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Jean Piaget and Cognitive Psychology

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Piaget insisted that cognitive development followed a sequence and that stages cannot be skipped and that each stage is marked by a new intellectual abilities and a more complex understanding of world by children , then experience discrepancies between what they already know and what they discover in their environment. The goal of this theory is to explain the mechanism and processes by which the infant , and then the child develops into an individual who can think using hypothesis . According to Woolfolk (2005) cognitive development is a person’s mental capacity to engage in reasoning , thinking ,interpretation , understanding ,knowledge acquisition , remembering ,organizing information ,analysis and problem solving”. This …show more content…

Piaget (1954) believed that all children try to strike a balance between assimilation and accommodation , which is achieved through a mechanism which he called equilibration . As children progress through the stages of cognitive development , it is important to maintain a balance between applying previous knowledge and changing behavior to account new knowledge . Equilibrum helps explain how children are able to move from one stage of thought into the next . Piaget (1954) argues that children perform different kinds of operations at different stages in their cognitive development and that a child who has not reached the appropriate stage cannot perform that particular kind of operation for example an infant in the first stage cannot perform an operation belonging to the third stage .its senses and is also learning motor co-ordination , the control of its body . Hayes (1993:120) posits that according to Piaget (1954) at this stage the child has only a limited number . The second stage is the pre operational stage which ranges between two years and seven years .This stage is time of dramatic change and cognation. According to Piaget (1954) the pre operational child’s thinking is often quite illogical by adults standards. The child at this stage cannot perform logical, mental operations but gradually develops the use of language and ability to think in symbolic form. Children at this stage are able to think operations though logically in one

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