Jeff’s Cognitive Development According to Piaget

According to the Woolfolk text, Jeff’s cognitive development should have reached formal operational thought. This means that Jeff can perform what Piaget called hypothetical-deductive reasoning, and can think in the abstract and consider a variety of possible answers to a solution. This is good because formal operational thought can occur in children as early as eleven years old, and it might be sad for Jeff if he had not reached that stage yet. However, Piaget claimed that not everyone reaches formal operation thought, so I tested Jeff with a formal operational task known as the truthteller and liar question:

You are visiting a strange country in which are two kinds of people-truth tellers and liars. Truth tellers always tell the truth and liars always lie. You hail the first two people you meet and say, "Are you truth tellers or liars?" The first person mumbles something you can't hear. The second says, "He is a truth teller. He is a truth teller and so am I." Can you trust the directions that these two may give you?

Jeff was able to approach the problem somewhat like a formal operational thought, but did not come up with a clear reason for his answer. A characteristic of someone in formal operational thought is to recognize and examine relationships and then test them systematically. So, a person in formal operational thought would consider each situation for the truthtellar and liar, and then come up with an answer that doesn’t involve contradictions or impossible conditions (the recognition of which represents characteristics of formal operational thought). However, when I asked Jeff another formal operational thought question -where he might put a third-eye if he had the opportunity, he did mention other places than what the concrete operational thought (9 year olds) children always say – between their eyes. (Here is a YouTube clip on what people might say if they have no thumbs - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw36PpYPPZM) So, I would say that Jeff shows sign of operational thought, but hasn’t reached the highest stage. According to Piaget in the Woolfolk text, Jeff’s schema doesn’t contain enough of the heuristics to solve problems in a formal operational way. In other words, he was never taught how to systematically solve problems.

Cognitive Development Teaching Strategy According to Piaget.

One strategy that might help Jeff strengthen his cognitive development, especially for increasing his formal operational thought, is to get involved in problem solving. I need to place Jeff in a situation with complex variables and ask him to try and figure out ways to solve that problem. However, for Jeff to assimilate and accommodate new information into his schema (develop his thinking), Jeff needs to be paired with an equally talented peer. Piaget believed that when two humans interacted and neither one knew the answer, then their schemas go into disequilibrium, and they will work together to figure it out. If one person is more expert than the other, then Piaget claims that one person’s schema may shut down and not grow because someone is solving the problem for that person.