Learning to Think

Paul Light, Sue Sheldon, Martin Woodhead, Paul Light, Sue Sheldon, Martin Woodhead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317835813
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

The popular image, derived from Piaget, of the child as a solitary thinker struggling to construct a personal understanding of the mathematical and logical properties of the physical world has given way in recent years to a view of children's learning and thinking as embedded in social relationships. This shift is here reflected in a set of readings which show the child being initiated into shared cultural understandings through close relationships with parents and teachers, as well as siblings and peers.

Part one
Perspectives on development and instruction

Introduction

A very rough and ready history of psychology of cognitive development (at least in the English-speaking world) might run as follows. In the 1960s the 'discovery' (or rediscovery) of Piaget was the major factor, marking the ascendancy of a constructivist perspective over associationist and psychometric traditions in this field. In the 1970s Piaget's work was subject to a much more critical appraisal. Criticism focused on the 'individualism' inherent in Piaget's approach, on his claim for the universality of stages of mental development, and on the abstract, content-independent way in which cognitive processes were conceived. In the 1980s, renewed interest in Vygotsky's work reflected the need to recognize, within a constructivist framework, the role of cultural transmission of knowledge, skills and understanding. The transmission of culture lies at the heart of cognitive development, just as much as of social development. Vygotsky provides a framework within which learning is sharply focused: development is no longer separate from or transcendent to learning, but occurs through it.

The chapters in this first part allow both Piaget and Vygotsky to speak for themselves. The extract from Piaget (Chapter 1) dates from the 1960s. In it, he outlines his theory of the development of mental operations and, more unusually, touches on some of its implications in the field of education. Davis's (Chapter 2) article takes stock of the current position, arguing that Piaget's influence remains a major one in the 'psychology of education', and that this influence or relevance may indeed be reinforced in the context of new developments in curriculum and assessment. The Vygotsky extract (Chapter 3) which follows dates from 1930-1, and offers a clear statement of his central developmental argument concerning the social origins of the capacity for reflective thought. In particular, he discusses the role of language and, more broadly, 'signs' in the movement from the inter-mental to the intra-mental domain. Finally, Tharp and Gallimore (Chapter 4) offer a contemporary exegesis of aspects of Vygotsky's theory, especially the concept of a 'zone of proximal development' and its implications for our understanding of the processes of teaching and learning.

1 Advances in child and adolescent psychology

Jean Piaget
Source: Piaget, J. (1969) Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child, Harlow: Longman.

[. . .] There are some subjects, such as French history or spelling, whose contents have been developed, or even invented, by adults, and the transmission of which raises no problems other than those related to recognizing the better or worse information techniques. There are other branches of learning, on the other hand, characterized by a mode of truth that does not depend upon more or less particular events resulting from many individual decisions, but upon a process of research and discovery during the course of which the human intelligence affirms its own existence and its properties of universality and autonomy: a mathematical truth is not dependent upon the contingencies of adult society but upon a rational construction accessible to any healthy intelligence; an elementary truth in physics is verifiable by an experimental process that is similarly not dependent upon collective opinions but upon a rational approach, both inductive and deductive, equally accessible to that same healthy intelligence. The problem then, where truths of this type are concerned, is to decide whether they are better acquired by means of educational methods of transmission analogous to that which is more or less successful in the case of knowledge of the first type, or whether a truth is never truly assimilated as a truth except insofar as it has first been reconstructed or rediscovered by means of some activity adequate to that task.

[. . .] If we desire, in answer to what is becoming an increasingly widely felt need, to form individuals capable of inventive thought and of helping the society of tomorrow to achieve progress, then it is clear that an education which is an active discovery of reality is superior to one that consists merely in providing the young with ready-made wills to will with and ready-made truths to know with. Though, even if one is setting out to train conformist minds that will keep to the already mapped out paths of accepted truths, the question remains one of determining whether the transmission of established truths is more efficiently carried out by using processes of simple repetition or by a more active form of assimilation.

And, in fact, it is to this problem, though without having deliberately set out to solve it, that child psychology [. . .] is now able to give a more complete answer than before. And this answer bears on three points in particular, all three of them of decisive importance with regard to the choice of didactic methods and even to the working out of educational programs: the nature of intelligence or knowledge, the role of experience in the formation of ideas, and the mechanism of social or linguistic communications between adult and child.

The Formation of the Intelligence and the Active Nature of Knowledge

In an article written recently for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, R. M. Hutchins affirms that the principal aim of education is to develop the intelligence itself, and above all to teach how to develop it 'for as long as it is capable of further progress,' which is to say, of course, far beyond the age at which one leaves school. Whether the ends allotted to education, either openly or in secret, consist in subordinating the individual to society as it is or working toward a better society, everyone will doubtless accept Hutchins' formula. But it is also quite clear that this formula does not mean very much unless one can be quite precise about what intelligence consists of, for although the notions of common sense on this subject are as uniform as they are inexact, those of the theoreticians vary sufficiently to inspire the most divergent forms of pedagogy. It is therefore indispensable to consult the facts in order to find out what intelligence is, and psychological experiment has no means of answering that question other than by characterizing that intelligence according to its modes of formation and development. Fortunately, however, it is precisely in this field that child psychology has provided us with most new results [. . .].

The essential functions of intelligence consist in understanding and in inventing, in other words in building up structures by structuring reality. It increasingly appears, in fact, that these two functions are inseparable, since, in order to understand a phenomenon or an event, we must reconstitute the transformations of which they are the resultant, and since, also, in order to reconstitute them, we must have worked out a structure of transformations, which presupposes an element of invention or of reinvention. Whereas the older theories of intelligence (empirical associationism, etc.) emphasized understanding [. . .] and looked upon invention as the mere discovery of already existing realities, more recent theories, on the other hand, increasingly verified by facts, subordinate understanding to invention, looking upon the latter as the expression of a continual construction process building up structured wholes.

The problem of intelligence, and with it the central problem of the pedagogy of teaching, has thus emerged as linked with the fundamental epistemological problem of the nature of knowledge: does the latter constitute a copy of reality or, on the contrary, an assimilation of reality into a structure of transformations? The ideas behind the knowledge-copy concept have not been abandoned by everyone, far from it, and they continue to provide the inspiration for many educational methods, even, quite often, for those intuitive methods in which the image and audio-visual presentations play a role that certain people tend to look upon as the ultimate triumph of educational progress. In child psychology, many authors continue to think that the formation of the intelligence obeys the laws of 'learning', after the model of certain Anglo-Saxon theories of learning exemplified by those of Hull: repeated responses of the organism to external stimuli, consolidation of those repetitions by external reinforcements, constitution of chains of association or of a 'hierarchy of habits' which produce a 'functional copy' of the regular sequences of reality, and so forth.

But the essential fact that contradicts these survivals of associationist empiricism, the establishing of which has revolutionized our concepts of intelligence, is that knowledge is derived from action, not in the sense of simple associative responses, but in the much deeper sense of the assimilation of reality into the necessary and general coordinations of action. To know an object is to act upon it and to transform it, in order to grasp the mechanisms of that transformation as they function in connection with the transformative actions themselves. To know is therefore to assimilate reality into structures of transformation, and these are the structures that intelligence constructs as a direct extension of our actions.

The fact that intelligence derives from action, an interpretation in conformity with the French-speaking psychological tradition of the past few decades, leads up to this fundamental consequence: even in its higher manifestations, when it can only make further progress by using the instruments of thought, intelligence still consists in executing and coordinating actions, though in an interiorized and reflexive form. These interiorized actions, which are still actions nevertheless insofar as they are processes of transformation, are nothing other than the logical or mathematical 'operations' that are the motors of all judgment, or reasoning. But these operations are not just any interiorized actions, and they present, moreover, insofar as they are expressions of the most general coordinations of action, the double character of being reversible (every operation includes an inverse, as with addition and subtraction, or a reciprocal, etc.), and of coordinating themselves in consequence into larger total structures (a classification, the sequence of whole number, etc.). It follows from this that intelligence, at all levels, is an assimilation of the datum into structures of transformations, from the structures of elementary actions to the higher operational structures, and that these structurations consist in an organization of reality, whether in act or thought, and not in simply making a copy of it.

Development of Mental Operations

It is the continuous development, leading from initial sensorimotor actions to the most abstract mental operations, that child psychology has attempted to describe in the past thirty years, and the facts obtained in numerous countries, as well as their increasingly convergent interpretations, today provide those educators who wish to employ them with a number of sufficiently consistent elements of reference.

The origin of our intellectual operations is thus to be sought for as far back as an initial stage of the development characterized by sensorimotor actions and intelligence. With perceptions and movements as its only tools, without yet being capable of either representation or thought, this entirely practical intelligence nevertheless provides evidence, during the first years of our existence, of an effort to comprehend situations. It does, in practice, achieve the construction of schemata of action that will serve as substructures for the operational and notional structures built up later on. At this level, for example, we can already observe the construction of a fundamental schema of conservation, which is that of the permanence of solid objects, these being looked for from nine to ten months onward (after essentially negative phases in this respect) behind screens cutting them off from any actual perceptual field. Correlatively, we can also observe the formation of structures that are already almost reversible, such as the organization of the displacements and positions within a 'grouping' characterized by the possibility of forward and backward or circling movements (reversible mobility). We can watch the formation of causal relationships, linked first of all to the action proper alone, then progressively objectified and spatialized through connection with the construction of the object, of space, and of time. One of the facts that helps to verify the importance of this sensorimotor schematism for the formation of future mental operations is that in those born blind, as we know from the research of Y. Hatwell, the inadequacy of the initial schemata leads to a lag in development of three to four years and more in the formation of the more general operations, and lasting until adolescence, whereas children who become blind at a later age suffer a much less considerable retardation.

At about the age of two, a second period lasting until the seventh or eighth year begins. The onset of this second period is marked by the formation of the symbolic or semiotic function. This enables us to represent objects or events that are not at the moment perceptible by evoking them through the agency of symbols or differentiated signs. Symbolic play is an example of this process, as are deferred imitation, mental images, drawing, etc., and, above all, language itself. The symbolic function thus enables the sensorimotor intelligence to extend itself by means of thought, but there exist, on the other hand, two circumstances that delay the formation of mental operations proper, so that during the whole of this second period intelligent thought remains preoperational.

The first of these circumstances is the time that it takes to intenorize actions as thought, since it is much more difficult to represent the unfolding of an action and its results to oneself in terms of thought than to limit oneself to a material execution of it: for example, to impose a rotation on a square in thought alone, while representing to oneself every ninety degrees the position of the variously colored sides, is quite different from turning the square physically and observing the effects. The interiorization of actions thus presupposes their reconstruction at a new level, and this reconstruction may pass through the same stages as the previous reconstruction of the action itself, but with a much greater time lag.

In the second place, this reconstruction presupposes a continual decentering process that is much broader in scope than on the sensorimotor level. During his first two years of development (the sensorimotor period), the child has already been obliged to accomplish a sort of Copernican revolution [. . .] On the level of reconstructions in thought the same holds true, but on a much broader scale, and with another difficulty added: the child must not only situate himself in relation to the totality of things, but also in relation to the totality of people around him, which presupposes a decentering process that is simultaneously relational and also social, and therefore a transition from egocentrism to those two forms of coordination, the sources of operational reversibility (inversions and reciprocities).

Lacking mental operations, the child cannot succeed during this second period in constituting the most elementary notions of conservation, which are the conditions of logical deductibility. Thus he imagines that ten counters arranged in a row become greater in number when the spaces between them are increased; that a collection of objects divided in two becomes quantitatively greater than the initial whole; that a straight line represents a greater distance if it is broken in two; that the distance between A and B is not necessarily the same as that between B and A (especially if there is a slope); that a quantity of liquid in glass A increases when poured into the narrower glass B, etc.

At about seven or eight years of age, however, there begins a third period in which these problems and many others are easily resolved because of the growing interiorization, coordinating, and decentering processes, which result in that general form of equilibrium constituted by operational reversibility (inversions and reciprocities). In other words, we are watching the formation of mental operations: linking and dissociation of classes, the sourc...