What's My Child Thinking?: Practical Child Psychology for Modern Parents

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Dasen, P. (1994). Culture and cognitive development from a Piagetian perspective. In W .J. Lonner & R.S. Malpass (Eds.), Psychology and culture (pp. 145–149). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Four year-olds almost always chose a picture that represented what they could see and showed no awareness that the doll’s view would be different from this.

A child’s cognitive development is not just about acquiring knowledge, the child has to develop or construct a mental model of the world, which is referred to as a schema. Six years old were more aware of other viewpoints but still tended to choose the wrong one. This shows egocentrism as the child assumed that the doll “saw” the mountains as he didAccording to Piaget children learn through the process of accommodation and assimilation so the role of the teacher should be to provide opportunities for these processes to occur such as new material and experiences that challenge the children’s existing schemas. Adolescents can deal with hypothetical problems with many possible solutions. E.g. if asked ‘What would happen if money were abolished in one hour’s time? they could speculate about many possible consequences. Aim: Piaget and Inhelder (1956) wanted to find out at what age children decenter – i.e. become no longer egocentric. Infants at this stage also demonstrate animism. This is the tendency for the child to think that non-living objects (such as toys) have life and feelings like a person’s. Jean Piaget is famous for his theories regarding changes in cognitive development that occur as we move from infancy to adulthood.

A person who has always believed that all birds can fly might label penguins as birds that can fly. This is because their existing schema or understanding of birds includes the ability to fly. Keating, D. (1979). Adolescent thinking. In J. Adelson (Ed.), Handbook of adolescent psychology (pp. 211-246). New York: Wiley. Object Permanence Games: Play peek-a-boo or hide toys under a blanket to help babies understand that objects still exist even when they can’t see them. Gender & Learning: Stereotypes about gender abilities, like “boys are better at math,” can influence how children approach logical problems or classify objects based on perceived gender norms.Accommodation: when the new experience is very different from what we have encountered before we need to change our schemas in a very radical way or create a whole new schema. Hughes did this to make sure that the child understood what was being asked of him, so if s/he made mistakes they were explained and the child tried again. Interestingly, very few mistakes were made. Because Piaget’s theory is based upon biological maturation and stages, the notion of “readiness” is important. Readiness concerns when certain information or concepts should be taught. He believed that these incorrect answers revealed important differences between the thinking of adults and children. Piaget branched out on his own with a new set of assumptions about children’s intelligence: A 2-year-old child sees a man who is bald on top of his head and has long frizzy hair on the sides. To his father’s horror, the toddler shouts “Clown, clown” (Siegler et al., 2003).