LSC 300 L
Literature for Children
Department of Library Science and Instructional Technology
Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven CT

CONTENTS:
Child Development Home

Cognitive Stage Theory (Piaget)

Trained as a biologist, Piaget based his theory on observation and classification of behaviors. Piaget views intellect and affect as always together--believing that human emotion, or affect, evolves from the same primary processes as cognitive development. Two overriding interests in Piaget's work are: 1) what are the characteristics of children that enable them to adapt to their environment; and 2) what is the simplest, most accurate, and most useful way of classifying or ordering child behavior.

Much of Piaget's thinking is based on four kinds of operations:

• Assimilation--as a child notes new information about the environment, the new information is assimilated into existing thinking. [schemata]
• Accommodation--when new information cannot be assimilated, the child modifies existing thought structures [schemata] to incorporate the new experiences.
• Conservation--the child is able to deal with the difference between appearances and reality. That is, the child is able to make inferences about the real characteristics that underlie appearances rather than base judgments on surface characteristics. Example: the amount or quantity of a matter stays the same regardless of any changes in an irrelevant dimension.
• Reversibility--the child can follow a line of reasoning back to where it started

Piaget's COGNITIVE STAGE THEORY

Infancy [birth-appearance of language, @ 2 yrs.] -- Sensorimotor Intelligence

• This period is concerned with coordinating movement and action.
• The focus is on self-satisfaction of basic needs (food, warmth, companionship) and discovery of the physical self.

Period of pre-operational thought

• Early Childhood [2-4] Pre-conceptual phase
  • Children are busy discovering the environment.
  • Play centers on how and why. Activities that seem like fantasy to adults are realistic to these children.
  • The child often explain things that happen by giving life to inanimate objects, e.g. "The fire truck tripped me."
• Middle Childhood [4-7] Intuitive phase
  • Children begin to use language successfully to verbalize their mental activities and they are better able to generalize what they experience.
  • A shift from being egocentric ("Itıs me") to "I see whatıs happening."
  • The child is becoming able to react realistically to the environment and is able to project his or her self into other roles and think in term of other people.
  • The child is beginning to recognize the differences between how things look and how they really are. (Classic examples are different shaped containers holding the same volume of liquid; and two rows of the same/different number of objects spaced differently:

Late Childhood [7-11] Period of concrete operations

• Children are able to work through a problem so that they combine performance with a verbal explanation or an attempt to reason out the problem.
• Concepts of time are more fully developed so that ideas about the past, even historical past, become real and important.
• The child begins to move beyond one-dimensional thinking and is able to relate one event to a system of interrelated parts, for example, from a beginning to an end and vice versa, suggesting the beginning of the ability to handle flashbacks and of thinking in terms of the future.
• The child begins to internalize moral values.
• In the later part of this stage (about 9-11 years) the child is very interested in examining the rules that govern their lives, including questioning traditional ways of operating, and what happens when conventional wisdom is questioned.

Adolescence [11-15] Period of formal operations

• The young person is able to think beyond immediate experiences and to theorize about a wide variety of things.
• The young person develops the ability to apply formal logic to abstract constructions and to experiences which represent an ideal and may be contrary to fact.
• The child is able to assume a point of view, to think beyond the present, and to formulate theories about physical and social aspects of life.
• The child is moving from stereotypical thinking to greater ability to understand and empathize with others and to be more aware of their relationships within the family and within the community.