Jean Piaget 's Theory Of Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development proposes that the developmental process of a child is the result of their brains maturity, their nervous system, and environmental factors. He believes the foundation of a child's ability to learn is through discovery learning (Gordon & Browne, 2016). Piaget suggests that a child’s logic of thinking is different from that of an adults. Children’s cognitive performance is directly related to the stage of development that they are in currently. Additionally, these stages are divided into sub-stages to provide greater insight into a child’s cognitive growth process. The initial stages of development is considered a difficult point to try to determine a child’s developmental

Piaget also hypothesised four different stages – sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational- in which children develop (Woolfolk & Margetts 2013, p.83). It was thought that every person passes through the stages in the exact same order, never skipping a stage. The stages are often categorised by age, from birth to adulthood. However, it was stated that people may experience long periods between stages, and others may show characteristics from different stages at different times. The sensorimotor stage is approximately from ages zero to two years old and involves the development of thinking and understanding through the five senses, and movement. Object permanence, which is the understanding that objects exist whether they are seen or not, and goal-oriented actions are

At the centre of Piaget's theory is the principle that cognitive development occurs in a series of four distinct, universal stages, each characterized by increasingly sophisticated and

Piaget believe that children are active thinkers. He recognized that the mind develops through a series of irreversible stages. He also acknowledged that a child’s maturing brain builds schemas that are constantly assimilating and accommodating to the world around them. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is split into four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. The sensorimotor stage occurs from birth to nearly two years of age. At this stage, infants learn about the world around them by sensing it and interacting within it. It is also in this stage that the idea of object permanence develops, that is, the awareness that things continue to exist even when they are not being observed. In my personal life, I am certain that in this stage of development I would have enjoyed peek-a-boo, because if I didn’t see it, to my developing mind, it wasn’t there at all. The second stage, preoperational, lasts from two years of age to seven years of

Jean Piaget developed a systematic study of cognitive development. He conducted a theory that all children are born with a basic mental structure. He felt that their mental structure is genetically inherited and their learning evolved from subsequent learning and knowledge. Piaget’s theory is different from other theories and he was the first to study a child’s learning by using a systematic study of cognitive development. His theory was only concerning the learning of children, their development and not how they learn. He proposed stages of development marked more by qualitative differences than by a gradual increase in number and complexities of behavior or concepts. His goal for his theory was to explain the mechanisms a child uses from the infant stage to the growing child who develops into a thinking and reasoning individual when reasoning and using hypotheses. His theory was that cognitive development was how the brain reorganized mental processes over time due to biological maturation and the experiences they have in an environment. The three basic components to Piaget’s cognitive theory is schemas, adaption processes that allow the child to transition from one stage to another, and the four different stages of development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational.

There are many distinct divisions within Piaget's framework of human development, however there are only four major phases of development in cognitive development identified, with further subdivisions less accurate and less meaningful in an overall view of development (Feldman, 2008). The sensori-motor stage extends from birth two approximately two tears of age and is typified by a growing differentiation of the self from the environment/external objects and an increasing sense of agency and intentionality, accompanied by a sense of object permanence and objective reality (Feldman, 2008). This is followed by the pre-operational stage, lasting from the age of two years to approximately seven years, in which language skills are more fully acquired

Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist (Presnell, 1999), is famously known for his theory of cognitive development. His theories focused on the intellectual development of children throughout childhood. He discovered that children fundamentally think differently than adults think. He assumed that infants are born with “reflexes”. These reflexes help babies adapt to the environment (Huitt, 2003). There are four stages within Piaget’s theory which include the sensorimotor stage, the preoperational stage, the concrete operational stage, and the formal operation stage. In the first stage, the achievement is to form a mental representation of an object, and

Jean Piaget was a field altering stage theorist born in 1896 of Swiss descent. He was a pioneer in the concept of cognitive development. Cognitive development is by definition the study of how children acquire the ability to learn, think, reason, communicate, and remember. Piaget opened up and dissected the question, “how do children construct their worlds”. Piaget was the first person to present a comprehensive account of cognitive development. In the following essay I will dissect the complex and varying differences between a 3-year-old preschooler and a 9-year-old student in terms of the theories professed by Piaget. As a stage theorist Piaget focused on children’s development involving radical reorganization of thinking at specific common points. He dissected the

The first of Piaget’s stages to occur is the sensorimotor stage. This stage takes place from birth through age two. This stage focuses on the knowledge

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) suggested that children have a different thought process than that of an adult (.REF) He argued that all children go through the same four stages of cognitive development in the same order and that development is biologically based which changes as the child matures. Piaget had a stage theory that children learn to adapt to the world around them by constant interaction, and that adaption significantly depends on two main processes, which, are accommodation and assimilation. Another two important concepts of Piaget’s theory are schema and equilibration. Schema which refers to organised knowledge that is used to guide action such as body schema, which helps an infant in its attempts to make sense of the world by the infant

Jean Piaget was a cognitive theorist who was born in Switzerland in the late 1800’s. He began his life with a concentration in the natural sciences, particularly the subject of mollusks, and later developed an interest in cognitive theory (“Jean Piaget Biography,” n.d.). His subsequent research and findings greatly influenced the field of developmental psychology, particularly childhood cognitive development theory. According to Saul McLeod, an instructor at the University of Manchester, prior to Piaget’s work “the common assumption in psychology was that children are merely less competent thinkers than adults. Piaget showed that young children think in strikingly different ways compared to adults” (McLeod, 2009). Instead, Piaget suggested

Jean Piaget is considered to be very influential in the field of developmental psychology. Piaget had many influences in his life which ultimately led him to create the Theory of Cognitive Development. His theory has multiple stages and components. The research done in the early 1900’s is still used today in many schools and homes. People from various cultures use his theory when it comes to child development. Although there are criticisms and alternatives to his theory, it is still largely used today around the world.

For this paper I will be exploring Piaget's theory of cognitive development. Swiss Psychologist Jean Piaget, theorized that children progress through four key stages of cognitive development that change their understanding of the world. By observing his own children, Piaget came up with four different stages of intellectual development that included: the sensorimotor stage, which starts from birth to age two; the preoperational stage, starts from age two to about age seven; the concrete operational stage, starts from age seven to eleven; and final stage, the formal operational stage, which begins in adolescence and continues into adulthood. In this paper I will only be focusing on the

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 first stage of Piaget’s development theory is the sensorimotor stage which takes place in children most commonly 0 to 2 years old. In this stage, thought is developed through direct physical interactions with the environment. Three major cognitive leaps in this stage are the development of early schemes, the development of goal-oriented behavior, and the development of object permanence. During the early stages, infants are only aware of what is immediately in front of them. They focus on what they