Search Forum:

Piagetian stages 1: These were not central to his unit of analysis; more basic than a stage was a series of levels, tiers, layers, steps. An analogy is contours indicating height on a map. Note well: the same contour can link terrain with different properties - rock, grass, cliff, plateau, etc. The contour does not indicate weather, time of day nor other things relevant to mountain scrambles. Still, it does indicate something essential - is the height you are on top of Everest, or on 5th Avenue: it helps to know which! 2. The other basic notion was normative self-regulation in the advance from one level to the next higher level; nor did Piaget exclude regression, downwards to a lower level. Norms in a framework and their self-regulation were always co-implicated for Piaget, whether or not the knower realised their interactive use. 3. Piaget was inconsistent as to the number of stages - five, four, and three were mentioned. In his paper "Piaget's theory" (1970 in Handbook of Child Psychology, Mussen; reprinted in 1983), the number of stages was given as three. None of his work in the last decade of his life contradicted this. 4. Any stage, whatever the number, was defined through a framework [cadre] - scheme, system, structure - whose principles set out the?the norms operative in the framework. At issue in any use of that framework would be how these norms are used, coherently or incoherently, regularly or in novel ways. Now that could be interesting - think of the young lad playing soccer at Rugby school when he picked up the ball and ran with it. 5. A strategy in psychology has been typically defined causally. An interesting question is how to link the norms in a framework to the causal properties of a strategy. That is interesting because norms are not causes. Even if the use of a norm can have causal antecedents and causal consequences, the main distinction is at the level of rationality - the reasons and reasoning generated by the use of the framework; and not the causal flow itself. If you find this puzzling, here are 2 scenarios in which you are playing a game, where you are the winner in both. In one,?every move you make is caused. In the other, you make each move.?These are different; even if you do not know which scenario you are in. Piaget's theory has the optimistic implication that anyone can be an agent in scenario 2. There's a bit more in these papers Smith, L. (2002). Piaget’s model. In?U. Goswami (ed) Blackwell handbook of childhood cognitive development.?[pp. 515-537]. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, L. (2009). Piaget's developmental epistemology. In U. Müller, J. Carpendale,& L. Smith (eds.). Cambridge companion to Piaget, New York: Cambridge University Press.