Jean Piaget 's Theory And Theory

There have been many important theorists in the history of child development. All of them attempt to explain why children do what they do and many of them explain at least one aspect of development well. Rather than picking just one and disregarding the rest, it's crucial to look at all the major theorists and see that there are strengths and weaknesses to each. Only after that can you decide what aspects you should incorporate into your teaching.

Chomsky’s theory seeks to explain how children acquire language so quickly. Chomsky asserts that children are born with innate linguistic abilities that are triggered by experience (Universal Grammar 2006).

Piaget theory was said to believe that children go through Four stages of Cognitive Development. Each stage marks development in how children understand the world. Piaget liked to say that children are “little scientist” and that they explore and make sense of the world around them. Through his observations, Piaget developed a stage theory that included four stages. The Sensorimotor Stage that begins from birth to age 2, is the first one. The Preoperational stage from age 2 to about 7, and the third stage is the Concrete Operational stage from the age 7 to 11. Piaget was interested in children's wrong answers that they’ve given on problems that require logical thinking. Piaget revealed

His theory on Cognitive Developmental Theory in a nutshell was how biology influences how children conceptualize and deal with task at different stages while growing up. Piaget’s theory focuses more on how children’s behavioral changes as they grow and how the children interact with their environment. For easy understanding, Piaget theory has a total of 3 components Cognitive Developmental Theory:

In 1896, Jean Piaget was born in Neuchatel, Switzerland and would grow up to be one of the most influential researchers in developmental psychology. While Piaget was surrounded by rather scholarly family members throughout his childhood, he was also effected by his mother heavily. His mother had a strong neurotic temperament which made home life challenging at times, and consequently created a young Piaget's wanting to understand his mother's erratic behavior- the spark of his intense interest in psychology. As time passed, Piaget received his PhD at twenty two years old and continued to work in the field of psychology, particularly in regards to children. It was in the 1920s when working at the Binet Institute though when Piaget found something that truly fascinated him, enough so that he would dedicate years of research and theorizing towards it.

The thinking patterns between a 3-year-old preschooler and a 9-year-old student differ, according to Piaget’s theory of development. Based on Piaget’s theory, a 3-year-old preschooler fits within the preoperational stage of development. During this stage, the child is able to produce mental representations. However, the child cannot perform mental transformations. Also, the preschooler will be egocentric. For example, a 3-year-old may use symbols to represent his ideas. On the contrary, a 9-year-old student fits within the concrete operations stage of Piaget’s theory of development. Throughout this stage, the student is now able to perform mental transformations. However, the student can only perform mental transformations of actual physical

Operations, according to Dr. Piaget every stage is marked by shifts, changes how kids understand the world (Cherry, n.d.) I will get more into details on the four different stages later on. Piaget describes children as dynamic and enthused learners. He believed that children are curious by nature about the world around them and are constantly looking for information that provides them the tools to make sense of it (Ormrod, 2014). In other words, children are naturally inquisitive about their surroundings, wanting to explore and know everything they put their eyes on.

The first stage of Jean Piaget’s Cognitive development is the Sensorimotor Period. This stage is the earliest of cognitive growth. The Sensorimotor stage happen within the first two years of a child’s life. During this stage children are only aware of what is in front of them. They primarily focus what is in their possession at the moment, what they can get into, and their physical environment.

The thinking pattern of a 3 year old according to Piaget’s Theory would be preoperational stage, which is from 2 years to 7 years. In the preoperational stage children are able to think beyond the here and now, but egocentric and unable to perform mental transformations. Children in this stage can use language, drawings, and objects as representation of ideas. A child pretending to be a fireman and pretending their bike is a fire truck with a hose to put out fires is an ability to differentiate that imaginary role from actual roles. Clear advances in thinking characterize the preoperational stage but Piaget believed a set back in this stage was egocentrism, an inability to see the world from others point of view, conservation tasks prove this

Piaget worked in a psychiatric lab in Zurich for a year where he studied the thoughts of Jung and Freud. Piaget also started teaching psychology in 1919 in Paris. This is where he started doing studies of intelligence testing with Simon-Benet Fame. Piaget felt that the “right-wrong” ways of intelligence testing was an unreliable source; instead he started interviewing school boys. He used psychiatric techniques to learn about adolescence reasoning (Boeree n.d.). Piaget researched in many places, such as, the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute of Geneva in 1921 where he studied the mental capabilities of an infant in the first two years of life. This is where he would write and publish his first works on children phycology. During this time he met his soon to be wife, Valentine Chatenay. After his success of his first five books, in 1925 Piaget started teaching psychology at Neuchatel University (Presnell 1999). During this time he would become a father of two daughters and a son. He would use them as observational studies as they grew up (Boeree n.d.). Piaget continued to study and teach at numerous places, such as, Lausanne and Paris (Jean Piaget Biography n.d.). He ended up writing over sixty books and articles during his long career. Piaget past away in Geneva, Switzerland on the 16th of September 1980, over fifty years of excellent research that will shape the world of psychology and sociology for years to come (Boeree n.d.).

With any mental illness there are no clear cut, “perfect” textbook cases. When observing and diagnosing bipolar disorder in an adult, there are no definitive tests a doctor can give such as blood work or even in vivo testing during pregnancy to predict whether or not a child will be mentally predisposed to a disease such as bipolar disorder. To make such a diagnosis in a child, no matter how educated is instilling a prophecy onto them that labels and predicts how difficult the rest of their lives will be, how many roadblocks they have to overcome, and how much medication they could face taking .

The Work of Jean Piaget Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, was a pioneer in the field of developmental psychology. He developed many fields of science, but is recognised primarily for his contribution to the field of genetic epistemology (the theory of knowledge). He believed that there was a biological explanation for the development of knowledge, and that children had their own processes of learning, and their thought processes were separate and distinct from adults. He developed a broad theory, based on his studies of children, which described four main stages in the learning process. He began studying children and the development of knowledge when he moved to Paris and began working on the

can put the things they observe in some sort of order the easier it is

The Spatial Relations Test has also been used in the study of Piaget’s concepts in their application to art education.

Jean Piaget was born in Switzerland on August 9th, 1896. He showed signs of interest in the natural sciences very early in life and received his Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Neuchâtel. He eventually took a job at the Binet Institute in 1920. “His job included developing versions of questions on English intelligence tests” (Mcleod,1970). It was then that Piaget moved to work in the Psychology field. This job intrigued him and brought up some other questions that still needed to be studied. He became interested with why children answered questions wrong that required some type of logical thinking, more importantly, why the adults would answer the questions correctly and why the children would