LANGUAGE AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT-
THE PIAGET PROJECT
Purpose: To discover if the conclusions that Piaget drew about language and cognitive development for children can be substantiated by your experimental findings.
Process:
After you have been assigned to an experimental group, meet with your team to develop an experiment to test the development stage of your group. You will need to know who Piaget is and the characteristics of each of his developmental stages.The five groups we will use to represent Piaget’s four stages are:
Sensorimotor Stage 1-3 (Birth to 12 months) - Learning rooted in the development of sensorimotor experiences and reflexes
Sensorimotor Stage 4-6 (12-24 months) – Learning supports further refinement and elaboration of reflexes and motor development
Preoperational Stage (2-5 years) - Learning centered around needs and desires of the individual. All experience reflected back to child as the center of action.
Concrete Operations (6-10 years)-Children able to consider others’ point-of-view, they recognize that their thoughts and actions exist separately from others and can used concrete information to solve problems
Formal Operations (10-16+) - Adolescents use logical-mathematical, inductive and deductive reasoning to solve abstract problems
After you know which group of children you will use for your experiment, choose the roles that each member will play. Each role can be done by up to 2 people and each group is to be comprised of the following roles:
Lead Researcher(s)-Person(s) who decide(s) which activities represent a reasonable test of the stage tested.
Experiment Designer(s) - Person(s) who plans and puts together the experiment, determines what materials are needed and who will provide them.
Materials Expert(s) - Person(s) who are responsible for gathering and bringing the materials for the experiments. Written documentation about why the materials are chosen should be provided by this group. For example, if it is decided that a stacking toy will be used to illustrate a concept in Piaget’s sensorimotor period, the Materials Expert(s) could decide that cups of different sizes will be used because they are readily available and are safe for children under three years of age.
Archive and Background Experts- These people will do the research on the Internet to get background for the experiment. They will find out all that they can about other experiments using Piaget’s theory.
Research Writer(s) - This person(s) do the write up of the experiment that will be presented. All members should contribute to the discussion about the alternate theory to explain Piaget’s findings. For example, one could stay that “Our experiment confirmed the principle of overgeneralization as a characteristic of preoperational children. The fact that the child tested called all of the four-legged fur animals “dogs” shows that he/she has generalized the characteristics of the animals that she knows to all animals. Actually, the picture that we showed her was one of a fox. After naming this animal differently, she was able to recognize it as a fox and not a dog. Piaget would say that she “over generalized” () and used the process of assimilation and accommodation to change how she made meaning of the new information. However, social learning theorists would say that the child is learning by modeling and imitating what others around her do and say. (Social Learning: )
Outcome:
After completing the research and conducting the experiment, you should have a clear understanding about how children learn and how learning changes as they grow and mature. As you complete the final report, you should be able to see the relationship between different developmental theories and they can be used to frame development. The write-up for this project will take place at the end of the experiment. Each student must complete an individual write-up. These will be handed out during the experiment.