“If you want to get ahead, get a theory”
By Annette Karmiloff-Smith, B. Inhelder. Thinking Developmentally from Constructivism to Neuroconstructivism, 2018
407 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Although Genevan research has provided a detailed analysis of cognitive structures, our knowledge of cognitive processes remains fragmentary. The focus is now not only on macro-development but also on changes occurring in children's spontaneous action sequences in micro-formation. A series of experiments designed to study goal-oriented behavior is in progress. This paper describes the action sequences of 67 subjects between 4;6 and 9;5 years in a block balancing task. It is not a study of children's understanding of a specific notion in physics, but an attempt to pave the way towards understanding the more general processes of cognitive behavior. The analysis focuses on the interplay between the child's action sequences and his implicit theories which the observer infers from the sequences rather than from his verbal comments. Emphasis is placed on the role of counterexamples and on shifts in attention from goal to means. The construction and overgeneralization of ‘theories-in-action’ appear to be dynamic and general processes which are not stage-linked. The results also suggest certain functional rather than structural analogies between the acquisition of physical knowledge and the acquisition of language.
Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6fd63111355ad418a2584743a115ae33abc38af4
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In Developmental and Educational Psychology
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Citations in the corpus
- Children's Misconceptions in Primary Science: A Survey of teachers' views (2001, background): “Yet when a child of 6 or 7 years is given a wooden beam—about 30 cm long with a block of wood xed to one end—and asked to let it rest upon a support so that it balances, they are often unable to do so (Karmiloff-Smith & Inhelder, 1974).”
- Cognitive requirements for learning with open-ended learning environments (2000, background): “To the extent that critical feedback is represented ambiguously with OELEs, misperceptions become a cause for concern--particularly because learners are more likely to use ambiguity to protect, rather than question, naive beliefs ( Karmiloff-Smith & Inhelder, 1975 ).”
- Adaptive expertise: Effects of type of experience and the level of theoretical understanding it generates (2002, background): “It has also been shown that performance does not always monotonically improve with experience, even in cases where more experience eventually does have a beneficial effect (Karmiloff Smith & Inhelder, 1974; Lesgold et al., 1988).”