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Jean Piaget 's Motivation And Foundation For His Four Stages Of Cognitive Development

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How do children learn? This was Jean Piaget’s motivation and foundation for his four stages of cognitive development. Piaget, like his father, had a dedication to his studies. As a young man he initially studied as a naturalist and received a doctorate degree in 1918. He then studied philosophy, biology, abnormal psychology and logic. He developed standardized tests, but then questioned these tests. He thought they were too strict in the questioning, and saw that children 's incorrect answers better revealed their qualitative thinking, or their quality of thinking at different stages of development. This then led him to his eternal question: How do children learn? (World Biography) While Piaget pursued his incessant question about children, his research lead him to define four stages of mental growth: the first stage is the sensory-motor stage, from birth to age two, when mental configurations concentrate on tangible, or real objects; the second stage is the pre-operational stage, from age two to seven, when children learn symbols in language, fantasy, play, and dreams; the third stage is the concrete operational stage, from age seven to eleven, when children master classification, relationships, numbers, and ways of reasoning, arguing to a conclusion about them; and finally, a formal operational stage, from age eleven, when they begin to master free thought and other people 's thinking. Piaget believed that actively discovering the environment, through a child’s

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