Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id JAA22697 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-bounces@mmu.ac.uk); Tue, 21 Aug 2001 09:33:19 +0100 From: <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 02:46:41 -0500 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Piaget and Alternative Explanations (crosspost) Message-ID: <3B81CB91.600.7C8370@localhost> In-reply-to: <E15Z4TA-0006lK-00@dryctnath.mmu.ac.uk> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c) Sender: fmb-bounces@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> The Math Gene pp. 27-31 "The Rise and Fall of Piaget", by Keith
> Devlin: Much of our current popular wisdom about small children's
> mental abilities originates in the work of the cognitive psychologist
> Jean Piaget fifty years ago. Piaget's influence can be found not only
> in many of our current beliefs about the way children learn, but also
> in our educational systems. Unfortunately, as often happens with
> ground- braking research, subsequent investigations have show that
> many of Piaget's conclusions were almost certainly wrong. (I say
> "almost certainly" because some psychologists still maintain that
> Piaget was right, and that the experimental results I shall describe
> admit alternative conclusions.) In the 1940s and I950s, Piaget
> developed a "constructivist" view of child development. According to
> this view, a newborn baby enters the world with a cognitive clean
> slate and, by observing the world around it, gradually pieces together
> a coherent and steadily increasing understanding of that world. In
> other words, the child constructs a mental model or conceptualization
> of the world. Piaget did not arrive at his conclusions by armchair
> speculation. He was an experimentalist, and his experiments are one
> reason why his work was so influential.. It took great ingenuity and
> equipment not available in Piaget's time for subsequent generations to
> devise more reliable experiments. Whcn they did so, they reached very
> different conclusions. For example, according to Piaget, children
> younger than ten months old have no proper sense of physical objects
> as things that endure in the world. Piaget based this conclusion on
> his observation that, when an object such as a toy is hidden under a
> cloth, a baby ten months old or younger will fail to reach for it.
> According to Piaget, "object permanency," as he called it, is not
> innate but is acquired sometime after ten months of age. Similarly,
> Piaget believed that children do not have a number sense until they
> acquire it at around four or five years of age. In one of Piaget's
> experiments, repeated many times by different groups, a psychologist
> would show a four-year-old child two equally spaced rows of six
> glasses and six bottles and ask whether there were more glasses or
> more bottles. The child invariably answered that there were the same
> number. Presumably the child observed a one-to-one correspondence
> between the l rows. The experimenter then spread out the glasses to
> form a longer row l and asked the child again whether there were more
> glasses or more bot-l ties. Now the child would answer that there were
> more glasses, apparently l misled by the longer length of that row.
> "Obviously," Piaget concluded, l "this shows that the child does not
> have a properly developed number sense." In particular, Piaget
> claimed, four- and five-year-old children have not yet grasped the
> idea of number conservation: the notion that rearranging the objects
> in a collection does not change their number. At the time, Piaget's
> experiments were held up as triumphs of experimental science in
> psychology. As a pioneer, Piaget was blazing a trail for future
> generations. And that is good science. Unfortunately, his methods had
> serious flaws. He relied on the motor actions of the babies in the
> object permanency test and on a dialogue between the experimenter and
> the subject for the various number tests performed on older children.
> In the case of object permanency, a baby's failure to reach for an
> object hidden under a blanket does not support the rather dramatic
> conclusion that the baby thinks the object has ceased to exist.
> Perhaps he simply does not yet have sufficient hand-arm coordination
> to reach for a hidden object. In fact, we now know that this
> explanation is correct. Recent experiments, more sophisticated than
> Piaget's, indicate that even very young babies have a well-developed
> sense of object permanency. Likewise, dialogue with a small child is
> highly unreliable. Communication via language is never loo percent
> objective and free of the influences of context, emotion, social
> factors, and possibly several other things. Just how unreliable
> dialogue can be was demonstrated by Jacques Mehler and Tom Bever at
> MIT during the late 1960s. In one experiment, Mehler and Bever carried
> out the original Piaget experiment to test for number conservation,
> but with two- and three-year old children instead of Piaget's four-
> and five-year-olds. The children succeeded perfectly. Consequently,
> unless we believe that children temporarily lose their sense of number
> conservation between the ages of four and six, we clearly need some
> alternative explanation for Piaget's results. One is readily
> available. Around five years of age, children begin to develop the
> ability to reason about another person's thought process ("What Daddy
> means by this is . . . "). This provides the most likely explanation
> of Piaget's observations. Remember the way the experiment was
> performed. First the experimenter arranges the glasses and bottles in
> two equally spaced rows and asks the child which row has more objects.
> Then the experimenter rearranges one of the rows, making it longer,
> and again asks the child, "Which row has more objects?" Now, by four
> or five years of age, a young child knows that adults are powerful and
> are knowledgeable. Moreover, she has probably observed the respect her
> parent showed the experimenter when they arrived at the laboratory.
> How is this child likely to react when she sees the experimenter
> rearrange the objects in one of the two rows and then ask the very
> same question as a moment earlier, "Which row has more objects?" She
> may well reason, "Hmm. That's the same qucstion she just asked me.
> Adults are not dumb, and this is a special kind of adult who knows a
> lot. We can both see that the number of objects hasn't changed. So I
> must have misunderstood the question the last time. I thought she was
> asking me about the number of objects in the row, but obviously she
> was really asking me about the length, since that's what she just
> changed." And so the child gives the answer she thinks is expected of
> her. Of course, we can't know for sure. Attempts to find out by
> interrogating the child are unlikely to yield conclusive evidence, for
> the same reason that the original Piaget experiment is suspect! This
> is where the Mehler and Bever experiment came into its own. The kind
> of "what-does-she-really-want?" reasoning just described is beyond
> two- or three-year olds. Mehler and Bever's younger subjects took the
> experimenters' questions literally, and counted correctly. What
> Piaget's original experiment really showed is that four- and five
> year-old children can reason rationally about the motivations and
> expectations of another person. That's an important and useful
> discovery. But it's not the one Piaget thought he had made! To confirm
> that children from age two upward have a good sense of number, Mehler
> and Bever redesigned the Piaget test to avoid the reliance on
> language. Their idea was breathtakingly simple. Instead of glasses and
> bottles they presented the child with two rows of M&Ms. One row
> contained six M&Ms, the other had four. Sometimes the rows were the
> same length; sometimes the row of six M&Ms was longer; other times the
> row of four M&Ms was longer. Instead of being asked to indicate which
> row had more candies, the child was simply told he could pick one row
> and eat them. The outcome was precisely what any parent would predict.
> The child invariably plumped for the row of six candies, regardless of
> its length. He knew full well which row had more members, and moreover
> realized that the number was not dependent on the arrangement. The
> result was just as conclusive with two-year-old children as with four
> year-olds. Another ingenious variation of the original Piaget
> experiment reached the same conclusion. This time, James McGarrigle
> and Margaret Donaldson of the University of Edinburgh carried out
> their experiment in a small puppet theater. Like Piaget, they started
> by aligning two rows of the same number of objects and asking the
> child which row had more objects. After the child responded correctly,
> the experimenter pretended to look away while a teddy bear puppet
> lengthened one of the rows. Turning back, the experimenter exclaimed,
> "Oh dear, that silly teddy has mixed up the rows. can you tell me
> which row has more objects again?" Children from two to five
> invariably gave the correct answer. Since the teddy bear had
> rearranged one of the rows, unseen by the experimenter, the child
> presumably found it reasonable for the adult to ask the same question
> again. Yet when the experimenter repeated the process with the same
> children but rearranged the objects him- or herself, the four- and
> five-year-old children responded exactly as they had for Piaget,
> basing their answer on length. -Keith Devlin, The Math Gene (2000)
>
>
>
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