From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed Feb 05 2003 - 23:39:30 MST
Brett writes
> I don't reckon personality could have the same meaning when
> a neo-nate is the referent as opposes to say a five year old
> child because of the still-developing brain. Piaget outlines
> stages of development/learning that most children go through.
> The actual stages still seem to hold true even though the rate
> at which a particular child goes through them can vary.
It's important to know that in important ways, Piaget has
been debunked. One of his famous experiments was to observe
that young children were incapable of "conservation" in the
following: present a row of jelly beans to a young child,
and have him note the quantity of beans. Then separate
the beans by a somewhat larger distance, so as to make the
row longer. When you ask the child, say four years old or
so, whether there are more or not, the child will reply
that there is more.
I used to wonder (just a little) about this, thinking that
perhaps the communication wasn't reliable, and that perhaps
the child didn't know what you meant by "more". But I
assumed that Piaget had taken this into account---after all,
I did a term paper on him, and knew that he had spent years
on this stuff.
However, later research shows that indeed there was a problem,
as exposed when the experiment is done this way: the adult
sets up a row of jelly beans, and gets the child to notice
their extent. Then the adult experimenter pretends to be
distracted and turns away for a moment while a colleague
manipulates a puppet bear who arranges the beans in a longer
format.
The experimenter turns around and says, "oh the silly bear
has been here. Is the amount of beans the same or not?"
This time, the children (even at very early ages) answer
correctly.
So it's interesting to speculate on what is going on in the
mind of the child, especially in Piaget's experiments. The
child sees this all-knowing and very powerful adult rearrange
the beans, and the child can see that the adult has all the
information. So when the adult asks the seemingly stupid
question "are there more?", the child figures that the adult
must be getting at something else, perhaps the length of the
configuration.
Lee
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