Introduction
The ways in which children develop cognitively have fascinated philosophers, researchers and theorists for centuries. However, in the twentieth century, several different schools of thought arose, each of which attempted to categorize the various phases of cognitive development between infancy and adolescence. Piaget, in his early observations, asserted that children, even at a very early age, were capable of creating their own ideas. Instead of merely receiving and assimilating information from adult figures, they could take the stimuli they received and build unique structures of knowledge. His work ended up as the foundation of the modern constructionist theories in education. Most constructionists agree that a sign of learning is a product that a child makes in response to learning. The more relevant these products feel to the learners, the more authentic and effective the learning process will tend to be (Huitt and Hummel, 1998).
During his studies, Piaget developed a four-stage classification for the particular development of children through adolescence. These stages are: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. Piaget asserted that each child must go through these stages, in sequence, to reach the next stage; it is not possible to jump over a step (Slavin, 1988, p. 108). Each new stage has a particular set of descriptors that children display during the diagnostic process. It is possible to show descriptors from more than one stage; in that case, diagnosticians use the stage from which the child is showing the most descriptors in identifying the stage in which that child is currently learning.
The purpose of this research project is to analyze one of Piaget’s assertions about the egocentricity that he identified as being an essential part of the preoperational stage, and see if that egocentricity actually does go away in the transition to concrete operational thought. This project involves a slight adaptation of Piaget’s “Three Mountains” experiment, using a child who is four years old and another who is ten years old. This project will evaluate the validity of one of Piaget’s assertions that has been challenged for a number of reasons, including the complexity of the “Three Mountains” scenario. This experiment will analyze the same proposition about ego centricity, using a simpler setup than the “Three Mountains” plan, and render conclusions about Piaget’s assertion about egocentricity behind the respondents’ answers to the experiment.
Method
The children involved sit at a table and look at an arrangement of seven blocks. Each is a different color, and the blocks are placed, one at a time, from left to right. Opposite the child, on the other side of the blocks, we will place a doll. Then, we will ask both children to identify the left-hand block, from the perspective of the doll. According to Piaget’s theories, this will yield an egocentric response from the preoperational child, who will think that the doll sees the same left-hand side block that he does, instead of recognizing that the doll is looking at the setup from the opposite direction. However, the concrete operational child, according to Piaget, will identify the one that is on his own right, realizing that his right would be the doll’s left.
In Piaget’s “Three Mountains” setup, the child and the doll are seated identically as in our setup. However, instead of a set of blocks, the child sees a cross sitting on the side of a mountain. The doll sees the same mountain, but the mountain is blocking the cross, and so the doll would not be able to “see” it. In Piaget’s experiment, the preoperational child said that the doll could see the cross, even though it was between the child and the larger mountain. To Piaget, this indicated a degree of egocentricity, because the child did not see things from the doll’s perspective when asked to do so, instead substituting his own perspective for the doll’s.
Results
Both sets respondents saw an array of seven blocks, arranged horizontally before them. In both cases, the ordering of colors was, left to right (from the respondent’s view), red, green, white, blue, red, yellow and black. The respondents were tested separately, and the results appear below. The correct response is “Black.”
It is worth noting that some of the preoperational respondents were incorrect in identifying the block. Nine of the respondents asked for, and received, permission to walk around to the doll’s side of the table, but then it was easy all nine to identify the block on the left. All of the concrete operational respondents were able to identify the proper block without moving from his seat. The fact that some of the preoperational respondents saw it necessary to move showed that they had progressed beyond geocentricism, and knew that they had to move around to the doll’s side of the table to look at the blocks from the doll’s perspective. Once they were around on the doll’s side, though, they were able to point at the correct block and say the color almost instantly. It would have been interesting to see what had happened had they not been given permission to move around the table, but to restrict them from moving, in our perspective, would have been testing a different cognitive function than geocentricism, as we will explain in the “Discussion” section.
Discussion
Links to Cognitive Development. Based on their ages, Piaget would have expected the preschoolers to be in the preoperational stage, and the fifth graders to be in the concrete operational phase. The preoperational stage ends around the age of seven, while the concrete operational stage ends around the age of 11 (Liebert and Kail, 1986, p. 227). We would agree with those findings, although the fifth graders displayed some social behaviors that we found were actually more in the realm of formal operational (Kafia and Resnick, 1996, p. 81). The scope of questioning on our project was limited to egocentricity, and so we did not see a comparative difference in terms of sophistication or complexity between the two sets of respondents, except for the fact that some of the preschoolers had to get up and walk around the table to see the blocks from the doll’s perspective.
Based on Piaget’s ideas of egocentricity, we expected most of the preschoolers to identify the red block (the one on theirown left) as the block on the doll’s left. It was unexpected for us to have nine of them request to get up and go and look at the tableau from the perspective of the doll, rather than himself. The apparent significance of this was that these nine had already constructed a schema for their world view that included the fact that other people see things from a different physical standpoint than they do. This knowledge helps them to affectively interpret his surroundings correctly.
What would be interesting as a topic of further study would be the precise reason why some of the students thought that the doll had the same perspective as they did – or why “RED” was the correct answer. It could have been that the students did not understand the question; it could have been that the students rushed the answer and ignored the fact that the doll’s perspective was the one to use. It could also have been an egocentric assumption that the doll sees the set of blocks from the same point of view as the respondent, even though the doll is on the other side of the table, but it seems problematic to refer to what may be a cognitive lack of ability as egocentrism. The simple inability to look at the blocks from a view outside one’s own eyes may show inabilities in other areas instead. Because children of this age are not reliable for qualitative interviews, further study is needed to identify study methods that would explore this phenomenon further. A great deal of research indicates that this age is crucial in terms of forming intellectual and educational habits, and so the more we can discover about this time period, the more effectively we can prepare our students for the future.
Limitations of the Study. It would be interesting to see an even larger sample of children here. We worked to provide one of each age group for the study; it would be even more instructive to get a larger group, with students from different socioeconomic backgrounds and from different types of schools. As a result, we decided to try out the experiment, at first, with one group from each target age to get a base point for future study. This is a limitation, because two groups, taken alone, have too many variables to reduce effectively to the question of geocentricism (Slavin, 1988, p. 22). The research out there advocating minimum sample sizes is plentiful, and to move forward with a meaningful thesis, we would need to expand our sample. The fact, though, that egocentrism might not affect the preoperational as much as Piaget suggests is definitely a sound starting point. If it turned out that egocentrism ends much earlier than theorists believe, that could have a major difference on teaching practices in elementary school. Many of the practices in those grades have to do with building a student’s self-esteem and increasing a student’s sense of positivity. While it is certainly worthwhile to provide motivation for a student, there are those who suggest that the elementary school years contain entirely too much pandering to the self-image, particularly in American schools (Markus and Kitayama, 1991, p. 227). If it turns out that teachers can begin weaning students from egocentrism a bit sooner, that may bode extremely well for the intellectual development of students, who now may be receiving too much attention to the ego – and not enough to the mind.
Conclusions
Knowing just how – and why – children learn when they do will have tremendous implications for our future as a society. Because members of different cultures view the role of the child in the educational process so differently, vastly different outcomes are beginning to emerge from educational setting around the globe. Those countries whose cultures preach self-discipline and long hours of study are passing their peers in countries that take more of a laid-back, comforting approach to education. Often, these cultures view children more as extensions of the parents, rather than autonomous individuals, and so the job of the child is to learn and study, with self-actualization and self-esteem considered less important. In other cultures, the self-esteem and actualization of the child are considered to be more important, and in those cultures, it is not uncommon to find parents spending a lot of time on after-school activities such as sports that have very little to do with academics. The belief that the self is important is more prevalent in cultures that cater to the child’s wants at a young age, and if it could be proven that egocentrism is not as important for preoperational children as Piaget suggested, it would justify changes on a cultural level, at least through the academic institutions, so that teachers could adjust their pedagogical practices to suit their child’s actual needs – instead of those needs that their parents might think they have. Finding out which approach is more valuable will help future instructional designers, and assessing the validity of Piaget’s notions of egocentrism in the primary age student is an important step toward actually finding the best and the brightest.
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