Mosman school kids and Piaget

In a recent article in The Mosman Daily school children as young as 4 had been asked to describe their city of dreams to help Mosman Council shape its plans for the next 40 years.

The thing that caught my interest was the way kids use language to represent objects by images. I am of course talking about Piaget’s work and in particular the stages of cognitive development. Piaget talks about the representation in the mind of a set of perceptions, ideas, and/or actions, which go together (schema) and periods in a child's development in which he or she is capable of understanding some things but not others (stages).

We know Piaget's theories focus on:

• Children, rather than all learners.
• The development, rather than learning per se, so it does not address learning of information or specific behaviours.
• Discrete stages of development, marked by qualitative differences, rather than a gradual increase in number and complexity of behaviors, concepts, ideas, etc.

So here is what some of the kids had to say…

·             A 6 year old wants  “Waterslides, bumper cars and rollercoasters”

·             A 7 year old says “Horses that we could ride to school”

·             A 6 year old “Miniature cars that we could shrink to fit” and

·             Pet dragons that breath lightning

According to Piaget 2 to 7 year-olds learn to use language and to represent objects by images and words. Such as dragons that breath lightning.

Their thinking is still egocentric - have difficulty taking the viewpoint of others. Horses that we could ride to school

Classify objects by a single feature: e.g. group together all the red blocks regardless of shape or all the square blocks regardless of color such as Miniature cars that we could shrink to fit.

Babies Can Count

Jack Dikian

February 2011

The University of Queensland study found children understood the concept of numbers and counting by the time they were 18 months old, at least six months earlier than previously thought.

Child development and milestone attainment has attracted significant research and the topic of a number of underlying models. More recent theories outline the developmental stages of children and identify the typical ages at which these growth milestones occur.

Freud's theory of psychosexual development is one of the best known, but also one of the most controversial. Freud believed that personality develops through a series of childhood stages during which the pleasure-seeking energies of the id become focused on certain erogenous areas.

The theory, put simply, psychosexual stages are either completed successfully, resulting in a healthy personality or if certain issues are not resolved at the appropriate stage, fixation can occur. A fixation is a persistent focus on an earlier psychosexual stage and until this conflict is resolved, the individual will remain "stuck" in this stage.

Piaget suggested that children learn actively through the play and developed stages of development. Piaget proposed the sensorimotor stage (birth to about age of 2) 
during which, the child learns about herself and his environment through motor and reflex actions. Thought derives from sensation and movement. The child learns that she is separate from her environment and that aspects of the environment — parents or favorite toys, objects — continue to exist even though they may be outside the reach of her senses.

His work on children’s quantitative development provided mathematics educators with crucial insights into how children learn mathematical concepts and ideas. Piaget provided tactual representations of mathematical concepts such as conservation of quantities, one-one correspondence, ordination, cardination, classification, and additive and multiplicative composition of numbers. Here he isn’t testing the child's ability to solve math problems, but her ability to solve spatial relationships that are a precursor to true understanding of mathematical operations.

The University of Queensland study found children understood the concept of numbers and counting by the time they were 18 months old, at least six months earlier than previously thought. The researchers showed simple videos of correct counting and incorrect counting to toddlers aged 15 months and toddlers aged 18 months, monitored their reactions and recorded the length of time the children watched each scenario.

The experiment showed that by the time children were 18 months old, they paid more attention to the correct counting video as opposed to the incorrect one.