Accomplishments of Jean Piget: Genetic Epistomology

According to Piaget’s Four Stages of Cognitive Development, it should be in sensorimotor and preoperational stages. At sensorimotor stage, infants will from reflexive to goal directed behavior. The limitation of this stage is object permanence. At preoperational stage, children begin to think or imagine something in their mind, they will gain two cognitive accomplishments, mental representations and intuitive thought. Mental representations mean children can mentally represent something in the past or future but not now. Intuitive thought means children are self-centered, and they trust others have the same idea as their own. There are three limitations at this stage, first is egocentrism. It means children cannot think something from other’s perspective. Second is lack of conservation, it means if you change the its shape or appearance of something, its weight still the same, but children cannot understand that. Last one is lack of hierarchical classification, it is very hard for children to distinguish similar objects. Little People Musical Preschool has more than 35 sounds of music and phrases to motivate children. It is helpful because they will have a higher interest in language, it is good for mental representations during age 2 to 7 years old. Also, children can gain knowledge through this virtual toy world, in this little world, children may think toys have the same ideas with him, it can exercise their imagination. Also, caregiver can give children some situation to let children use these toys to make up a

Piaget was a constructivist theorist. He believed that people build up their own understanding of the

The third stage is the Concrete Operational Stage, which occurs around age seven to age eleven. This stage marks the beginning of logical or operational thoughts for the child. Their thinking becomes less egocentric, and the child can now understand that although the appearance of something changes, the “thing” itself does not. For example, if a child decided to spread out a pile of blocks, they know there are still as many blocks as there were before, even though it looks different.

From the age of seven to about eleven, children become capable of performing mental operations or working through problems and ideas in their minds. However, they can perform operations only on tangible objects and real events. Children also achieve conservation, reversibility, and decentration during this stage:

The Concrete Operational Stage (7-11): - A this stage the child can operate objects and understand them providing they can se them and/or are holding them. The child can count, spell, read etc. Although the child still needs some objects i.e. fingers, toys to count there is still a need for visual assistance. The child is developing a less egocentric perspective.

Children develop cognition through two main stages that Jean Piaget theorized. The stages run from birth and infancy to school age children. Sensorimotor is the first stage and goes from birth to about the age of two. This stage implies that the children learn about the environment they live in and they learn this through the reflexes and movements they produce. They also learn that they are separate people from their parents and they can say goodbye to them and know they will come back. The second stage is called the preoperational stage. During this stage of development, children will learn how to incorporate symbols to represent objects. This is also the beginning of learning the alphabet and speech. The child is still very much egocentric at this point in time, but with the help of understanding educators, the child will grow appropriately onto the next stages of development. Finally, the children need to develop emotionally/socially.

Generally for these infants, it is "out of sight, out of mind." Between eight or nine months of age things will begin to change. Infants of this age will begin to search for the objects that have been hidden. They have developed object permanence –they know that objects will still exist even though they aren’t seen.

| Piaget's second stage of cognitive development in which the preschool child learns to use language as a means of exploring the world

Piaget claims that before the beginning of this stage, children 's ideas about different objects, are formed and dominated by the appearance of the object. For example, there appears to be more blocks when they are spread out, than when they are in a small pile. During the Concrete Operational Stage, children gradually develop the ability to 'conserve ', or learn that objects are not always the way that they appear to be. This occurs when children are able to take in many different aspects of an object, simply through looking at it. Children are able to begin to imagine different scenarios, or 'what if ' something was to happen. This is because they now have more 'operational ' thought. Children are generally first able to conserve ideas about objects with which they are most comfortable. Once children have learnt to conserve, they learn about 'reversibility '. This means that they learn that if things are changed, they will still be the same as they used to be. For example, they learn that if they spread out the pile of blocks, there are still as many there as before, even though it looks different!

The first being the sensorimotor stage during which the infant child learns about the world around him/her by using their senses to make sense of their environment. Towards the end of this discrete stage the child begins to understand that things are represented by symbols, for example, mummy, dog and ball. The next stage of development as described by Piaget is the Pre-Operational stage when a child comes to understand that written words can be used in order to communicate information about the world around

In this essay I will analyse major theories and compare the major theorists of, and influences on the development of young children during the first eight years of life which includes physical, social, emotional, cognitive, sensory, and language development. The three theorists I have chosen to compare are Piaget, Bowlby and Vygotsky. Piaget Jean Piaget was seen as having a cognitive constructivist approach in his work. He believed that humans build their own knowledge through their life experiences and they will learn better by doing this than being told information. Piaget gave little attention to the emotional or social aspects of children’s development but was particularly interested in the cognitive aspect, focusing on how children think and make sense of their world.

During this stage the child starts to use symbolism so the development of language is very fast during this period, but they can not see other points of view, it is all from their own perception. Piaget believed that the child in this stage was not capable of logical thought (Lee and Gupta).

Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is one the most widely accepted, his four stages of development are age based.

In the sensorimotor stage the child discovers the environment through physical actions such as sucking, grabbing, shaking and pushing. During these first two years of life children realize objects still exist, even if it is out of view. This concept is known as object permanence. Children in the preoperational stage develop language skills, but may only grasp an idea with repeated exposure. As Piaget describes in the next stage, children draw on knowledge that is based on real life situations to provide more logical explanations and predictions. Lastly, in the formal operational stage children use higher levels of thinking and present abstract ideas.

The third stage is the concrete-operational stage, which is from ages 7-11. Children in this stage begin to “figure things out” through logical tasks, but will have difficulty with metaphors and proverbs because they