According to Piaget, the process of development of the intellect proceeds as follows: schemes are organized into operations, various combinations of which correspond to qualitatively different stages of cognitive growth. As humans evolve, they use increasingly complex schemas to organize information and understand the outside world.

According to Piaget, four discrete, qualitatively different stages or periods can be distinguished in this development. He gave these periods the following names: sensorimotor stage (from birth to 1.5-2 years), pre-operational stage (from 2 to 7 years - sometimes it is considered as the first phase of the stage of specific operations), stage of specific operations (from 7 to 12 years ) and the formal operations stage (beginning at age 12 or older). a brief description of these stages is given in table. 2 (table given by )

Sensorimotor stage (from birth to 2 years) - here adaptation is carried out in the form of detailed and consistent material actions of the child. Babies use action patterns: looking, grasping, etc. - to get acquainted with the world around them. This stage is called sensorimotor because, when balancing, the infant's intellect relies on the data of the sense organs and bodily movements.

The pre-operational stage (from 2 to 7 years) - according to J. Piaget, it begins at the time when children begin to speak and use language and other symbolic means (imitation, play). At this stage, the child's thinking tends to be overly concrete, irreversible, egocentric, and it is difficult for them to classify objects.

During the preoperational stage, children experience the world primarily through their own actions. They don't push wide general theories about brick houses, grandmothers or dogs, but use their everyday experience to build specific knowledge. At the preoperational stage, children do not generalize about a whole class of objects, nor can they think through the consequences of a particular chain of events. In addition, they do not understand the difference between a symbol and the object it denotes. At the beginning of this stage, children take names so seriously that they cannot separate their literal meaning from the things they represent. By the end of the stage, due to repetition in various situations, external objective actions are schematized and, with the help of symbolic means, are transferred to the internal plane. By the end of this period, children will learn that the words of the language are conventional signs and that one word can mean not only one, but also several objects.

Stage of concrete operation (from 7 to 11 years) - here children begin to use logic in thinking. They can classify objects and deal with hierarchical classification, they are able to operate with mathematical concepts and comprehend the law of conservation. For example, at the preoperational stage, it is difficult for a child to understand that a given animal can be both a "dog" and a "terrier" at the same time. It can only deal with one class at a time. But seven-year-olds understand that terriers are a subgroup within a larger group - dogs. They may see other subgroups as well, such as the "small dogs" subgroup, such as terriers and poodles, and the "big dog" subgroup, such as golden retrievers and St. Bernards. By thinking in this way, they demonstrate an understanding of the class hierarchy. At the stage of concrete operations, children master logical operations of this type, and their thinking becomes more and more similar to the thinking of adults. When a child concludes that the quantity of a certain set of objects is unchanged, despite the changes in their spatial arrangement, then it is believed that his reasoning is based on the understanding of the possibility of returning again to the original arrangement of objects simply by reversing the movements that led to this change. Therefore, his thinking is reversible.

This kind of mental flexibility is believed to be closely related to the increased capacity for "decentration" and that it depends on the development of operational structures. What are these structures? The word "operation" in the theory of J. Piaget has a precise meaning. To understand it, three things must be learned.

First. Operations are actions. True, they are not physical manipulations, since they are carried out only in the mind. Nevertheless, these are actions and their source is the physical actions of the sensorimotor period.

Second. The actions from which operations derive their origin are not all physical actions, but rather actions of the type of combining, ordering, separating and rearranging objects, that is, they are actions of a very general nature.

Third. An operation cannot exist by itself, but only within an ordered system of operations. And the orderliness, the organization of the system always takes the form of a “group” or “grouping”.

However, the new symbolic actions are still closely related to the specific objects with which the original physical actions were performed: the child mainly thinks about the action with physical objects, about their ordering, classification, etc. Hence the name - the period of specific operations.

When Piaget compares sensorimotor intelligence with the intelligence of the period of specific operations, he speaks of sin in the main directions in which the latter reveals superiority over the former.

First. Sensorimotor intelligence is more static, less mobile. He considers things one after another, without linking them into a single picture.

Second. Sensorimotor intelligence is aimed only at practical success. In operational thinking, explanation and understanding are much more interesting. This change is associated with the development of consciousness, which leads to a better understanding of the ways to achieve goals.

Third. Since sensorimotor intelligence is limited to real actions performed with real objects, it is limited to narrow spatio-temporal boundaries. Symbolic actions have a wider scope of application [12].

The stage of formal operations (from 12 years old) is characterized by the ability to operate with abstract concepts. At this stage, teenagers can explore all the logical options for solving a problem, imagine things that contradict facts, think realistically about the future, form ideals, and understand the meaning of metaphors that are inaccessible to children. younger age. Formal-operational thinking no longer requires a connection with physical objects or actual events. It allows teenagers to ask themselves for the first time the question: “What will happen if ..?” (“What if I said that to that person?”). It allows them to “get into the minds” of other people and take into account their roles and ideals.

Is it possible to accelerate the change of stages of development and, for example, to teach a capable five-year-old child to specific operations? Piaget called this question "American" because it was asked whenever he visited the United States. He replied that, even if it were possible, in the long run the value of such an acceleration of development is very doubtful. He emphasized that it was important not to hasten the change of stages, but to provide each child with a sufficient amount teaching materials corresponding to each stage of his growth, so that no area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe intellect remains underdeveloped. In his writings, J. Piaget often analyzed the relationship between "development" and "learning". "Learning" for him is by no means synonymous with "development". Rather, he tends to equate "learning" with the acquisition of knowledge coming from some external source, i.e., he contrasts it with mastery, which is a consequence of a person’s own activity. Thus, if a child is able to remember the correct answer, either because it was given to him, or because he received a reward for guessing this answer himself, then he undoubtedly learns. But Piaget is convinced that in this case there is no fundamental development, since the latter is carried out through active construction and self-regulation.

J. Piaget argued that there are no gaps in the transition from the simplest types of adaptive behavior to the most highly developed forms of intelligence. One grows out of the other. Therefore, even in the case when the intellect is developed to such an extent that it is capable of using extremely abstract knowledge, the origins of this knowledge should be sought in action.

Piaget repeated many times: knowledge does not come to us from the outside “in finished form”. It is not a "copy" of reality, because it is not only a matter of receiving impressions, as if our brain were a photographic plate. Knowledge is also not something that we receive at birth. We must build it. And we have been slowly doing this for many years.

3. The discovery of the egocentricity of children's thinking

The general task facing Piaget was aimed at revealing the psychological mechanisms of integral logical structures, but first he singled out and investigated a more particular problem - he studied the hidden mental tendencies that give a qualitative originality to children's thinking, and outlined the mechanisms for their emergence and change.

Consider the facts established by Piaget with the help of clinical method in his early studies of the content and form of children's thought. The most important of them: the discovery of the egocentric nature of children's speech, the qualitative features of children's logic, and the child's ideas about the world that are unique in their content. However, Piaget's main achievement is the discovery of the child's egocentrism. Egocentrism is a central feature of thinking, a hidden mental position. The originality of children's logic, children's speech, children's ideas about the world -. only a consequence of this egocentric mental attitude.

Let us first turn to the characteristics of the phenomena available for observation. These phenomena, in comparison with the general egocentrism of the child, which is practically not amenable to direct observation, are outwardly relatively clearly expressed.

In studies of children's ideas about the world and physical causality, Piaget showed that a child at a certain stage of development, in most cases, considers objects as they are given by direct perception, that is, he does not see things in their internal relations. The child thinks, for example, that the moon follows him when he walks, stops when he stops, runs after him when he runs away. Piaget called this phenomenon "realism". It is this realism that prevents the child from considering things independently of the subject, in their internal interconnection. The child considers his instantaneous perception to be absolutely true. This happens because children do not separate their "I" from the world around them, from things.

Piaget emphasizes that this "realistic" position of the child in relation to things must be distinguished from the objective one. The main condition for objectivity, in his opinion, is the full awareness of the countless intrusions of the "I" into everyday thought, the awareness of the many illusions that arise as a result of this invasion (illusions of feeling, language, point of view, value, etc.). Realism expresses the paradox of children's thought, the child is at the same time closer to direct observation and more distant from reality; he is simultaneously closer to the world of objects and farther from it than adults.

Children up to a certain age do not know how to distinguish between the subjective and the external world. The child begins by identifying his ideas with the things of the objective world, and only gradually comes to distinguishing them from each other. This regularity, according to Piaget, can be applied both to the content of concepts and to the simplest perceptions.

"Realism" is of two types, intellectual and moral. For example, a child is sure that the branches of a tree make the wind. This is intellectual realism. Moral realism is expressed in the fact that the child does not take into account the inner intention in evaluating the act and judges the act only by the external effect, by the material result.

At first, at the early stages of development, every idea of ​​the world is true for the child; for him, thought and thing are almost indistinguishable. In a child, signs begin to exist, being originally part of things. Gradually, through the activity of the intellect, they separate from them. Then he begins to consider his idea of ​​things as relative to this point of view. Children's ideas develop from realism to objectivity, passing through a series of stages of participation (participation), animism (universal animation), artificalism (understanding natural phenomena by analogy with human activity) on which the egocentric relationship between the "I" and the world is gradually reduced. Step by step in the process of development, the child begins to take a position that allows him to distinguish what comes from the subject and see the reflection of external reality in subjective representations. who ignores his "I", Piaget believes, inevitably puts his prejudices, direct judgments and even perceptions into things. The objective intellect, the mind aware of the subjective "I", allows the subject to distinguish between fact and interpretation. Only through gradual differentiation inner world stands out and contrasts with the outside. Differentiation depends on how much the child is aware of his own position among things.

Piaget believes that parallel to the evolution of children's ideas about the world, directed from realism to objectivity, there is a development of children's ideas from absoluteness ("realism") to reciprocity (reciprocity). the same meaning as his own, when a correspondence is established between these points of view. From this moment, he begins to see reality no longer only as directly given to himself, but also as if established thanks to the coordination of all points of view taken together. During this period, the most important step is taken in the development of children's thinking, since, according to Piaget, ideas about objective reality are the most common thing that exists in different points of view, in which different minds agree with each other

IN experimental studies Piaget showed that in the early stages of intellectual development, objects appear to the child as heavy or light, according to direct perception, the child always considers large things to be heavy, and small things always to be light. For the child, these and many other ideas are absolute, while direct perception seems to be the only possible one. The appearance of other ideas about things, as, for example, in the experiment with the swimming of bodies, "a pebble - light for a child, but heavy for water," means that children's ideas begin to lose their absolute significance and become relative.

The lack of understanding of the principle of conservation of the amount of matter when changing the shape of an object once again confirms that the child can first reason only on the basis of "absolute" ideas. For him, two plasticine balls of equal weight cease to be equal as soon as one of them takes on a different shape, for example, Cups Already in his early works, Piaget considered this phenomenon as a common feature of children's logic. In subsequent studies, he used the child's understanding of the principle of conservation as a criterion for the emergence of logical operations and devoted his genesis to experiments related to the formation of concepts of number, movement, speed, space, about quantity, etc.

The child's thought also develops in a third direction - from realism to relativism. At first, children believe in the existence of absolute substances and absolute qualities. Later they discover that phenomena are interconnected and that our evaluations are relative The world of independent and spontaneous substances gives way to a world of relations. At first, the child considers, say, that in each moving object there is a special motor that plays a major role in the movement of the object. In the future, he considers the movement of an individual body as a function of the actions of external bodies. Thus, the child already begins to explain the movement of clouds in a different way, for example, by the action of the wind, the words "light" and "heavy" also lose their absolute meaning, which they had during the early stages, and acquire a relative meaning depending on the chosen units of measurement.

So, in terms of its content, children's thought, at first not completely separating the subject from the object and therefore "realistic", develops towards objectivity, reciprocity and relativity Piaget believed that the gradual dissociation, separation of the subject and object is carried out as a result of the child's overcoming of his own egocentrism

Along with the qualitative originality of the content of children's thought, egocentrism determines such features of children's logic as syncretism (the tendency to connect everything with everything), juxtaposition (lack of connection between judgments), transduction (transition from the particular to the particular, bypassing the general), insensitivity to contradiction, etc. All these features of children's thinking, according to Piaget, have one common feature, which also internally depends on egocentrism. logical operations addition and multiplication of a class least common to the other two classes, but containing both of these classes in itself (animals = vertebrates + invertebrates). Logical multiplication is an operation that consists in finding the largest class contained simultaneously in two classes, that is, finding a set of elements common to two classes (Genevians x Protestants = Genevan Protestants).

The absence of this skill is most clearly manifested in the way children define the concept. Piaget experimentally showed that each child concept is determined by a large number of heterogeneous elements that are not connected by hierarchical relationships. For example, a child, defining what strength is, says "Strength is when you can carry many things." When asked "Why does the wind have power9" - he answers: "This is when you can move forward." The same child says about water: "Streams have power because it (water) flows, because it descends" After a minute (if a stone thrown into water sinks), he says that water has no power, because it is nothing does not carry. A minute later he says "The lake has power because it carries boats."

It is especially difficult for a child to give a definition for relative concepts - after all, he thinks about things absolutely, not realizing (as experiments show) the relationship between them. The child cannot give the correct definition of such concepts as brother, right and left-hand side, family, etc., until he discovers that there are different points of view that must be taken into account. The well-known test about three brothers can serve good example this ("Ernest has three brothers - Paul, Henri, Charles. How many brothers does Paul have? And Henri? And Charles?"). Piaget asked, for example, L:

"Do you have brothers?" - Arthur. "Does he have a brother?" - "No". - "How many brothers do you have in your family?" - "Two". - "Do you have a brother?" - "One". - "Does he have brothers?" - "Not at all." - "You are his brother9" - "Yes." "Then he has a brother?" - "No".

The inability to perform logical addition and multiplication leads to contradictions with which children's definitions of concepts are saturated. Piaget characterized contradiction as the result of a lack of equilibrium: a concept gets rid of contradiction when equilibrium is reached. He considered the appearance of the reversibility of thought to be the criterion of stable equilibrium. He understood it as such a mental action when, starting from the results of the first action, the child performs a mental action that is symmetrical with respect to it, and when this symmetrical operation leads to the initial state of the object without modifying it. For every mental action there is a corresponding symmetrical action that allows you to return to the starting point.

It is important to note that, according to Piaget, there is no reversibility in the real world - only intellectual operations make the world reversible. Therefore, the reversibility of thought and, consequently, liberation from contradiction cannot arise from observation of natural phenomena. It arises from the awareness of the mental operations themselves, which the logical experiment performs not on things, but on itself, in order to establish which system of definitions gives "the greatest logical satisfaction." Logical experience is "the subject's experience of himself insofar as he is a thinking subject, an experience analogous to that which is done on oneself in order to regulate one's moral behavior; it is an effort to become aware of one's own mental operations (and not just their results), to see if they are connected or contradict each other," Pmajet wrote in his early work Speech and Thinking of the Child. This thought contains the germ of that epistemological conclusion from Piaget's latest works, which has already become a psychological requirement for a new pedagogy.

For the formation of a truly scientific thinking in a child, and not a simple set of empirical knowledge, it is not enough to conduct physical experiment with the memorization of the results. Here, a special kind of experience is needed - logical - mathematical, aimed at the actions and operations performed by the child with real objects.

In his early work, Piaget associated the lack of reversibility of thought with the child's egocentrism. But before turning to the characteristics of this central phenomenon, let us dwell on one more important feature of the child's psyche - the phenomenon of egocentric speech.

Piaget believed that children's speech is egocentric, primarily because the child speaks only "from his own point of view", and, most importantly, he does not try to take the point of view of the interlocutor. For him, any counter - - interlocutor. Only the appearance of interest is important to the child, although he probably has the illusion that he is heard and understood. He does not feel the desire to influence the interlocutor and really tell him something.

Such an understanding of egocentric speech met with many objections (L.S.

Vygotsky, S. Buhler, V. Stern, A. Iseke and others). Piaget took them into account and tried to clarify the phenomenon by devoting a new chapter to it in the third edition of his early work. In this chapter, Piaget noted that the reasons for the conflicting results are that different researchers put different meanings into the term "egocentrism", that the results may vary depending on the social environment, and the great importance for the coefficient of egocentric speech (the ratio of egocentric statements to all spontaneous speech of the child) have connections that develop between the child and the adult. The verbal egocentrism of the child is determined by the fact that the child speaks without trying to influence the interlocutor, and is not aware of the difference between his own point of view and the point of view of others.

Egocentric speech does not cover the entire spontaneous speech of the child. The coefficient of egocentric speech is variable and depends on two circumstances: on the activity of the child himself and on the type of social relations established, on the one hand, between the child and the adult, and, on the other hand, between children of the same age. Where the child is left to himself, in a spontaneous environment, the coefficient of egocentric speech increases. During symbolic play, this ratio is higher than when children experiment or work. However, the younger the child, the more obscured the differences between play and experimentation, which leads to an increase in the coefficient of egocentrism in the early preschool years. The coefficient of egocentric speech, as already noted, depends on the type of social relations of the child with the adult and of the children's peers among themselves. In an environment dominated by adult authority and coercive relations, egocentric speech occupies a significant place. In a peer environment where discussions and disputes are possible, the percentage of egocentric speech decreases. Regardless of the environment, the coefficient of verbal egocentrism decreases with age. At three years, it reaches its greatest value: 75% of all spontaneous speech. From three to six years, egocentric speech gradually decreases, and after seven years, according to Piaget, it disappears.

The phenomena discovered by Piaget, of course, do not exhaust the entire content of children's thinking. The significance of the experimental facts obtained in Piaget's research lies in the fact that thanks to them, the most important psychological phenomenon, which remained little known and unrecognized for a long time, is revealed - the child's mental position, which determines his attitude to reality.

Verbal egocentrism serves only as an outward expression of the child's deeper intellectual and social position. Piaget called this spontaneous mental attitude egocentrism. Initially, he characterized egocentrism as a state when the child views the whole world from his own point of view, which he is not aware of; it appears as absolute. The child does not yet realize that things may look different than they imagine. Egocentrism means the lack of awareness of one's own subjectivity, the absence of an objective measure of things.

The term "egocentrism" has caused a number of misunderstandings. Piaget acknowledged the unfortunate choice of the word, but since the term had already become widespread, he tried to clarify its meaning. Egocentrism, according to Piaget, is a factor of knowledge. This is a certain set of pre-critical and, therefore, pre-objective positions in the knowledge of things, other people and oneself. Egocentrism is a kind of systematic and unconscious illusion of cognition, a form of the initial concentration of the mind, when there is no intellectual relativity and reciprocity. Therefore, later Piaget considered the term "centration" to be a more successful term. On the one hand, egocentrism means a lack of understanding of the relativity of cognition of the world and the lack of coordination of points of view. On the other hand, it is the position of unconsciously ascribing the qualities of one's own "I" and one's own perspective to things and other people. The original egocentrism of cognition is not a hypertrophy of the awareness of "I". This, on the contrary, is a direct relation to objects, where the subject, ignoring the "I", cannot leave the "I" in order to find his place in the world of relations, freed from subjective ties.

Piaget conducted many different experiments that show that up to a certain age a child cannot take another, someone else's point of view. A clear example of the child's egocentric position is the experiment with the model of three mountains, described by Piaget and Inelder. The mountains on the layout were of different heights and each of them had some hallmark- a house, a river descending a slope, a snowy peak. The experimenter gave the subject several photographs in which all three mountains were depicted from different angles. The house, the river and the snowy peak were clearly visible in the pictures. The subject was asked to choose a photograph where the mountains are depicted as he sees them at the moment, from this angle. Usually the child chose the correct picture. After that, the experimenter showed him a doll with a head in the form of a smooth ball without a face, so that the child could not follow the direction of the doll's gaze. The toy was placed on the other side of the layout. Now, when asked to choose a photograph where the mountains were depicted as the doll sees them, the child chose a photograph where the mountains were depicted as he sees them himself. If the child and the doll were interchanged, then again and again he chose a shot where the mountains look the way he perceives them from his place. This was the case for most of the preschoolers.

In this experiment, children became victims of a subjective illusion. They did not suspect the existence of other evaluations of things and did not correlate them with their own. Egocentrism means that the child, imagining nature and other people, does not take into account his objective position as a thinking person. Egocentrism means the confusion of subject and object in the process of the act of cognition.

Egocentrism is characteristic not only of a child, but also of an adult where he is guided by his spontaneous, naive and, therefore, not essentially different from children's judgments about things. Egocentrism is a spontaneous position that controls the mental activity of the child in its origins; it persists for life in people who remain at a low level of mental development.

Egocentrism shows that the external world does not act directly on the mind of the subject, and our knowledge of the world is not a simple imprint of external events. The subject's ideas are partly the product of his own activity. They change and even distort depending on the dominant mental position.

According to Piaget, egocentrism is a consequence of the external circumstances of the subject's life. However, the lack of knowledge is only a secondary factor in the formation of children's egocentrism. The main thing is the spontaneous position of the subject, according to which he relates to the object directly, without considering himself as a thinking being, without realizing the subjectivity of his own point of view.

Piaget emphasized that the decrease in egocentrism is explained not by the addition of knowledge, but by the transformation of the initial position, when the subject correlates his initial point of view with other possible ones. To free oneself from egocentrism and its consequences in some respect means to decenter in this respect, and not only to acquire new knowledge about things and the social group. According to Piaget, to get rid of egocentrism means to realize what was perceived subjectively, to find one's place in the system of possible points of view, to establish a system of general and mutual relations between things, personalities and one's own "I".

The existence of an egocentric position in cognition does not predetermine what our knowledge can never provide. true picture of the world. After all, development, according to Piaget, is a change of mental positions. Egocentrism gives way to decentration, a more perfect position. The transition from egocentrism to decentration characterizes cognition at all levels of development. The universality and inevitability of this process allowed Piaget to call it the law of development. In order for this transition to be possible, a special tool is needed, with the help of which it was possible to connect the facts with each other, to carry out the decentration of objects in relation to perception and one's own action.

If in development there is a change of mental positions, their transformation, then what drives this process? Piaget believed that only the qualitative development of the child's mind, that is, the progressively developing awareness of one's "I", can lead to this. In order to overcome egocentrism, two conditions are necessary: ​​first, to realize one's "I" as a subject and to separate the subject from the object; the second is to coordinate one's own point of view with others, and not to see it as the only possible one.

According to Piaget, the development of self-knowledge in a child arises from social interaction. The change of mental positions is carried out under the influence of the developing social relationships of individuals. Piaget considers society as it appears to the child, that is, as the sum of social relations, among which two extreme types can be distinguished: relations of coercion and relations of cooperation.

L.F.Obukhov. Child (age) psychology. M., 1996.

Introduction

§1. Theory of children's thinking

2.1 Sensorimotor period

Conclusion

Introduction

Speech is the process of people communicating with each other through language, it is the activity of communication, influence, communication through language, it is a form of existence of consciousness. As we can see, speech can indeed be interpreted in a very diverse way, but the last definition attracts our attention to a greater extent. In this regard, it should be noted that most of the research on child thinking has been predominantly analytical. That is why the wide possibilities of studying speech (as one of the forms of the existence of consciousness) empirically are of particular interest to psychologists.

The most large-scale and authoritative work in this area belongs to J. Piaget. Piaget was the first to systematically study the peculiarities of children's thinking and speech with extraordinary depth and breadth of coverage. It is worth highlighting some features of his research and the first clinical method he applied. This method of observation consists in the fact that the child is forced to speak out and carefully recorded exactly how his thought unfolds. What is new here is that in this case they are not limited to simply registering the answer that the child gives to the question posed to him, but they give him the opportunity to express everything that he would like. By following the child in each of his answers, guiding him all the time, encouraging him to express himself more and more freely, the observer finally obtains the greatest possible picture of the development of thought. In his work, Piaget tried not to fall under the influence of existing theories and focus directly on the collection of facts and their processing. It is also impossible not to notice the biological past of the author, which is manifested in the extraordinary thoroughness of the arrangement and classification of facts. It is to the latter that Piaget devotes Special attention deliberately refraining from attempts to prematurely analyze and systematize the diversity of the facts obtained.

“We tried,” says Piaget, “to follow step by step the facts in the form in which they were presented to us by the experiment. We know, of course, that an experiment is always determined by the hypotheses that give rise to it, but so far we have limited ourselves to just a consideration of the facts.

§1. Theory of children's thinking

Piaget built his theory of children's thinking on the basis of logic and biology. He proceeded from the idea that the basis of mental development is the development of the intellect. In a series of experiments, he proved his point of view, showing how the level of understanding, intelligence affect the speech of children, their perception and memory. The children in his experiments did not see and did not remember at what level the water was in the communicating vessels, if they did not know about the connection between the water level and the cork that closed one of the vessels. If they were told about this property of communicating vessels, the nature of their drawings changed, they began to carefully draw the water level (the same or different), as well as the plug.

Thus, Piaget comes to the conclusion that the stages of mental development are the stages of the development of the intellect, through which the child gradually passes in the formation of an increasingly adequate scheme of the situation. The basis of this scheme is just logical thinking.

Piaget said that in the process of development, the organism adapts to the environment. Therefore, the intellect is the core of the development of the psyche, because it is understanding, creation correct scheme environment provides adaptation to the surrounding world. At the same time, adaptation is not a passive process, but an active interaction of the organism with the environment. This activity is necessary condition development, since the scheme, according to Piaget, is not given in finished form at birth, it does not exist in the outside world either. The schema is developed only in the process of active interaction with the environment, or, as Piaget wrote, "the schema is neither in the subject nor in the object, it is the result of active interaction with the object." One of Piaget's favorite examples was that of a child who does not know the concept of a number, who realizes its meaning by sorting out pebbles, playing with them, lining them up.

The process of adaptation and formation of an adequate scheme of the situation occurs gradually, while the child uses two mechanisms for its construction - assimilation and accommodation. During assimilation, the built scheme is rigid, it does not change when the situation changes, on the contrary, a person tries to squeeze all external changes into the narrow, given framework of the already existing scheme. An example of assimilation for Piaget is a game in which the child learns about the world around him. Accommodation is associated with a change in the finished scheme when the situation changes, as a result of which the scheme is indeed adequate, fully reflecting all the nuances of this situation. The process of development itself, according to Piaget, is an alternation of assimilation and accommodation; up to a certain limit, the child tries to use the old scheme, and then changes it, building another, more adequate one.

§2. The development of human intelligence: periods and stages of development

Piaget identifies three main periods of development:

1. Sensorimotor intelligence (from birth to 1.5 years).

2. Specifically - operational (representative) intelligence (from 1.5-2 years to 11 years).

3. Formal operational intelligence (from 11-12 to 14-15 years old).

Piaget characterizes each stage in two ways: positively (as a result of differentiation, complication of the structures of the previous level) and negatively (in terms of shortcomings and features that will be removed at the next stage).

2.1 Sensorimotor period

Piaget's study of the development of thinking begins with an analysis of the child's practical, objective activity in the first two years of life. He believes that the origins of even extremely abstract knowledge should be sought in action, knowledge does not come from outside in a finished form, a person must “build” it.

Observing the development of his own three children (daughters Jacqueline and Lucienne and son Laurent), Piaget identified 6 stages of sensorimotor development. These are the stages of transition from innate mechanisms and sensory processes (like the sucking reflex) to forms of organized behavior used arbitrarily, intentionally. A child from birth to 1.5 - 2 years is characterized by the development of feelings and motor structures: he looks, listens, touches, smells, manipulates, and does this out of innate curiosity for the world around him.

There are two sub-periods of sensorimotor intelligence:

Up to 7-9 months, when the infant is centered on its own body;

From 9 months, when the objectification of the schemes of practical intelligence in the spatial sphere takes place.

The criterion for the emergence of intelligence is the use by the child of certain actions as a means to achieve the goal. So, by the end of the first sub-period, children discover connections between their own action and the result - by pulling up the diaper, you can get a toy lying on it. They also develop an idea of ​​the independent and permanent existence of other objects. The "constancy" of the object consists in the fact that now the thing for the child is not only a perceptual picture, it has its own existence independent of perception. The previously disappeared object, as it were, "ceased to exist", now the baby is active in searching for the object hidden before his eyes.

Another important change is the overcoming of absolute egocentrism, total unconsciousness. The child begins to distinguish himself (the subject) from the rest of the world of objects. Piaget recognizes the role of maturation processes, which creates opportunities for cognitive development. But for intellectual progress, the infant needs to independently interact with the environment, manipulate objects, which leads to the transformation and gradual improvement of his intellectual structures.

2.2 Period of specific (elementary) operations

The mental abilities of the child reach a new level. This is the initial stage of the internalization of actions, the development of symbolic thinking, the formation of semiotic functions, such as language and mental image. Mental visual representations of objects are formed; the child designates them by names, not by direct actions.

Specifically, operational intelligence consists of the following sub-periods:

Preoperative, preparatory (from 2 to 5 years);

The first level - the formation of specific operations (5 - 7 years);

The second level is the functioning of specific operations (8-11 years).

Initially, thinking has a subjective, illogical character. Actually, the features of this type of thinking were discovered and described by J. Piaget already at an early stage of creativity as characteristics of egocentric thinking.

In order to trace how logical systems develop in ontogeny, Piaget offered children (4 years and older) tasks of a scientific nature, which were called "Piaget's problems". These experiments are often also called "tests for the preservation of equality" (weight, length, volume, number, etc.). Since all tasks of this kind are built on general principles, for example, consider the volume conservation test.

Fluid volume retention test. Stages of implementation:

1. First, the child is shown two glasses filled with water or juice to the same mark. The child is asked if the amount of liquid in both glasses is the same. It is important that the child recognizes that "the waters are the same". The statement of initial equality is obligatory. The initial equality of the evaluated property is necessarily accompanied by a perceptual similarity - the water levels in the two glasses are aligned.

2. Then the adult pours water from one glass into a glass of another shape, wider and lower. As a rule, the experimenter draws the child's attention to these transformations: "Look what I'm doing." A transformation is performed in which the perceptual similarity is broken, although this does not affect the evaluated property in any way.

3. After the transfusion, the question is repeated: “Is the amount of liquid in two glasses the same?”, And always in the same form as at the beginning.

Typically, children under the age of 7 do not cope with standard conservation tasks. Solving problems, preschoolers demonstrate their specific ideas about the preservation (constancy, invariance) of various properties of an object during its spatial, perceptual transformation - "Piagetian phenomena". These are the most reliable facts in child psychology, they can be reproduced in any preschool child. As a rule, the child says that there is now less (or more) water in one of the glasses, i.e. he lacks an understanding of the preservation of the properties of an object during its perceptual transformation. Then the phenomenon of non-conservation is ascertained.

The preschooler evaluates the object as a global whole, directly, egocentrically, relying on perception. He is "centered" on the present moment and unable to simultaneously think about how things looked before; does not see that the action performed is in principle reversible (water can again be poured into identical glasses); focusing on one aspect (the difference in the height of the liquid levels), cannot take into account two parameters at once (height and width of the glass). Piaget regards the phenomenon of non-conservation as evidence of the inability of the child (before reaching the age of seven) to decentration and the inability to build logical reasoning.

In the case when the repeated question “Is the amount of liquid in two glasses the same?” the child confirms the equality of the property, it is said that he retains the trait. Execution of the save test is a criterion for the functioning of specific operations. Recall that logical operations are mental actions that are characterized by reversibility. Reversibility refers, for example, to the relation of addition and subtraction or the relation of statements that the distances Between A and B and between B and A are the same. The ability to mentally use the principle of reversibility is one of the main signs of reaching the stage of concrete-operational thinking.

Another variant of Piaget's problems - "test for inclusion in a set" - involves comparing the whole and its parts.

Test for inclusion in a set

1. Show a few familiar objects, such as flowers. Objects must be divided into two subclasses (white and red), the number of elements in these subclasses must not be the same (4 red and 2 white).

2. The child is asked the question: “What is more - red flowers or flowers?”

3. The usual answer of a five-year-old child: "There are more red flowers."

Piaget's explanation is that the child is class-centered and cannot think about the class and its subclasses at the same time. When a child begins to solve such problems correctly (usually after 7 years), this indicates increased mental flexibility, the appearance of reversibility, an increase in the ability to decenter, which depends on the formation of operational structures. The child becomes able to understand that two features of an object are not related to each other, do not depend on each other (for example, the shape and amount of a substance). There are ideas about the preservation of various features - the material of the object, length, mass, volume, and later - about the preservation of time, speed. The ability to classify objects and seriation (i.e. ordered arrangement in a row, for example, in order of decreasing size) appears. Now the child can overcome the influence of direct perception and apply logical thinking to certain situations.

The social and cultural environment can speed up or slow down the rate at which a developmental stage progresses, primarily by whether it provides him with the right materials to study, tasks to solve, and so on. The transfer of ready-made knowledge (learning the correct answers) is inefficient; development occurs when a person's own activity is performed, active construction and self-regulation cognitive processes. Also important for the development of thinking (and in particular for the development of awareness of other points of view) is the exchange of ideas, discussion and argument with peers.

The transition to concrete-operational thinking restructures all mental processes, moral judgments and the ability to cooperate with other people.

However, all these logical operations are concrete - they are applied only to real, tangible objects and actions with them, they are subject to the specific content in which reality is presented to the child.

2.3 Stage of formal (propositional) operations

Formal-operational structures are manifested in the child's ability to reason hypothetically and independently of the content. subject area without specific support. Formal mental operations are the basis of the logic of an adult; elementary scientific thinking is based on them, functioning with the help of hypotheses and deductions. Abstract thinking is the ability to build conclusions according to the rules of formal logic and combinatorics, which allows a teenager to put forward hypotheses, come up with their experimental verification, and draw conclusions.

Particularly noticeable are the new achievements of adolescents in experiments on the derivation of some of the simplest physical laws (the laws of the swing of a pendulum; ways to combine colorless liquids to obtain a yellow liquid; factors affecting the flexibility of some materials; the increase in acceleration when sliding on an inclined plane). In this situation, the child of the preoperational level acts chaotically, “for good luck”; a child of a particular intelligence level is more organized, tries some options, but only some, and then refuses to try. A teenager of the formal level, after several trials, stops direct experimentation with the material and starts compiling a list of all possible hypotheses. Only then does he begin to test them one by one, trying to isolate the operating variables and examine the particular impact of each. This type of behavior

Systematic testing of all possible combinations

It is based on new logical structures, which Piaget uses the language of propositional logic to characterize.

A teenager acquires the ability to understand and build theories, to join the worldview of adults, going beyond his own direct experience. Hypothetical reasoning introduces the adolescent into the realm of the potential; at the same time, idealized ideas are not always verifiable and often contradict real facts. Piaget called the teenage form of cognitive egocentrism "naive idealism" of a teenager, who attributes unlimited power to thinking in striving to create a more perfect world. Only by assuming new social roles as adults does the adolescent encounter obstacles, begins to take into account external circumstances, and the final intellectual decentration in the new sphere takes place.

As for the period of transition from youth to adulthood, Piaget outlines a number of problems regarding the further development of the intellect, its specialization. During the period of building a life program, from 15 to 20 years, we can assume the process of intellectual differentiation: firstly, general cognitive structures are revealed that are used by each individual in a specific way in accordance with their own tasks, and secondly, special structures are formed for different areas of activity .

§3. The theory of child egocentrism

So, the concept of children's egocentrism occupies, as it were, the place of a central focus, in which the threads coming from all points intersect and gather at one point. With the help of these threads, Piaget brings to unity all the variety of individual features that characterize the logic of the child and turns them from an incoherent, disordered, chaotic set into a strictly connected structural complex of phenomena caused by a single cause. Now let's try to find out the thought of Piaget himself, to determine what the author sees as the actual basis of his concept. Piaget finds such a basis in his first study, devoted to elucidating the function of speech in children. In this study, he comes to the conclusion that all children's conversations can be divided into two groups, which can be called egocentric and socialized speech. Under the name of egocentric speech, Piaget understands speech that differs primarily in its function. “This speech is egocentric,” says Piaget, “first of all because the child speaks only about himself. He is not interested in whether they are listening to him, does not expect an answer. He does not feel the desire to influence the interlocutor or really tell him anything. The child talks to himself as if he's thinking aloud. He doesn't address anyone." The calculated coefficient of egocentric speech ranges from 44% to 47% for children aged 5-7 years and from 54% to 60% for children aged 3-5 years. And so, based on a series of experiments, as well as on the fact of egocentric speech, Piaget comes to the conclusion that the child’s thought is egocentric, that is, the child thinks for himself, not caring either about being understood or about understanding the point of view. another.

The scheme is fundamental for the perception of Piaget's theory:

extraverbal autistic thinking

Egocentric speech and egocentric thinking

Socialized speech and logical thinking

Egocentric thought is an intermediate link between authentic and socialized thoughts. In its structure it remains authentic, but its interests are no longer directed to the satisfaction of organic needs or the needs of play, as in pure autism, but are also turned to mental adaptation, as in an adult. It is characteristic that in his reasoning Piaget relies on Freud's theory: "And psychoanalysis came indirectly to an extremely similar result. One of the merits of psychoanalysis is that he established a distinction between two kinds of thinking: one is social, capable of being expressed, guided by the need to adapt to others (logical thought), the other is intimate and therefore not amenable to expression (authentic thought)" (1, p. 350). However, under the influence of external factors, egocentric thinking is gradually socialized. The active beginning of this process can be attributed to 7-8 years ("the first critical period"), but the result is a transition to the form of thinking, which Piaget called socialized, trying to emphasize the completeness of the process.

Above, we briefly got acquainted with the main facts and theses of the study of children's egocentrism. We can say that it was this study, for all its controversy, that paved the way for further study of child psychology. Moreover, all subsequent theories, to a greater or lesser extent, were based on Piaget's research.

Conclusion

Piaget is one of the most respected and cited researchers, whose authority is recognized throughout the world and the number of followers is not decreasing. The main thing is that he was the first to understand, investigate and express the qualitative originality of children's thinking, showing that the thinking of a child is completely different from the thinking of an adult. The methods developed by him for studying the level of intelligence development have long become diagnostic and play an important role in modern practical psychology. Those laws of the process of mental activity that were discovered by Piaget remained unshaken, despite the large number of new facts about children's thinking. The opportunity he opened to understand and shape the child's mind is Piaget's greatest merit.

Bibliography

1. Vallon A. Mental development of the child. - M., 1967.

2. Developmental and pedagogical psychology / Ed. A.V. Petrovsky. - M., 1979.

3. Volkov B.S., Volkova N.V. Tasks and exercises in child psychology. - M., 1991.

4. Martsinkovskaya T.D. Genetic psychology of Jean Piaget. - M., 2005

5. Obukhova L.F. Jean Piaget's concept: pros and cons. - M., 1981

6. Piaget J. Selected psychological works. - M., 1986

7. Piaget's theory. History of foreign psychology. - M., 1986

8. Piaget J. Piaget J. Speech and thinking of the child. M., 1994

9. Elkonin D.B. Selected psychological works. - M., 1989

10. Yaroshevsky M.G. History of psychology from antiquity to the middle of the XX century. - M., 1996.

The process of development of the intellect, according to Piaget, consists of three large periods, during which the emergence and formation of three main structures takes place. First, sensorimotor structures are formed), there is a system reverse actions), performed materially and consistently, then specific operations arise (a system of actions performed in the mind, but based on external, visual data). After that, the opportunity opens up for the formation of formal operations. This is the period of formation of formal logic, hypothetical-deductive reasoning.
Development, according to Piaget, is the transition from a lower stage to a higher one. The previous stage always prepares the next one. Any action (movement, thinking, feeling) responds to some need that arises when something inside or outside of us has changed, and when it is necessary to restructure behavior depending on this change.
The order of these stages is unchanged. Associated with biological maturation. The age at which balance structures appear is influenced by the activity of the child and his environment.
Thus, the stages of intellectual development, according to J. Piaget, can be considered as stages of mental development in general. For their development is subject to the intellect.
Literature
Bruner J. Psychology of knowledge. M., 1977.
Obukhova L.F. Age-related psychology. – M.: Russia, 2001, 414 p.
Piaget J. Selected psychological works. - M., 1994.

Questions for self-control of knowledge on the topic "The Teaching of Jeanne Piaget on the Intellectual Development of the Child":
1. Name the main stages of the scientific biography of J. Piaget.
2. The main provisions of the concept of J. Piaget.
3. Define the concepts of accommodation, assimilation.
4. Define egocentrism and egocentric speech.
5. Tell us about the main features of the formation of the stages of the child's intellectual development.
Test tasks on the topic "The Teachings of Jeanne Piaget on the Intellectual Development of the Child":
1. Phenomena of mental development discovered by J. Piaget: a) egocentrism, b) syncretism, c) distress.
2. According to the views of J. Piaget, the decisive role in cognitive development belongs to: a) adults who provide training and education, b) the child himself, c) heredity.

Many parents are concerned about the age at which to give their child pocket money and when to trust valuables. I really want the child to show independence and responsibility. When an eight-year-old student loses money or breaks expensive phones, moms and dads get very upset.

After school, eight-year-old Andrei, together with his governess, returns home by bus. Parents bought a ticket, but the boy sometimes forgets it at home. Andrei has to pay with his own money, donated by his grandfather for his birthday. Andrei carries money with him everywhere, he likes to feel “with money”, to buy sweets and small toys for himself and the girls. Andrei does not like to pay for travel, but he does it. After all, you can’t argue with your father!

One day, a schoolboy forgot both his travel card and money at home. I had to borrow from the governess. All the way Andrey almost cried: “Please don’t take my money when we get home! Oh please!"

At first, the governess could not endure the suffering of the child and forgave the debt. When such behavior began to be repeated almost daily, she realized that she was making a pedagogical mistake by encouraging Andrey's irresponsibility, and stopped responding to tantrums.

The boy almost stopped forgetting his money and travel card at home. When this did happen, the child would throw a tantrum and, in crying, would reach a state of passion. He did not understand why he had to return the money to the governess.

It turns out that the child's thinking is absolutely not ready to save, analyze, preserve and draw conclusions based on analysis. All that a child can at this age is to lose money, become a victim of a robbery (older children will be taken away, and even intimidated so as not to tell their parents), buy things that no one needs, try to “buy” friends for themselves, feeding them with pies and sweets …

We, adults, have long forgotten how we thought in childhood. It seems to us that we were just less smart, knew less. How can you think differently?! As you can see, you can! To understand a child, you need to know how he thinks. This task is very difficult. The world famous Swiss scientist Jean Piaget was able to cope with it.

The scientist conducted a series of experiments with children from four years old and discovered the striking features of children's thinking.

The children were shown two rows of beads with the same number of beads, two identical vessels with the same amount of water, and two identical lumps of clay. The subjects were asked the question, is the number of beads in both rows the same, is the amount of water in the vessels the same, and is the amount of clay in the lumps the same? Everyone answered: "The same."

Then, before the eyes of a child in one of the rows, the beads were moved further apart; water from one container was poured into a narrower vessel, so that the water level became what it was originally; one of the lumps of clay was rolled into a long sausage. After all these manipulations, the subjects were again asked the same questions.

The answer of preschoolers from four to six years old was as follows: there are more beads in the first row than in the second; there is more water in a narrower vessel; there is more clay in the sausage. At the same time, any explanations that this is not so, any attempts to explain the correct answers did not give any results.

A child of seven to ten years old either gave different correct answers in different situations, or gave the correct answer, but could not explain it, or easily agreed if he was suggested the opposite answer.

And, finally, a child of eleven or thirteen years old always confidently gave the correct answer and could somehow substantiate his statement.

These phenomena in mental development any child were subsequently named Piagetian phenomena.

Piaget tried to find an explanation for them: maybe the child does not understand the questions he is asked? He insistently drew the children's attention to the fact that they were asked not about the distance between the beads, but about their number, and so on. But the children stood their ground and to the question “why is there more water?” They answered: "Because it was transfused."

It turns out conservation principle(quantity, volume, mass ...) a child can master at best by the age of eleven, because for this you need to perform operations with concepts. Moreover, the ability to compare quantities does not appear spontaneously, but requires special training, including training in logical rules.

This was proved by the scientists-teachers L. M. Fridman and L. I. Zemtsova. They conducted several experiments with five groups of subjects: older preschoolers (5 to 7 years old), younger students (7 to 9 years old), younger teenagers (10 to 12 years old), older students and adults.

The subject was shown ten various items: ruler, string, pencil, ball, cube, etc. We made sure that he knew each of them and could name the properties, then they asked: “Which of these objects is the largest and why?” and “Which of these items is the smallest and why?” All preschoolers, the vast majority junior schoolchildren and teenagers and more than half of high school students and adults immediately pointed to one object or group of the largest or smallest. Although the parameter by which it was necessary to compare these items was not specified.

In the last series of experiments, all subjects who tried to compare objects without a comparison parameter were found to have Piaget's phenomenon. That is, they did not possess or poorly possessed the principle of conservation!

Children and adults in whom Piaget's phenomenon is found compare objects not according to the attribute they are asked for, but according to the one that catches their eye. When they have two identical objects in front of them: two identical rows of beads, two identical vessels with the same amount of water and two identical lumps of clay, they just say: “The same”. And when one of the objects changes shape, the comparison takes place solely on the basis of the external, most obvious sign: the length of the beads, the height of the water level and the length of clay sausages.

An employee of the largest American specialist in the field of research on cognitive processes, Jerome Bruner I. Frank, found that if a child of four or five years old was asked whether the amount of water would change if it was poured from one vessel to another, for example, a wider one, then most of these children answered that the same amount of water will remain. But when this transfusion was performed before their eyes, they pointed to a vessel with more high level water, as for containing more water.

The understanding of abstract laws, which include the law of conservation, occurs in the process of development and learning. Before five years, the level of development of thinking does not allow understanding such laws. And after five, development already corresponds to the required level, but without training this will never happen anyway, otherwise there would be no adults with the Piagetian phenomenon.

Through experiments, Jerome Bruner and his collaborators found that if children five or six years old were trained, three out of four children would understand the conservation principle.

The mere accumulation of knowledge does not automatically lead to the development of thinking. The child's thinking is formed in the learning process, when, under the guidance of older children, the child actively masters various practical skills and masters various ways of cognitive activity, ranging from observing nature and experimenting with pets, ending with the development of the world of books, cinema and, of course, the development of science at school .

This is evidenced by research by University of California psychologist Patricia Greenfield. She found that in the absence school education intellectual development stops shortly after the age of nine.

It is in our power to help the child master the laws of logic, become more independent and responsible. And if you, dear parents, want to check whether your child is developing in the right direction, then the Stanford-Binet and Wexler tests can help you.

The Stanford-Binet test allows you to determine the so-called mental age of a child, calculate the IQ based on general awareness, the level of development of speech, perception, memory, and the ability to think logically.

The Wechsler test has two different versions: for children from four to six years old and from seven to sixteen. He evaluates word proficiency, the ability to detect similarities and differences between objects, memorize, count, and a number of other abilities.

The possibility of early development of children is not in doubt. And geeks are living proof of this. But let the peculiarities of children's logic for the time being not cause you concern.

Read other articles by Lyubov Mayskaya about the phenomena of children's thinking!