Identify one area of the material that you believe should be in the exam, and present a coherent Justification. Pigged emphasized that cognitive development Is stage-liked and discontinuous. Some key Ideas In Plague theory are that children are curious and active learners, who organize what they have learnt from their experiences via assimilation and accommodation. It was stated that a limitation in Piglet’s theory was the possible underestimation of children’s cognitive capacities.
As there are many existing research which challenge his theory, it is perhaps of worth to explore the limitation further and see to what extent did Pigged underestimate the cognitive capacities of children In the pre-operational stage? This will test one’s understanding of Piglet’s theory. Furthermore, Instead of simply forming our perceptions of children’s cognitive capacities based on Pigged theory, this will challenge students to read the existing research to have a more holistic and better understanding of the children’s cognitive capacities. ) To what extent did Pigged underestimate the cognitive capacities of children in the pre-operational stage? Pigged acknowledged that children are able to use mental symbol to represent an object that Is not physically present. Besides this accomplishment, Pigged focused on the deficiencies in the cognitive capacities of children. Firstly, Pigged believes that young children are egocentric and rely purely on their perceptual view to Judge others perspectives.
Pigged based this on a three- mountain test. However, 5 years old children can pass false belief tasks (Peeper, 1988). According to Oldster & Brenner (1999), children respond correctly on simple perspective taking tasks. Children’s perspective-taking seems crucially dependent on task demands. The way the task Is presented to children results In different answers and thus it is difficult to determine if child has possessed the ability.
Since children are able to pass other perspective taking tasks, Pigged may have underestimated the perceptual views of children. According to Pigged, children do not know that quantity is unrelated to the arrangement of objects and hence, they often fall the conservation tasks. They display concentration, in which they concentrate on one salient aspect of a stimulus, ignoring other aspects. However, some children show the width gesture despite giving an incorrect response, showing that they may be aware of the concept of conservation of volume.
Additionally, 3 years old children are able to give a response consistent with an understanding of conservation of number (Agleam, 1972). When children were asked to count the number of items in each row before transforming one of the rows, children gave the correct answer. Similarly, when Donaldson (1974) used a teddy bear to make the transformation seems Like an accident, children are able to conserve. All these suggest that children may be able to conserve and Pigged may have underestimated children’s understanding of conservation.
Hence, the above has illustrated the controversies in Piglet’s research and provided evidences showing children’s cognitive capacities are more developed than what Pigged has imagined it to be. A Plague overestimate congealer’s cognitive telltales-; Plague may nave overestimated some cognitive aspects of children in designing the Paginating tasks, which then causes him to underestimate the cognitive capacities of young children to large extent. Pigged may have overestimated their visual-spatial ability, attention and language ability.
The three mountain task requires children to adopt a spatial perspective, which may be more challenging. Children may fail the conservation task as they misunderstand the purpose of repeated questioning and think that the experimenter rejected their first answer. Ironically, one plausible explanation behind why children fail the Paginating tasks is because Pigged has overestimated the cognitive capacities of children. References Donaldson, M. 1974). Conservation accidents. Cognition, 3, 341-350.
Agleam, Rachel (1972), “The Nature and Development of Early Number Concepts,” Advanced Child Development, 7, 115-167. Oldster, W. ; Brenner, J. G. (1999). Interpretation and construction of coordinate dimensions by 4- to 5-year-old children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 17, 189-201. Wimpier, H. , ; Peeper, J. (1983). “Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. “. Cognition 13 (1): 103-128.
