Piaget\'s theory views children as active in constructing their development. Exp
ID: 3495995 • Letter: P
Question
Piaget's theory views children as active in constructing their development. Explain what children construct as they develop intellectually (i.e., cognitively) and give an example. According to Piaget. children adapt to the world through a dynamic balance between two complimentary processes. What are they? Give examples of how these processes drive the construction of knowledge in children. Why is reversibility an important characteristic of children's reasoning at the stage of concrete operations? Give examples of experiments that demonstrate how children's reasoning changes from preoperational to concrete operational as a consequence of being able to perform reversible mental actions. According to Piaget. Learning is an active process. This means that teaching can only take place indirectly. Explain how teaching should be organized according to Piagetian construct theory. Discuss the implications for education of 3 Piagetian theoretical principles. Be specific about how these principles render constructivist instruction direction from traditional instruction (i.e. transmission model)Explanation / Answer
Answer 4.
Implications of Piaget's theory are as follows :
1. This emphasises on the way the child is thinking and not its outcomes:
This is important since the parent and the teacher need to look at the thought process of the child. It is important to check if the child is giving correct answers, but also what way the child is using to get to those answers. When a teacher appreciates the method the child uses to arrive it.
2. To appreciate the child's role in involving himself in active learning processes:
Pigetian theories state that children should learn from the environment and not only given and theoretical knowledge. Thus, there involves more of active learning and less of spoon fed learning through interactions and questioning.
3. To de-emphasise on accelerating the children's thinking by making them adult like :
Piaget emphasises that premature acceleration of the children and their thinking is much worse than the not teaching anything to them. Making children think adult like would result in superficially accepting adult ideas rather than actually understanding those ideas.
Answer 1.
When children think constructively, they learn to develop the ability of critical thinking that includes problem solving, building of a thought process, trying to build the process of decision making. It is now known that infants develop the ability to think and understand much before they start to talk. They gather and learn information from their environment, and if guided correctly, their development can progress exponentially by the use of active learning.
Answer 2
The most influential work in the world of cognitive development of children was carried out by Jean Piaget. He looked into how a child's environment may affect his growth and development. For him, in place of learning only, there could be more active processes that help a child gather knowledge. For Piaget viewed that a child's knowledge is composed of smaller structural units known as the SCHEMAS and these schemas help a child in organisation of his past experiences.
Piaget Said that the schemas are continuously being altered by two processes that are complementary:
1. Assimilation
2. Accomodation
This means, that a person would assimilate or gather new information and put it together into the schema that is already existing and relate it to the things that the child already know. This is followed by accomodation, where the schemas that assimilate new knowledge, change themselves in order to adjust the new knowledge or ACCOMODATD new knowledge. If there occurs a balance between the two process, it is called equilibration.
Answer 3:
The third stage of Piaget's theory is the concrete operational stage. This stage will be considered from the age of 7-11 years and this is the age where there is development of rationale thinking. Piaget considers that this is the stage where the child develops logical thinking. During this stage, there is development of reversibility in the children . This is the ability in which the children develop the ability to recognise that the numbers can be reciprocated and returned to their original condition. An example of this phenomenon is the deflation and refilling of the ball. The child, who by now would have started crying if a ball was deflated, would now begin to understand that if a ball gets deflated , it can be filled with air and would begin to bounce back.