When studying the psychology of a developing child, no other phenomenon has received such close attention as thinking and speech. This is explained by the fact that speech and thinking form the basis of intelligence, and the problem of development is of interest to scientists, in particular in order to determine the correct approach to intellectual education.

L. S. Vygotsky was one of the first who began a deep study of this problem and drew attention to the fact that thinking and speech, connecting with each other in an adult, have different roots in their genesis, a long history of independent existence and development. The statement of this fact made it possible, on the one hand, to conduct a number of studies aimed at studying the communicative function of speech and to highlight the so-called non-verbal means of communication, which play a significant role in a person’s acquisition of language and speech. On the other hand, pre-verbal forms of thinking were discovered: visual-effective and visual-figurative; it became possible not only to judge the child’s intelligence before he mastered speech, but also to develop his thinking in two forms no less significant than verbal. Thanks to this, the comprehensive development of intelligence at all its levels has become possible, which allows for a diversified impact on the child’s mental abilities.

Screaming, babbling, even the first words of a child are stages in the development of speech, but practically unrelated to intelligence. At this stage, the child’s speech is more of an emotionally expressive and communicative form of behavior than an intellectual one, that is, it serves the expression and exchange of feelings. During the first year of a child’s life, the two indicated functions of speech are clearly revealed. The development of speech itself is just beginning here and is of a preparatory nature. First, the child develops phonemic hearing. It develops quite early, long before the child begins to use speech and pronounce words independently. Such hearing is not yet connected with thinking; it belongs to the area of ​​perception and partially affects memory.

Starting from an early age, about two years, the lines of development of thinking and speech come closer and give rise to a new form of behavior characteristic of a person. As a result of such rapprochement, the symbolic function of speech is revealed to the growing individual. A child who has experienced this most important psychological turning point begins to independently and actively expand his vocabulary, asking about each new thing the question: what is it called? There is a rapid increase in the number of recognizable and pronounced words expressing the names of surrounding objects and phenomena, and from this moment speech enters the intellectual phase of its development.

The external aspect of speech continues to develop in the child from a word to a concatenation of two or three words, then to a simple phrase, even later to complex sentences and, finally, to coherent speech consisting of an expanded series of thoughts - sentences.

It is also known that in terms of its meaning, the first word - the child's morpheme - is a whole phrase, a monosyllabic sentence according to the meaning contained in it. In the development of the semantic side of speech, the child thus begins with a sentence and only later moves on to mastering private semantic units, the meanings of individual words, dividing the thought collectively expressed in a one-word sentence into a number of interconnected verbal meanings.

Under the influence of the theory of the American linguist N. Chomsky in the middle of the 20th century. There has been a reorientation of research in the field of developmental psychology of children's speech. Instead of studying how a child learns individual words, researchers have focused on the child's attempts to recognize and identify the rules for producing those words. It has been observed that a child's first two-word utterance already has a structure or grammar,

different from the speech of an adult. From two to five years of age, children go through a series of distinct stages in their language development towards adult grammar, which will be discussed in a later chapter.

The child masters the complex structure of subordinate clauses with conjunctions “because”, “despite”, “since”, “although” earlier than the semantic structures corresponding to these syntactic forms. Grammar in the development of a child’s speech clearly goes ahead of logic, which indicates that speech becomes a means of thinking relatively late. The semantic plan of speech, notes L. S. Vygotsky, is only one of its internal plans associated with thinking. Behind it opens the plane of internal speech, which, in fact, represents verbal thinking. However, inner speech is formed in children only in older preschool age.

A special line in the development of children’s thinking is the one that is characterized by the gradual connection of thought with words and appears first in the form of an external and then an internal dialogue of a person, in the form of questions and answers to them. The first signs - prerequisites for the development of a dialogical form of communication between a child and an adult - appear by the age of two months (emotional communication - a revitalization complex). An adult, starting to talk with a child at a time in life when the child is not yet able to speak, stimulates his cognitive activity and demonstrates the necessary forms of behavior in dialogue, and these forms of behavior are subsequently acquired by the child. At an early age, the child begins to play an active role in the dialogue. his first questions appear. The content and nature of these questions usually reproduce those with which the adult previously addressed the child during the pre-speech period of his development. The child’s own speech activity encourages the adult to move to a new level of question-and-answer dialogue with him, which advances the child’s current level of development and thereby stimulates his further growth.

The number of questions that adults ask children usually exceeds the number of questions that children themselves ask adults. The complexity of the system of questions goes as follows: the nature of the object (who?, what?), its location (where?), signs (which?), actions (what does it do?), purpose (for what?, why?), reason ( Why?). This sequence of asking questions deepens the child’s curiosity, develops his thinking and indicative research activity. Through skillful and progressively more complex posing of questions to the child, the adult organizes his thinking, systematizes and deepens his knowledge about the world.

In preschool age, from 2.5 to 6-7 years, there is a period of the child’s greatest activity in asking questions to adults (the “why” age). At this time, persistence appears in the child’s dialogue, he certainly strives to achieve an answer to the question posed, demonstrates his own attitude to the answer, is not always satisfied with the adult’s answer and does not necessarily agree with it.

Here the fact is already evident that dialogue has ceased to be a form of communication for the child and has turned into reflection with the participation of an adult. A question addressed to another person often serves as a means for a child to clarify his own position, and not just as a way to obtain new information. By the end of preschool childhood, external dialogue turns into internal. A sign of the transition of external dialogue to internal is the well-known phenomenon of children's egocentric speech. At the beginning of primary school age, there is a clear separation of two forms of dialogue: dialogue as a means of managing interpersonal communication and dialogue as a means of organizing individual thinking. The questions of the participants in the dialogue addressed to each other, in this case the questions of an adult to a child and a child to an adult, begin to activate their thought processes and perform a mutually developing intellectual function. This is especially facilitated by questions like “why?” “Behind a question in the form of “why” in a primary school student there is not just curiosity... but a discovered contradiction between some existing ideas.” By posing such questions to an adult, the child, together with him and with his help, explores the problematic situation that has arisen. A significant portion of children of this age, about 20%, are able to address such questions to themselves, thereby activating their own internal dialogue.

Next, the so-called “hypothesis questions” appear, which in their content contain a tentative answer to the question posed. Junior school age, from 6 to 9 years, can be considered as particularly sensitive, or sensitive, to the development of the child’s ability to identify the unknown in a problem situation and actively study it.

The dialogue turns completely or almost completely into an internal one as the child transitions from primary school to adolescence. The number of questions that a child at this age asks an adult drops sharply, but the number increases significantly, the content of the questions that a teenager poses to himself expands and deepens.

The initial period of adolescence can be considered as a kind of peak of curiosity, which in these years, unlike preschool childhood, is already aimed at clarifying the essence of things and phenomena. Increased curiosity, however, does not characterize all children, and their individual differences in this regard increase sharply during adolescence.

If L. S. Vygotsky and N. B. Shumakova, whose point of view on the process of development of the dialogical form of speech we have just examined, managed to trace changes in speech up to the moment when it becomes a means of thinking, then the merit of J. Piaget for the presentation whose views we are moving on, there was a detailed study of the development of thinking up to the moment when it is combined with speech, especially visual-effective and visual-figurative thinking. Both L. S. Vygotsky in relation to speech and J. Piaget in connection with thinking came to the conclusion that thinking takes shape long before it becomes verbal. Based on the research carried out by J. Piaget, logical structures of thinking were identified - operations, the genesis of which constitutes the content of the stages of development of children's intelligence.

For J. Piaget, knowledge is not the sum of units of information and not the state of its possession on the part of the individual, but a process. To know something means to act in accordance with the knowledge we have, either mentally or practically. The subjects of cognitive actions can be real objects, their images, signs and symbols.

The main goal of intelligent human behavior or thinking is adaptation to the environment. J. Piaget calls the methods of such adaptation schemes. A schema is a repeating structure or organization of actions in typical situations. The scheme can consist of the simplest movements, or include quite complex complexes of motor abilities, skills and mental actions.

Operation is the central concept of J. Piaget's theory, which explains the process of development of intelligence. An operation is understood as a mental action that has an important property - reversibility, which means that, having performed the corresponding action, the child can return to its beginning by performing the opposite action. An operation is a reversible action. Most paired mathematical operations are such reversible operations, performed both forward and backward. The essence of a child's intellectual development is mastery of operations.

The main mechanisms by which a child moves from one stage of development to another are assimilation, accommodation and balance. Assimilation is an action with new objects in accordance with already established skills and abilities. Accommodation is the desire to change the skills themselves in accordance with changing conditions. As a result of accommodation in the psyche and behavior, the disturbed balance is restored again, and the discrepancy between the existing skills, abilities and conditions for performing the action is removed. The cognitive development of children is carried out through the processes of assimilation, accommodation and balance. These processes function throughout a person’s life.

When assimilation dominates over accommodation, rigidity of thinking and inflexibility of behavior arise. When accommodation prevails over assimilation, stable, economical adaptive mental actions and operations are not formed, and behavior becomes inconsistent and disorganized. Equilibrium between these processes means their optimal combination. As long as assimilation and accommodation are in a state of equilibrium, we can talk about reasonable behavior; otherwise it is lost and loses its intellectual properties. Achieving a fundamental balance between assimilation and accommodation is a difficult task, and its solution depends on the level of intellectual development of the subject, on the new problems that he faces. Such balance must exist at all levels of intellectual development.

J. Piaget identified four stages of children's intellectual development: 1. Sensorimotor stage, from birth to 18-24 months. 2. Preoperative stage, from 18-24 months to 7 years. 3. Stage of concrete operations, from 7 years to 12 years. 4. Stage of formal operations, after 12 years. There are certain individual differences in the speed at which children progress through these stages, so the age limits of the stages are determined approximately.

By the end of the sensorimotor stage of development, the child, from a being dependent on heredity, becomes a subject capable of elementary symbolic actions. The main characteristic of the preoperational stage is the beginning of the use of symbols, including words. The child uses them primarily in play, in the process of imitation. At this stage, it is still very difficult for him to imagine how others perceive what he himself observes and sees. However, when a child needs to solve a corresponding problem in a specific situation, including real relationships between people, then children of about three years of age cope well with it, experiencing difficulties only in the case when the found solution principle must be expressed in an abstract, verbal form. It can therefore be assumed that the difficulties that the child faces in this case are difficulties caused by insufficient development of speech.

At the stage of concrete operations, the child discovers the ability to perform flexible and reversible operations performed in accordance with logical rules. Children who have reached this level of development can already give logical explanations for the actions performed, are able to move from one point of view to another, and become more objective in their assessments. They cope with conservation tasks relatively easily (Piaget's phenomena). Children come to an intuitive understanding of two important logical principles that are expressed by relationships:

if A = B and B = C, then A == C; A + B == B + A Another important characteristic of this stage of intellectual development is the ability to rank objects according to some measurable characteristic, for example, by weight or size. g of the theory of J. Piaget, this ability is called seriation. The child also already understands that many terms expressing relationships: smaller, shorter, lighter, taller, etc., characterize not absolute, but relative properties of objects, i.e., such qualities that appear in these objects only in relation to other objects.

Children of this age are able to combine objects into classes, distinguish subclasses from them, denoting with words the distinguished classes and subclasses. At the same time, children under the age of 12 cannot yet reason using abstract concepts or rely in their reasoning on assumptions or imaginary events.

At the stage of formal operations, which, starting from the age of 12, continues throughout a person’s life, the individual assimilates real concepts, shows flexibility of thinking, and demonstrates the reversibility of mental operations and reasoning. A characteristic feature of this stage is the ability to reason using real abstract concepts. Another significant feature of this stage of development is the systematic search for solutions to problems, in which various solution options are consistently tested, the effectiveness of each option is evaluated and weighed.

In table 1 summarizes the main stages of child development according to J. Piaget and provides a brief description of each stage.

1. Sensorimotor stage (from birth to 1.5-2.0 years)

The child’s psychological separation of himself from the outside world. Knowing yourself as a subject of action. The beginning of volitional control of one’s own behavior. Understanding of stability, constancy of external objects. The awareness that objects continue to exist and be in their places even when they are not directly perceived through the senses.

2. Pre-operational stage (from 2 to 7 years)

Language acquisition, representation of objects and their images in words. Egocentrism of thinking, expressed in the difficulty of taking the position of another person, seeing phenomena and things through his eyes. Classification of objects according to individual, often random characteristics.

3. Stage of specific operations, (from 7 to 12 years)

The emergence of elementary logical reasoning regarding objects and events. Mastering the concepts of conservation of number (age about 6 years), mass (age about 7 years) and weight of objects (age about 9 years). Classification of objects according to individual essential characteristics.

4. Stage of formal operations (beginning of age about 12 years)

The ability to think logically using abstract concepts. The ability to perform direct and inverse operations in the mind (reasoning). Formulating and testing hypothetical assumptions.

Let us trace, as an example, the process of a child’s age-related development through such an intellectual operation as seriation. At the initial stage, which can be called stage A, the youngest children, conducting seriation, claim that all these objects (say, sticks) offered to them are the same. In the second stage (stage B), they divide objects into two categories: large and small, without further ordering them. At stage B, children already talk about large, medium and small objects. At stage D, the child builds a classification empirically, through trial and error, but is not able to immediately make its construction error-free. Finally, at the last stage D, he discovers the method of seriation: first he selects the largest of the sticks and places it on the table. Then he looks for the largest of the remaining ones. And so on. At this final stage, he, without hesitation, correctly builds the series, and the construction he creates presupposes reversible relationships, that is, he understands that element “a” in the series is simultaneously smaller than all previous elements and greater than all subsequent ones.

During the operational stage, between the ages of 7 and 12 years, children are able to organize objects according to various characteristics, such as height or weight. They are also able to mentally imagine, name a series of actions being performed, completed, or those that have yet to be performed. Having passed any complex path in space, a seven-year-old child is able to remember it, point it out and recognize it, moreover, go back and repeat it, if necessary. But, as a rule, he still cannot depict it graphically on paper. An eight-year-old child is already able to do this. This level of intellectual development is called the stage of concrete operations because a child here can use concepts only by connecting and relating them to specific objects, and not as concepts in the abstract logical sense of the word.

Conservation experiments conducted by J. Piaget, their results and interpretation have been tested many times, sometimes confirmed, sometimes questioned. Some modern critics of Piaget believe that he underestimated the level of intellectual development of a preschool child and did not quite correctly interpret the results of his experiments. It turned out, for example, that if we make sure that assessments of a child’s behavior and his intelligence are not based on the child’s verbal statements, i.e., are not associated with speech, then by the age of 3-4 years children can demonstrate the phenomenon of mastering the concept of conservation of quantity with changing the shape and arrangement of objects.

Denying the stages of development and taking positions that affirm its continuity, Piaget's critics denied the legitimacy of dividing the process of intellectual development into stages. It is quite possible, they argued, that the stages identified by J. Piaget indicate stages of speech, rather than intellectual development. A child may know, understand, but be unable to explain his understanding in the same way as an adult. We find many examples of this kind in the intellectual behavior of animals, which are deprived of speech, but are able to discern and use in their actions the complex relationships that exist between things.

Operations are interiorized actions that depend in their development on the activity of the subject. An example of such operational structures is a process that can be observed in children between 4 and 5, 11 and 12 years of life in a situation in which life experience alone is clearly not enough to explain.

The experiment consists of dissolving sugar in a glass of water. The child is asked about the conservation of a solute, its weight and volume. For children under 7-8 years of age, dissolved sugar is usually considered destroyed, and even its taste, in the child’s opinion, disappears. Around the age of about 7-8 years, sugar is already seen as retaining its substance in the form of very small and invisible particles, but has neither weight nor volume (a naive, pre-experimental discovery of atomism). At the age of about 9-10 years, children claim that each grain of sugar retains its weight, and the sum of all elementary weights is equivalent to the weight of sugar before dissolution. At the age of 11-12 years, the same applies to volume: the child predicts that after the sugar melts, the water level in the glass will remain at its original height.

According to Piaget, the three main factors influencing the development of a child’s intelligence are maturation, experience and the influence of the social environment, in particular training and upbringing. The success of learning depends on the level of development already achieved by the child. If he has approached the operational level of development, that is, is able to understand quantitative relationships, then this is quite enough to lead him to the concept of conservation. But the further he is from this level, the less able he is to use the learning situation to construct the concept of conservation.

The biological maturation of the organism plays a certain role in the development of intelligence. The stable sequential nature of the stages of development is confirmation of their partial biological determinism. But this does not mean the existence of a hereditary program that genotypically determines the development of a child’s thinking. The effect of maturation consists, according to J. Piaget, mainly in the opening of new opportunities for development, but not in their practical implementation.

The concept developed by another American scientist, J. Bruner, had a great impact on theoretical studies of the development of children's thinking, as well as on the practice of teaching and raising children. Like many other researchers, J. Bruner proceeded from the idea that children's culture and language play important role in the intellectual development of the child. He also used a number of concepts from information theory in his concept.

The main ideas contained in Bruner's theory of the development of child intelligence are as follows:

1. Of the various biological abilities that a child develops during the first two years of his life, three seem to be the most important: the ability to imagine (imagine an absent object), iconic memory and symbolic encoding. They appear in ontogenesis in the indicated sequence at approximately 6, 12 and 18 months of a child’s life.

2. In themselves, these biological abilities are relatively insignificant, but they allow children to form and develop systems for representing, encoding and transforming information perceived through the senses.

3. Children are not able to invent this kind of system on their own. In the process of ontogenesis, they rather rediscover them for themselves under the influence of culture, training and education in the broad sense of the word. This, in particular, is facilitated by children’s own genetic predisposition to perceive pedagogical influences. Development occurs under the influence of external (training and upbringing) and internal (biological maturation) factors.

4. Of the various systems of symbolic representation of information that a child learns, none is as important for his development as language. The dominance of natural language allows children to go beyond primitive cognitive strategies, work with concepts, and use logic.

5. Although by the age of approximately 5 years the child already speaks the language quite well, this is not enough for deep qualitative changes in his thinking. For such changes to occur, children must learn to connect their use of language with other ways of presenting information.

6. This process occurs differently in different cultures. In order for children to rise to the level of proficiency in intellectual operations described by J. Piaget, it is necessary that their training be formalized, that is, conducted at an abstract theoretical level. This type of teaching separates two systems of information representation: concrete (iconic) and abstract (theoretical) - and places children in a situation where Words are systematically used without association with the material objects they represent.

The theory of the development of children's intelligence according to J. Piaget has attracted the close attention of scientists and practitioners for several decades since its appearance (the first half of the 20th century). Some accept it, others reject it, others correct and supplement it. One of the attempts of the latter kind was made by the American scientist Pascual Leone. He postulated the existence of a special intellectual and motivational force, which he called the power of attention. This strength has been defined as the maximum number of independent intelligent circuits that can

simultaneously be fully actualized in a person when any problem or task arises. It has been shown that in children the power of attention consistently increases with age, increasing by approximately one every two years, starting from the age of 3-4 and up to 15-16 years inclusive. A young man's attention span is 5-6 units greater than that of a child of primary preschool age.

According to Pasquale-Leone, the underdevelopment of the power of attention, and not operational structures according to Piaget, determines the weakness of children's intellect. J. Piaget explained the similarity of problem solving by children at different age levels by the similarity of the logical structures of these problems, as well as the level of development of operations in the subject, while Pasquale-Leone explained the same thing, based on the general requirements for the coordination of circuits in these problems, “ the power of attention" in the subject. For J. Piaget, the difference in children’s readiness to learn is explained by differences in the formation of operational structures; the same differences according to Pasquale-Leone are explained by differences in the strength of attention.

Another option for developing the concept of J. Piaget was proposed by R. Case. His theory is based on the acceptance of the following postulates (they, in turn, were borrowed by the author from the theories of Baldwin, Piaget, and from the information theory of intelligence):

1. A child will be born with a series of motor operations that are almost ready for use, which he gradually transfers from involuntary ones under his conscious, volitional control during the first few months of life.

2. These first arbitrary, controlled operational structures are then coordinated with each other. As soon as this happens, noticeable changes in accommodation appear in the child’s thinking.

3. The four main stages of child development approximately correspond to the following chronological periods: from birth to 1.5 years; from 1.5 to 5.0 years; from 5 to 11 years; from 11 to 18.5 years.

4. The resulting operations of each stage are organized into a stable system that allows the child to show significant flexibility at a certain cognitive level.

5. Differentiated and coordinated operating systems serve as building materials for the next stages of development.

6. The executive and control structures of intelligence can be divided into at least three categories: representation of existing states, representation of desired states (goals), and representation of operations or strategies for transition from one state to another...

7. Children acquire the ability to discern the principle of solving a problem (insight) when they have formed an internal system of logically sequential steps of transition from the existing state to the desired one through a series of intermediate states, i.e., speaking in cybernetic language, when they have an algorithm for such transition.

8. Children are born with the ready ability to represent certain elements of the current situation in the form of images. They are also born with the ability to recreate from memory recently experienced or desired states as goals, and with the rudimentary ability to act toward those goals.

9. Many phenomena of intelligence that are superficially similar to developmental stages can be explained by assuming that children acquire new ways of moving from present to desired states and that these methods are somehow included in action, enriching the intellect.

Based on these postulates, based on a series of intermediate arguments, R. Case comes to the following conclusions, which form the basis of his own theory:

1. The main changes in a child’s thinking during his development occur through the coordination of executive structures, the degree of complexity of which is the same, but the functions and internal form are different. Minor changes are made by coordinating executive structures whose complexity, form and function are the same.

2. In the process of a child’s cognitive development, the following typical changes occur:

a) one structure becomes part of another;

b) the situation that requires such entry is represented in consciousness as part of the problem;

c) operations are combined, and they are included in a higher-level structure as its element, becoming its cycle or subroutine;

d) in order for the newly created structure to function normally, certain necessary changes occur in each of its elements, i.e., it seems to be completely rebuilt a little.

3. The period from 2 to 5 years, contrary to J. Piaget, does not precede the appearance of operations. It represents a completely independent stage of development, with its own sequence of operational structures and its own result of development.

4. The four main classes of intellectual operations are the following: sensorimotor operations, operations aimed at clarifying relationships, measurement operations and vector operations (abstract measurement).

The nature of the concept presented by R. Case was obviously influenced by advances in the field of technology, technology and structures used in the compilation of data processing programs on a computer. The author tried to draw a parallel between human intelligence and the programs that modern computers operate on (the concepts of cycles, subroutines, nesting of program blocks, etc.).

Piaget Jean (1896-1980) - Swiss psychologist, founder of the Geneva Center for Epistemology (Geneva school of genetic psychology). Author of the concept of staged development of the child’s psyche. In the initial period of his activity, he described the features of children’s ideas about the world: the inseparability of the world and one’s own “I”, animism, artificialism (the perception of the world as created by human hands). He analyzed in detail the specifics of children's thinking (“Speech and Thinking of a Child,” 1923). To explain children’s ideas, he used the concept of egocentrism, by which he understood a certain position in relation to the world around him, which is overcome through the process of socialization and influences the constructions of children’s logic. Later he paid special attention to the development of intelligence. In his research he tried to

show that the development of thinking is associated with the transformation of external actions into internal ones through their transformation into operations. A significant part of the research in the field of intelligence conducted by him was reflected in the book “Psychology of Intelligence”, 1946.

J. Piaget's research became widely known, which contributed to the creation of a scientific direction, which he called genetic epistemology. The theory of the development of intelligence in childhood, proposed by J. Piaget within the framework of the ontogenetic direction, became widely known. Piaget proceeded from the assertion that the main mental operations have an activity origin. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the theory of the development of a child’s thinking, proposed by Piaget, was called “operational”. An operation, according to Piaget, is an internal action, a product of transformation (“interiorization”) of an external objective action, coordinated with other actions into a single system, the main properties of which are reversibility (for each operation there is a symmetrical and opposite operation). In the development of mental operations in children, Piaget identified four stages.

The first stage is sensorimotor intelligence. It covers the period of a child’s life from one to two years and is characterized by the development of the ability to perceive and cognize objects in the real world that make up the child’s environment. Moreover, knowledge of objects involves understanding their properties and characteristics.

By the end of the first stage, the child becomes a subject, that is, he distinguishes himself from the world around him and becomes aware of his “I”. He shows the first signs of volitional control of his behavior, and in addition to learning about objects in the surrounding world, the child begins to know himself.

The second stage - operational thinking - refers to the ages of two to seven years. This age, as is known, is characterized by the development of speech, therefore the process of internalization of external actions with objects is activated, and visual representations are formed. At this time, the child exhibits a manifestation of egocentrism in thinking, which is expressed in the difficulty of accepting the position of another person. At the same time, erroneous classification of objects is observed due to the use of random or secondary features.

The third stage is the stage of specific operations with objects. This stage begins at the age of seven or eight years and lasts until 11 or 12 years. During this period, according to Piaget, mental operations become reversible.

Children who have reached this level can already give logical explanations for the actions performed, are able to move from one point of view to another, and become more objective in their judgments. According to Piaget, at this age children come to an intuitive understanding of the two most important logical principles of thinking, which can be expressed by the following formulas:

The first formula is that if A = B and B -= C, then A = C.

The second formula contains the statement that A + B = B + A.

At the same time, children exhibit an ability called seriation by Piaget. The essence of this ability is the ability to rank objects according to some measurable characteristic, for example, by weight, size, loudness, brightness, etc. In addition, during this period the child demonstrates the ability to combine objects into classes and distinguish subclasses.

The fourth stage is the stage of formal operations. It covers the period from 11-12 to 14-15 years. It should be noted that the development of operations formed at this stage continues throughout life. At this stage of development, the child develops the ability to perform mental operations using logical reasoning and abstract concepts. In this case, individual mental operations are transformed into a unified structure of the whole.

In our country, the theory of the formation and development of intellectual operations proposed by P. Ya. Galperin has become widespread. This theory was based on the idea of ​​a genetic dependence between internal intellectual operations and external practical actions. This approach has been used in other concepts and theories of thinking development. But unlike other directions, Halperin expressed his ideas regarding the patterns of development of thinking. He spoke about the existence of a gradual formation of thinking. In his works, Galperin identified the stages of internalization of external actions and identified the conditions that ensure the successful transfer of external actions into internal ones. It should also be noted that Halperin’s concept is of great importance not only for understanding the essence of the process of development and formation of thinking, but also for understanding the psychological theory of activity, since it shows the process of mastering a specific action at the level of the formation of mental operations.

Halperin believed that the development of thinking in the early stages is directly related to objective activity, to the manipulation of objects. However, the translation of external actions into internal ones with their transformation into certain mental operations does not occur immediately, but gradually. At each stage, the transformation of a given action is carried out only according to a number of parameters. According to Halperin, higher intellectual actions and operations cannot be formed without relying on previous methods of performing the same action, and those rely on previous methods of performing a given action, and ultimately, all actions are fundamentally based on visually effective methods.

According to Halperin, there are four parameters according to which action is transformed. These include: execution level; measure of generalization; completeness of actually performed operations; measure of development. In this case, the first parameter of action can be at three sublevels: actions with material objects; actions in terms of external speech; actions in the mind. The three remaining parameters characterize the quality of the action formed at a certain sublevel: generalization, abbreviation, mastery.

The process of formation of mental actions in accordance with Halperin’s concept has the following stages:

The first stage is characterized by the formation of an indicative basis for future action. The main function of this stage is to become familiar in practice with the composition of the future action, as well as with the requirements that this action must ultimately meet.

The second stage of the formation of mental action is associated with its practical development, which is carried out using objects.

The third stage is associated with the continuation of mastering a given action, but without support from real objects. At this stage, the action is transferred from the external, visual-figurative plane to the internal plane. The main feature of this stage is the use of external (loud) speech as a substitute for the manipulation of real objects. Halperin believed that the transfer of action to the speech plane means, first of all, the verbal performance of a certain objective action, and not its voicing.

At the fourth stage of mastering mental action, external speech is abandoned. The external speech execution of an action is transferred entirely to internal speech. A specific action is performed “to oneself.”

At the fifth stage, the action is performed entirely internally, with appropriate reductions and transformations, with the subsequent departure of the execution of this action from the sphere of consciousness (i.e., constant control over its implementation) into the sphere of intellectual skills and abilities.

INTRODUCTION -

§1. Theory of children's thinking

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

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 see, speech can indeed be interpreted in very different ways, but the last definition attracts our attention to a greater extent. In this regard, it should be noted that most studies on child thinking have been predominantly analytical. That is why the wide possibilities for studying speech (as one of the forms of the existence of consciousness) empirically are of particular interest to psychologists.

The most extensive and authoritative work in this area belongs to J. Piaget. Piaget was the first to systematically study the features of children's thinking and speech with extraordinary depth and breadth of coverage. It is especially worth highlighting some features of his research and the clinical method he first used. This observation method consists of forcing the child to speak out and carefully recording exactly how his thoughts unfold. What is new here is that they do not limit themselves to simply registering the answer that the child gives to the question put to him, but give him the opportunity to express whatever he would like. By following the child in his every response, guiding him all the time, encouraging him to express himself more and more freely, the observer eventually obtains the greatest possible picture of the development of thought. In his work, Piaget tried not to be influenced by existing theories and focus directly on collecting facts and processing them. It is also impossible not to notice the author’s biological background, which is manifested in the extraordinary care of the arrangement and classification of facts. It is the latter that Piaget pays special attention to, deliberately avoiding attempts to prematurely analyze and systematize the variety of obtained facts.

“We tried,” says Piaget, “to follow step by step the facts in the form in which the experiment presented them to us. We, of course, know that an experiment is always determined by the hypotheses that gave rise to it, but for now we have limited ourselves to only considering the facts.”

§1. Theory of children's thinking

Piaget based 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 intelligence. In a series of experiments, he proved his point of view, showing how the level of understanding and intelligence affect children’s speech, their perception and memory. The children in his experiments did not see and did not remember what level the water was in the communicating vessels, if they did not know about the connection between the water level and the stopper with which one of the vessels was closed. 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 stopper.

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

Piaget said that in the process of development the organism adapts to its environment. Intelligence is therefore the core of mental development, because it is the understanding and creation of the correct scheme of the environment that ensures adaptation to the surrounding world. Moreover, adaptation is not a passive process, but an active interaction of the organism with the environment. This activity is a necessary condition for development, since the scheme, Piaget believes, is not given ready-made at birth, and it does not exist in the surrounding world. The scheme is developed only in the process of active interaction with the environment, or, as Piaget wrote, “the scheme 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 the example of a child who does not know the concept of number, who realizes its meaning by picking pebbles, playing with them, arranging them in a row.

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 constructed 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, predetermined framework of an existing scheme. An example of assimilation for Piaget is a game in which a child learns about the world around him. Accommodation is associated with changing the finished scheme when the situation changes, as a result of which the scheme is truly adequate, fully reflecting all the nuances of a given 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. 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 - rational (representative) intelligence (from 1.5-2 years to 11 years).

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

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

2.1. Sensorimotor period

Piaget begins his study of the development of thinking 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 the outside in a ready-made 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 stages of transition from innate mechanisms and sensory processes (like the sucking reflex) to forms of organized behavior used voluntarily, 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 about the world around him.

There are two subdivisions of sensorimotor intelligence:

Up to 7-9 months, when the baby is centered on his own body;

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

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

Another important change is overcoming absolute egocentrism, total unconsciousness. The child begins to distinguish himself (the subject) from the rest of the world of objects. Piaget recognizes the specific role of maturation processes that create opportunities for cognitive development. But for intellectual progress, the baby 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 child's mental abilities reach a new level. This is the initial stage of internalization of actions, development of symbolic thinking, 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, rational intelligence consists of the following sub-periods:

Pre-rational, preparatory (from 2 to 5 years);

-- First level -- formation of specific systems (5 -- 7 years);

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

At first, thinking is subjective and illogical. 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.

To trace how logical systems develop in ontogenesis, Piaget offered children (4 years old 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 conservation test. Stages of implementation:

1. First, the child is shown two glasses filled with water or juice to the same level. The child is asked if there is the same amount of liquid in both glasses. It is important that the child recognizes that “water is the same.” Statement of initial equality is mandatory. The initial equality of the assessed property is necessarily accompanied by a perceptual similarity - the water levels in the two glasses are equal.

2. Then the adult pours water from one glass into a glass of a different 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 carried out in which the perceptional similarity is disrupted, although this does not in any way affect the property being assessed.

3. After drinking, repeat the question: “Is the amount of liquid in the two glasses the same?”, and always in the same form as in the beginning.

Typically, children under 7 years of age do not perform well on standard conservation tasks. When solving problems, preschoolers demonstrate their scientific, characteristic ideas about the preservation (constancy, invariance) of various properties of an object during its spatial, perceptional 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 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 receptor transformation. Then the phenomenon of non-conservation is stated.

The preschooler evaluates the object as a global whole, directly, egocentrically, relying on perception. He is “centered” in the present moment and is unable to simultaneously think about how things looked before; does not see that the effect produced is, in principle, reversible (the water can again be poured into identical glasses); having focused on one aspect (differences in the height of liquid levels), he cannot take into account two parameters at once (the height and width of the glass). Piaget regards the phenomenon of non-conservation as evidence of the child’s inability (before he reaches the age of seven) to decenter and inability to construct 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, they say that he preserves the property. Performing a preservation test is a criterion for the functioning of specific operations. Let us 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 rational thinking.

Another version of Piaget's problems - the “inclusion test” - involves comparing the whole and its parts.

Test for inclusion in a set

1. Show several familiar objects, such as flowers. Objects must be divided into two subclasses (white and red), the number of elements in these subclasses must be unequal (4 red and 2 white).

2. The child is asked the question: “Which 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 emergence of reversibility, and an increase in the ability to decenter, which depends on the formation of rational structures. The child becomes able to understand that two characteristics of an object are not related to each other and do not depend on each other (for example, the shape and quantity of a substance). Ideas appear about the conservation of various features - the material of an object, length, mass, volume, and later - about the conservation of time, speed. The ability to classify objects and seriate (i.e. orderly arrangement in a row, for example in decreasing order of 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 person progresses through a stage of development primarily by whether it provides him with suitable materials to practice, problems to solve, etc. Transferring ready-made knowledge (learning correct answers) is ineffective; development occurs when a person’s own activity occurs, active construction and self-regulation of cognitive processes. Also important for the development of thinking (and especially for the development of awareness of other points of view) is the exchange of ideas, discussion and argument with peers.

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

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

2.3 Stage of formal (propositional) statements

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

Particularly noticeable are the new achievements of teenagers in experiments to deduce some of the simplest physical laws (the laws of swinging a pendulum; methods of combining colorless liquids to obtain a yellow liquid; factors affecting the flexibility of certain materials; the increase in acceleration when sliding along an inclined plane). In this situation, the child of the pre-rational level acts chaotically, “for luck”; a child of a particular level of intelligence is more organized, tries some options, but only some, and then gives up trying. A teenager at a formal level, after several tests, stops direct experimentation with the material and begins to compile a list of all possible hypotheses. Only after this does he begin to check them sequentially, trying to isolate the current ones and study the special influence of each of them. 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.

The teenager gains the ability to understand and build theories, to join the worldview of adults, going beyond the limits of his immediate experience. Hypothetical reasoning introduces the teenager into the realm of the potentially possible; Moreover, idealized ideas are not always verifiable and often contradict real facts. Piaget called the adolescent form of cognitive egocentrism the “naive idealism” of a teenager, who attributes unlimited power to thinking in the pursuit of creating a more perfect world. Only by taking on new social roles of adults does the teenager encounter obstacles, begin to take into account external circumstances, and the final intellectual decentralization in the new sphere takes place.

Regarding the period of transition from adolescence to adulthood, Piaget outlines a number of problems regarding the further development of intelligence and its socialization. During the period of building a life program, from 15 to 20 years, one can assume a process of intellectual differentiation: firstly, general cognitive structures are identified, applied 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 children's egocentrism

So, the concept of children's egocentrism takes, 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 the whole variety of individual features that characterize the child’s logic and transforms them from an incoherent, disordered, chaotic set into a strictly connected structural complex of phenomena caused by a single cause. Now we will 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. By the name egocentric speech, Piaget understands speech that differs primarily in its function. “This speech is egocentric,” says Piaget, “primarily because the child speaks only about himself. He is not interested in whether he is being listened to, does not expect an answer. He does not feel the desire to influence the interlocutor or really tell him anything. The child speaks to himself, as if he were thinking out loud. He addresses no one." Estimated rates of egocentric speech range from 44% to 47% for children aged 5–7 years and from 54% to 60% for ages 3–5 years. And so, based on a number 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.

Fundamental to the perception of Piaget’s theory is the following diagram:

*Nonverbal 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 aimed at satisfying organic needs or the needs of play, as in pure autism, but are also focused on mental adaptation as in an adult. It is characteristic that in his reasoning Piaget relies on Freud’s theory: “And psychoanalysis came in an indirect way to an extremely similar result. One of the merits of psychoanalysis is that it established a distinction between two types 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”), and the result is a transition to a form of thinking that Piaget called socialized, trying to emphasize the completeness of the process.

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

Conclusion -

Piaget is one of the most revered and cited researchers, whose authority is recognized throughout the world and the number of followers does not decrease. The main thing is that he first understood, explored and expressed 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 he developed for studying the level of intelligence development have long become diagnostic and play a large 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 educational 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 a 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 20th century. - M., 1996.

3. Discovery of the egocentrism of children's thinking

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

Let us consider the facts established by Piaget using the clinical method in his early studies of the content and form of children's thoughts. 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 was the discovery of the child's egocentrism. Egocentrism is a central feature of thinking, a hidden mental attitude. 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 phenomena accessible to observation. These phenomena, in comparison with the general egocentrism of the child, which is practically not amenable to direct observation, are relatively clearly expressed outwardly.

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 views objects as they are given by direct perception, that is, he does not see things in their internal relationships. The child thinks, for example, that the moon follows him during his walks, stops when he stops, runs after him when he runs away. Piaget called this phenomenon “realism.” It is precisely this kind of realism that prevents the child from considering things independently of the subject, in their internal interconnection. The child considers his instant 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 full awareness of the countless intrusions of the “I” into everyday thought, awareness of the many illusions that arise as a result of this invasion (illusions of feelings, language, point of view, values, etc.). Realism expresses the paradox of children's thought, the child is simultaneously closer to direct observation and more distant from reality; he is simultaneously closer to the world of objects and further from it than adults.

Children up to a certain age do not know how to distinguish between the subjective and external world. The child begins by identifying his ideas with things in the objective world, and only gradually comes to distinguish them from each other. This pattern, 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 internal intention in assessing an action and judges the action only by the external effect, by the material result.

At first, at the early stages of development, every idea about the world is true for a child; for him, a thought and a thing are almost indistinguishable. In a child, signs begin to exist, being initially part of things. Gradually, thanks to the activity of the intellect, they are separated from them. Then he begins to consider his idea of ​​​​things as relative to a given point of view. Children's ideas develop from realism to objectivity, going through a series of stages of participation (community), animism (universal animation), artificialism (understanding of natural phenomena by analogy with human activity), at 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 ideas. A subject who ignores his “I,” Piaget believes, inevitably puts his prejudices, direct judgments and even perceptions into things Objective intelligence, the mind aware of the subjective "I", allows the subject to distinguish fact from interpretation. It is only through gradual differentiation that the inner world is distinguished and contrasted with the outer. Differentiation depends on the extent to which the child has realized 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). Reciprocity appears when a child opens the points of view of other people, when he attributes something to them. the same meaning as his own when a correspondence is established between these points of view. From this moment he begins to see reality not only as directly given to him, but also as if established through 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 things that exist in different points of view, on 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, small things always light. For a child, these and many other ideas are absolute, as long as direct perception seems to be the only possible one. The emergence of other ideas about things, as for example, in the experiment with floating bodies, a pebble - light for a child, but heavy for water - means that children's ideas begin to lose their absolute meaning and become relative

The lack of understanding of the principle of conservation of the amount of matter when the shape of an object changes once again confirms that the child can initially reason only on the basis of “absolute” concepts. For him, two plasticine balls of equal weight cease to be equal as soon as one of them takes a different shape, for example, cups Already in his early works, Piaget considered this phenomenon as a general feature of children's logic. In subsequent studies, he used the child's emergence of an understanding of the principle of conservation as a criterion for the emergence of logical operations and devoted experiments to its genesis related to the formation of concepts about 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 assessments are relative. The world of independent and spontaneous substances gives way to a world of relations. First, the child believes, say, that every moving object has a special motor that plays the main role when the object moves. Subsequently, he considers the movement of an individual body as a function of the actions of external bodies. Thus, the child begins to explain the movement of clouds differently, 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 relative meaning depending on the chosen units of measurement.

So, in terms of its content, a child’s thought, which at first does not completely separate the subject from the object and is therefore “realistic,” develops towards objectivity, reciprocity and relativity. Piaget believed that gradual dissociation, the separation of subject and object, is carried out as a result of the child overcoming his own egocentrism

Along with the qualitative originality of the content of children's thoughts, egocentrism determines such features of children's logic as syncretism (the tendency to connect everything with everything), juxtaposition (lack of connection between judgments), transduction (the 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. It consists in the fact that a child under 78 years of age does not know how to perform the logical operations of addition and multiplication of the class, which is the least common for the other two classes. but containing both of these classes in itself (animals = vertebrates + invertebrates). Logical multiplication is an operation consisting of finding the largest class contained simultaneously in two classes, that is, finding the set of elements common to two classes (Genevians x Protestants = Genevan Protestants).

The lack of this skill is most clearly manifested in the way children define a concept. Piaget experimentally showed that each child's 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 a lot of things.” When asked “Why does the wind have power?” he replies: “It’s when you can move forward.” The same child says about water: “Streams have power because it (water) flows, because it goes down.” A minute later (if a stone thrown into water sinks) he says that water has no power because it is nothing does not carry. After another minute 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, without realizing (as experiments show) the relationships between them. A child cannot give the correct definition of such concepts as brother, right and left side, family, etc., until he discovers that there are different points of view that must be taken into account. The famous three brothers test can serve as a good example of 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 any 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: the concept gets rid of contradiction when equilibrium is achieved. He considered the emergence of reversibility of thought to be a criterion for 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 in relation to it, and when this symmetrical operation leads to the initial state of the object without modifying it. Each mental action has a corresponding symmetrical action that allows you to return to the starting point.

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

To develop truly scientific thinking in a child, rather than a simple body of empirical knowledge, it is not enough to conduct a physical experiment and memorize the results obtained. This requires a special kind of experience - logical - mathematical, aimed at actions and operations performed by the child with real objects.

In his early works, 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 another important feature of the child’s psyche - the phenomenon of egocentric speech.

Piaget believed that children's speech is egocentric, first of all, 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 his interlocutor. For him, anyone he meets is an interlocutor. The child only cares about the appearance of interest, although he probably has the illusion that he is heard and understood. He does not feel the desire to influence his interlocutor and really tell him anything.

This understanding of egocentric speech has met with many objections (L.S.

Vygotsky, S. Bühler, W. Stern, A. Isaac, etc.). Piaget took them into account and tried to clarify the phenomenon, devoting a new chapter to this in the third edition of his early work. In this chapter, Piaget noted that the reasons for the conflicting results are that different researchers have given different meanings to the term "egocentrism", that the results can vary depending on the social environment, and the great importance for the coefficient of egocentric speech (the ratio of egocentric utterances to all spontaneous speech). child’s speech) have connections that develop between the child and the adult. A child’s verbal egocentrism 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 all of the child’s spontaneous speech. 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 relationships 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 coefficient is higher compared to experimentation or children's work. However, the younger the child, the more the differences between play and experimentation become obscured, which leads to an increase in the coefficient of egocentrism in early preschool age. The coefficient of egocentric speech, as already noted, depends on the type of social relations of the child with an adult and children of the same age with each other. In an environment where adult authority and coercive relationships dominate, egocentric speech occupies a significant place. In an environment of peers, where discussions and arguments 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 that remained little known and unrecognized for a long time is revealed - the mental position of the child, which determines his attitude to reality.

Verbal egocentrism serves only as an external 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 a 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 he imagines. Egocentrism means a lack of awareness of one's own subjectivity, a lack of an objective measure of things.

The term "egocentrism" has caused a number of misunderstandings. Piaget acknowledged the poor choice of word, but since the term had already become widespread, he tried to clarify its meaning. Egocentrism, according to Piaget, is a factor of cognition. 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 type of systematic and unconscious illusion of knowledge, a form of initial concentration of the mind when there is no intellectual relativity and reciprocity. Therefore, Piaget later considered the term “centration” to be a more successful term. On the one hand, egocentrism means a lack of understanding of the relativity of knowledge of the world and coordination of points of view. On the other hand, it is the position of unconsciously attributing qualities of one's own self and one's own perspective to things and other people. The initial egocentrism of cognition is not a hypertrophy of awareness of the “I”. This, on the contrary, is a direct relationship to objects, where the subject, ignoring the “I,” cannot leave the “I” in order to find his place in the world of relationships, freed from subjective connections.

Piaget conducted many different experiments that show that until a certain age a child cannot take a different, alien point of view. A clear example of a child’s egocentric position is the experiment with a model of three mountains, described by Piaget and Inelder. The mountains on the model were of different heights and each of them had some distinctive feature - a house, a river going down the slope, a snowy peak. The experimenter gave the subject several photographs in which all three mountains were depicted from different sides. The house, river and snowy peak were clearly visible in the photographs. 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 this, 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 model. Now, when asked to choose a photo where the mountains were depicted as the doll sees them, the child chose a photo where the mountains were depicted as he sees them himself. If the child and the doll were swapped, then again and again he would choose a picture where the mountains looked the way he perceived them from his place. This is what most preschool age subjects did.

In this experiment, children became victims of a subjective illusion. They did not suspect the existence of other assessments 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 child’s mental activity at its origins; it persists throughout 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 become distorted depending on the dominant mental position.

According to Piaget, egocentrism is a consequence of the external circumstances of the subject’s life. However, 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 original point of view with other possible ones. To free oneself in some respect from egocentrism and its consequences means to decenter in this respect, and not only to acquire new knowledge about things and a social group. According to Piaget, to free oneself from 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 knowledge does not predetermine what our knowledge can never give. true picture of the world. After all, development, according to Piaget, is a change in 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, you need a special tool with which you could connect facts with each other, decentralize objects in relation to perception and your 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, a progressively developing awareness of his “I,” can lead to this. In order to overcome egocentrism, two conditions are necessary: ​​first, to realize your “I” as a subject and separate the subject from the object; the second is to coordinate your own point of view with others, and not consider it as the only possible one.

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

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

Development of thinking in ontogenesis (the theory of Jean Piaget)

Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) studied the patterns of development of thinking in a child and came to the conclusion that cognitive development is the result of successive stages of personality development. The development of a child's intelligence occurs in a constant search for balance between what the child knows and strives to understand. All children go through these stages in the same sequence under the influence of factors such as the maturation of the nervous system, the accumulation of experience, the development of speech and education. A child's cognitive development may be blocked at a certain stage if one of the listed factors is not sufficiently represented.

According to Piaget's theory, four main periods can be distinguished in the development of human intelligence: the sensorimotor stage (from birth to 2 years), the preoperational stage (from 2 to 7 years), the stage of concrete operations (from 7 to 11 years) and the stage of formal operations (from 11 to 15 years old).

Sensorimotor intelligence - stage of intellectual development (from birth to two years), which unfolds towards a period of intensive language learning. At this stage, coordination of perception and motor skills is achieved, the child interacts with objects, their perceptual and motor signals, but not with signs, symbols that represent the object.

Pre-operations are not thinking - The stage of development of a child’s intellect from two to seven years is characterized by the formation of a symbolic function, which ensures the distinction between the signified and the definition and is the basis for the development of ideas. At this stage of development, the child focuses only on perceptual relationships. Children's thinking at this stage is marked egocentrism.

Specific Operations Stage - a form of thinking carried out on the basis of logical operations that use external visual data. This stage of development is typical for children aged 7-8 to 11-12 years. At this stage, a conceptual reflection of the environment is formed, the child masters simple classification operations, and the concepts of number, time, movement, and the like are formed. At this stage, the operations of thinking are not yet fully developed, they are not formalized, they depend on specific content, they develop unevenly in different subject areas, and are not united into a coherent system.

Formal Operations Stage - stage of intellectual development, characteristic of a child aged 11-12 to 14-15 years. This is a system built on specific operations. Having mastered formal operations, the child can build his own hypothetico-deductive conclusions based on independently putting forward hypotheses and testing their consequences. Hypothetical and abstract thinking allows you to enter hypothetical worlds, explore and establish significant patterns.

The development of operational thinking, according to Piaget's theory, marks the completion of intellectual development, but not all people reach the stage of formal operations. This is characteristic only of highly intellectually developed individuals.

Piaget's experiments on egocentrism were a significant contribution to psychology. Thus, Piaget asked children simple questions where they had to consider the situation from the point of view of another person. For example, he asked the child how many brothers she had and, having heard the answer: “I have two brothers,” he asked the child the following question: “How many brothers does your older brother have?” As a rule, children could not answer this question correctly and answered that the older brother has only one brother, forgetting themselves.

The next experiment was more difficult, in which children were offered a model with three mountains, on the tops of which various objects were located - a mill, a house, a tree. The children were shown several photographs of the layout and asked to choose the one in which all three mountains were located as the child saw them. Even small, 3-4* year old children performed this task. After this, a doll was placed on the other side of the model, and the experimenter asked the child to choose the photo that corresponded to the doll’s point of view. The children could no longer cope with this task, and, as a rule, even 6-7 year old children again chose the photo that reflected their position in front of the model, but not the position of the doll or another person. These experiments allowed Piaget to conclude that preschool children find it difficult to take someone else’s point of view, that is, they are egocentric.

The main achievement of J. Piaget is that he was the first to understand, research and discover the specificity and qualitative originality of children's thinking, and showed that the thinking of a child differs from the thinking of an adult. The methods he developed for studying the level of intelligence development are widely used in modern practical psychology.