explained the processes (schema formation, assimilation, accommodation, equilibration, etc) involved in how a child’s thinking moves from being irrational and illogical to being rational and logical.
  • There is much evidence in support. Piaget and his colleagues carried out literally thousands of studies of young children and provided detailed documentation on which to base the theory. The findings have been supported by other researchers.
  • The theory has been used successfully in many applications. The main application has been in education, in which Piaget’s notions have been used extensively and successfully to teach children how to think rather than simply to provide information.
  • Piaget underestimated the cognitive abilities of young children. Although it has been clearly demonstrated that young children are egocentric and cannot conserve, Piaget’s tests of this probably underestimated their ability in this respect.
  • Piaget overestimated the ability of adolescents and some adults. Many adults never reach the stage of formal operations and many people do not reach this stage until much later than Piaget suggested.
  • Piaget de-emphasised the role of social factors in cognitive development. Piaget’s theory was very much based on the gradual unfolding of skills as children’s brains mature and they discover the world for themselves. He put little emphasis on the role of direct teaching and of the social world in shaping a child’s development. This is a controversial criticism because it is not clear whether or not he was correct.
  • Piaget’s theory does not account well for individual differences. Piaget’s focus was on the universal processes that underpin every individual’s cognitive development. He did not pay attention to the reasons why some people develop more quickly than others, although he did acknowledge that this is the case.
VYGOTSKY’S THEORY

Vygotsky paid particular attention to social factors in children’s development and the way in which adults and more experienced people help children learn. Important concepts are:

The role of others

Vygotsky believed that children make better progress if they work with people who are more experienced than they are: he believed that little progress can be made if the child is left to explore the world alone. A major theme of Vygotsky’s theory, then, is that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the development of understanding of the world.

The zone of proximal development (ZPD)

One of the reasons why adults (or older children) can help a child to develop is based on the idea of the zone of proximal development, which can be defined as the area between the level of performance a child can achieve when working independently and a higher level of performance that is possible when working under the guidance or direction of more skilled adults or peers (Wertsch et al., 1992). The fundamental idea, then, is that there is range of skills that children cannot do alone but which can be developed with adult guidance or help from more experienced children. Equally, there is a limit to what a child can do, even with adult help. So the ZPD is the skill range between what a child can do without help and what they could not achieve even with help.
Vygotsky distinguishes between a child’s actual developmental level and his or her potential level of development. When children are operating within their ZPD—their potential developmental level—they can work with more advanced ideas and concepts as long as they are working with someone who is more of an expert than they are.

Scaffolding

The way in which adults help children learn is by a process known as scaffolding, which can be defined as the appropriate support framework for children’s learning. Scaffolding is necessary for children to be able to learn for themselves and eventually internalise the concepts. In the course of everyday life, adults guide children all the time and they quite automatically change this guidance, or help, to suit the particular child according to their age and ability.

Language

This develops in three stages:

  • Language and thought are unrelated.
  • Language and thought develop in parallel and have little effect on each other.
  • Language plays a vital role in thought. Children talk to themselves to assist their thinking and problem solving. This starts with egocentric speech (speaking without actually talking to anyone) and gives way to inner speech.
RESEARCH EVIDENCE
  • Behrend, Harris, and Cartwright (1992, see A2 Level Psychology page 337) showed that children using inner speech performed difficult tasks better than children making little use of inner speech.
  • Berk (1994, see A2 Level Psychology page 337) found that children using inner speech when solving maths problems did better at maths over the following year.
  • Girbau (2002, see A2 Level Psychology page 337) found that, contrary to Vygotsky’s predictions, children aged 8–10 still use egocentric speech.
EVALUATION OF VYGOTSKY’S THEORY
  • It recognises the key role of the social environment in cognitive development.
  • It has been successfully applied to education.
  • Support from research. Vygotsky’s proposal that inner speech helps children’s cognitive development has been supported.
  • Vygotsky carried out little research. This means that his ideas are largely speculative.
  • He exaggerated the importance of the social environment. Children’s cognitive development is probably more determined by internal factors than Vygotsky believed.
  • The theory does not specify what types of social interaction are most helpful. Vygotsky did not say if general encouragement or specific instruction is more helpful.
  • Social interactions are not always beneficial to learning. Sometimes help from adults can upset and annoy children rather than enlighten them.
BRUNER’S THEORY

Bruner’s theory is basically an extension of Vygotsky’s approach.

Main principles

There are three main principles to Bruner’s constructivist theory.

  1. Instruction must be concerned with experiences and contexts that make students willing and able to learn. This involves a state of readiness on the part of the student.
  2. Instruction should be structured so it can be understood easily. This involves spiral organisation—topics are returned to at intervals at progressively more advanced levels.
  3. Instruction should be designed to allow students to draw inferences and to fill in gaps in the information provided. This involves the student going beyond the information given.
Scaffolding

Bruner agreed with Vygotsky about the importance of scaffolding (see previous notes). Granott (2005, see A2 Level Psychology page 339) identified four components of effective scaffolding:

  1. Input from scaffolding should always be at a higher level than that of the child’s.
  2. It should be reduced when the child’s input is reduced and increased when the child’s input is increased. This means the child always takes an active role.
  3. It should be withdrawn once the child does not need it.
  4. It should be fun and interesting for both parties.

RESEARCH EVIDENCE

  • Wood et al. (1976, see A2 Level Psychology page 339) found that a tutor helping 3- to 5-year-olds did more telling and less showing and helped less in general as children got older.
  • Moss (1992, see A2 Level Psychology page 339) reviewed studies of scaffolding and found it was an effective technique for promoting learning in preschool children.
  • Conner, Knight, and Cross (1997, see A2 Level Psychology page 339) found that both mothers and fathers used scaffolding effectively and that children who received better scaffolding continued to perform better than those who had received poor scaffolding.

EVALUATION OF BRUNER’S APPROACH

The positive features are the same as for Vygotsky’s theory:

  • It showed the importance of social factors.
  • It developed further the notion of scaffolding. It outlined the conditions in which it is most effective.
  • It underplayed internal factors in cognitive development.
  • The effects of scaffolding are unpredictable. The personal relationship between child and scaffolder can influence its effectiveness.
  • Scaffolding is not appropriate for all children. Some older children (and even some young ones) prefer to find things out for themselves rather than by interaction with a tutor.
APPLICATIONS OF PIAGET, VYGOTSKY, AND BRUNER TO EDUCATION

Piaget