ABSTRACT
In the past, developmentalists have urged those who study learning to pay heed to a particularly compelling claim. The claim, made on firm ground, held that cognitive structures develop through qualitatively different stages. Taking a strong cue from Piaget, many asserted that young children lack concrete operations; they fail in tests of their ability to conserve, seriate, and classify. Additionally, it was claimed that preschoolers are precausal and apparently willing to allow causes to follow their effects (e.g., Piaget, 1930), egocentric, perception-bound, and so on. If it is indeed true that the young have qualitatively different structures, there will be things they cannot learn. Likewise, they will often interpret stimuli in a fundamentally different way than do older children and adults. However, evidence from recent research on the nature of cognitive development in preschoolers calls into question the idea that they have structures that differ fundamentally from those of older children, or that they lack pieces of mental structures that older children have. Although understanding how and why the young are different remains an important question for research, appeals to an absence or difference in basic structure does not seem to provide the answer. Does it then follow that developmentalists can be ignored by those who study learning? I submit not. For I believe that recent findings on the cognitive capacities of young children shed new light on critical issues in the study of thinking and learning skills. To show why I need to first outline some of these new findings.
