Piaget, 1930
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The Child’s Conception of Physical Causality by Jean Paiget 1930
Section II: Prediction and Explanation
Chapter VIII: The Mechanism of Bicycles
OVERVIEW: This chapter of Piaget's seminal work on how children learn is found in the section on "prediction and explanation," and examines how children explain the workings of the bicycle as an example of this process. Piaget began by saying “a bicycle is an excellent subject for questions” (p. 197). Based on the enthusiastic responses he got from the boys he was questioning, this certainly seems true. (Why only boys, an enlightened 21st century reader might ask? Piaget stated that while boys he studied have the bicycle figured out by the time they are eight years old, girls lagged behind by a couple of years, a state of affairs he attributed to a lack of interest on their part. Thus, he focuses his study on boys only.)
METHODOLOGY: His method was to encourage a boy to diagram a bicycle, and then to draw out the boy’s explanation for how a bicycle moves by continuously asking clarifying and leading questions along the way. Piaget strongly believed that the combined use of drawing and speech enabled a child to show what he has understood. Piaget looked for five things in a complete bicycle and a complete explanation: two wheels, one gear in the middle, another gear on the back wheel, a chain connecting them, and pedals on the middle gear. He stated that if a child could draw them in their proper relationship and connection with each other, they could also probably explain the functioning of all the parts, as well. “Thus the drawing is a perpetual and extremely valuable safeguard” (p. 198).
PROGRESSION IN UNDERSTANDING: As in Chapter VII (“The Level of Water”) Piaget found several consecutive stages to the progression of a child’s understanding of a physical process. In this progression, Piaget saw, and made much of, “dynamic” explanations (observing that, yes, things move, and they move because of unexplained, unanalyzed forces) and a “mechanistic” explanation (where a connected story of cause and effect can be told that explains the phenomenon being studied). From a previous chapter, he concludes: “There is a universal process in the evolution of children which leads them from a dynamic to a mechanistic way of thinking. In addition, we can see how quickly, once he has discovered an empirical law, the child will look for its explanation.” But: “The discovery of a law, of a correct prediction does not entail the discovery of a correct explanation” (p. 179). We see this progression clearly in the following four stages.
First (4-5 years old) is an understanding of the bicycle as a “global,” “synthetic” entity that needs no causal explanation for its movement. There is no attempt to explain “how” a bicycle moves; it just does. Boys made statements like: “You turn your feet, and it goes.” Piaget found three common facets to a child’s explanatinos of how a bike moves. They were (1) explanation by an unanalyed moral determinism (the bicycle should or must move); explanation without spatial contact between the parts of the bicycle (e.g., the chain was only to supporting the pedals, not connecting them to the gears); and (3) explanation by self-caused forces (the bicycle just moved by itself, or by an unexplained action of the rider gripping the handlebars, or the air in the tires, or even the light). It was interesting to note that some boys, while not getting the connectedness of the various parts right at all, nevertheless noted that jumping on the bicycle made it move, or that the “self-caused” forces only seemed to work downhill. (The drawings, at this point, show perhaps only two wheels and a pedal, with no connection between them.)
Second (about 6-7 years old) is an understanding that certain parts are necessary, but a lack of understanding of their causal connection, which if noted at all, may be confused. There is a conviction of the necessity for a part to be present, without understanding how it works. Without prompting, the boy begins to draw chains, gears, etc., into his diagram, but although he has the machinery of the bicycle correct, he still persists in what Piaget calls “dynamical” rather than “mechanistic” explanations, as boys in the first stage. (The drawing may have almost all of the parts—e.g., a front and rear gear, and a chain—but they may not be connected to each other!)
There is a distict difference between the first two stages and the last two.
Third (about age 7) is an understanding that makes an effort to abandon the “dynamic” explanations of the previous stage and explain the bicycle mechanistically. Piaget stated that at about age seven a child seeks the causal order in the action of one part on another. He gives up on a “synthetic explanation” and looks for “an irreversible sequence of cause and effect in the detailed interaction of the parts” (p. 211). However, the resulting understanding, as elucidated by probing questions, is only partially-correct with regard to actual cause and effect. (Drawings, while looking more like Picasso than Durer, have all five of Piaget’s minimal requirements for a bicycle, and more importantly, have them arranged as a mechanism, so that they can causally effect one another, which leads to the next stage.)
From this short, “transitional” stage, it is a small distance to the next. Thus, the third and fourth stages together are comparable to the third stage in “The Level of Water.”
Fourth (about age 8) boys comes to a complete and correct mechanistic explanation of how each part of the bicycle is connected to the other, and how a bicycle moves. Arriving at this understanding completes not only the process Piaget was studying, but this chapter, as well.
