Home Search Sitemap Contact Bookmark

Free Dissertations - Education Dissertations

Where The Mastery Of Thought Takes Place, The Highest Level Of Thinking, ...

Where the mastery of thought takes place, the highest level of thinking, where the person can reason hypothetically and in the absence of material evidence.
Piaget put each of these four fundamental stages as part of an invariant sequence, a sequence that could not be broken but could be longer or shorter, and each stage contained major cognitive tasks that had to be completed for successful intellectual development before moving onto the next. These fundamental stages have been the foundation for teaching and learning, which some educationalists argue to reject.
Margaret Donaldson (1978) argues that the task Piaget used to observe children was at the time not explained in sufficient detail for them to understand. Therefore on the subject of centering (Piaget, stage 2B), the findings are invalid, and Donaldson explains that research into this task and another of similar design, have been carried out by several including Martin Hughes (pp 20-31). The results were dramatic. With thirty children aged between 3 and 5 years, 90% of their responses were correct, and the youngest ten children with an average age of 3 years 9 months, achieved a success rate of 88%. Overall the general conclusion seems unavoidable: pre-school children are not nearly so limited in their ability to ‘decentre' or appreciate someone else's point of view, as Piaget has maintained for many years (p 30).
So what are the reasons that hold a 5-6 year old child back, and how can they be addressed. Other elements to learning exist: that of different social and ethnic backgrounds, that children learn effectively by playing in a calm environment, that the performance and cycle of learning is enhanced when parent/teacher is eager to be positive and praise, and when parent/teacher is quick to be negative, the child is reluctant to learn. With these extra elements, the stages described are not so firmly coupled with age, but as stated, with mental age. This mixture is termed constructivism, the blending of cognitive psychology and social psychology that dictate adaptive behavior, not just cognitive alone.
So learning is a constructivist activity. Cognitive development is a process in which language is a crucial tool for determining how the child will learn how to think because advanced modes of thought are transmitted to the child by means of words.
The Russian theorist, Vygotsky (1962) reached a conclusion that thought and speech originate from different processes and then evolve in parallel but independently of each other. Children learn the names of objects only when told so. At some point the attitude changes, the child becomes curious about names of things. At this point the child's vocabulary increases dramatically, with much less coaching from adults, this point in the development of the child is where thought and speech merge.


Thanks