Patterns of Learning Traced by Piaget

Pioneer child psychologist and cogni tive theorist Jean Piaget saw mental growth as proceeding on many differ enit fronts simultaneously. He viewed six areas of learning- language, morality. play, numbers space and time-aspar ticularly significant, and he wrote ex intensively on the patterns of development

in those areas Language Piaget observed that children first use

speech for purposes other than com municating. In the beginning, a child's vo calizations are entirely egocentric She does not care one is listening or whether her sounds make sense to other people. The child repeats her favor Ite sounds simply for the enjoyment

of hearing them Later, when the child is capable of using simple sentences, she may indulge in long monologues, jumping from idea to idea without concern Rinogle

sense. In the last stages of this purely egocentric speech, she may engage in What Piaget called collective mono logues"- chattering at length with other children without actually listening to

what the others are saying

As the youngster gets older, she be comes more socialized and her space patterns change to accommodate her need to communicate. Hes contratione continue to be one-sided. but he IOw much more likely to ressato at another person is saying

Morality By studying children of yarons

ing games Piaget noted that in or at awareness - specifically child's nspet for a system of rules- te ses in stages, paralleling learning in utber arcas He observed that children up to the

age of two years simply play with objects

at will, with no concept of rules. As

preschoolers, they begin to have some

rasp of how rules work to organize a game but play in typically egocent Jon often changing the rules to suit their mood at the moment Around the

age of seven, a child enters a stage in which he unquestioningly accepts rules and guidelines laid down by adults and will follow them to the letter. Only later will he begin to consider the underly

ing purposes of rules and discipline him self to follow them Play

Almost as soon as an infant Can perceive her surroundings, imitation becomes the common thread running through her play Imitation starts as simple copying

of sounds gestures and facial expressions For some time, the baby may not even understand the actions that she cis copy ing She may wave good-by when you enter a room for example But gradually her imitations become both complex and appropriate, relying less and less

on trial and cror The youngster's cartiest forms of imita tion evalve into two types of activity which Piaget identified as "practice play and symbolic play paralleling the two major phases of early childhood

Practice play predominates during the sensory motor phase, when the child is

basy learning physical skills and inte grating the messages of here . This is purely physical activity, with no rules or structure. to addition to such activities as swinging. running or jumping prac

tice play Can Involve the senses-ope Cially taste, smell and hearing. There is Do purpose to this behavior other than the croyable actions it provides

Symbolic play commences at about the age of two, when fantasy and imagina ion bogin to flower, Previously, the child tant for the pure pleasure of running now, in the preoperational stage, she may

run because she is a galloping home or a jet speeding across the sky Symbolic play serves many purposes It helps

the child learn to distinguish between what is real and nonreal it letsher prac tice emotions or enact experience that have frightened her to make them seem less intimidating and it gives her a

forum in which she has total control Numbers

Children community learn to recite num bers by rote before they understand their meaning and proper use numer als - Woor six or nine-are, at first, simply words or objects to a preschooler. His early style of perception tends to confuse his sense of numbers, along with other logical concepts, because he is able to focus only on one aspect of a sita

tion at a time. For example, if a child of three or four is shown two rows of 10 pennies-one stretched out long, one

bunched up short-lie will most likely say there are more pennies in the lang crrow. He is focusing exclusively on the external appearance of the toes and

cannot understand that quantities remain the same despite changes in our wand appearances--a principle that Piaget called conservation. It is around the

time they enter school that children grasp this concept, which is the basis for their understanding that a number serves as a symbol for a fixed quantity of ob jects - whatever their arrangement

Space Babies start with very limited concept of

shapes and spatial relationships they build this understanding slowly by hun dling the objects around them and, lat- er by moving among them as they crawl and walk Piaget found that a child

perceptions of objects in space are pro foundly affected by her egocentric world view In the early preschool year she can visualize an object only from her own perspective at a given moment and cannot envision the sanc object from someone else's angle of vision As her egocentrism becomes less pro nounced around the age of six, she begins to adjust her perspective and under stand that the same object can look differ ent from different of view

Time

A Child's understanding of time takes a long while to mature. As a newborn be lives exclusively in the present throughout his first two years, his developing memory gives him a slowly growing awareness of past events. But it is not until the age of five or to that the concept of the future takes hold. A preschooler's idea of time is generally in tertwined with other concepts such as distance place and speed His idea of at hour may be the distance to grand- mother's house dinnertime is whenever he is eating dinner Fast is when he puts away his blocks real fast, and slow is when he takes his time. Usually u childtas reached school age before he grasps the notion of time as a continuous flow and is able to tell time by the clock.