Essay Kermit and the Keyboard from a Cognitivist Perspective

Piaget’s developmental stages are ways of normal intellectual development. There are four different stages. The stages start at infant age and work all the way up to adulthood. The stages include things like judgment, thought, and knowledge of infants, children, teens, and adults. These four stages were names after Jean Piaget a developmental biologist and psychologist. Piaget recorded intellectual abilities and developments of infants, children, and teens. The four different stages of Piaget’s developmental stages are sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. Sensorimotor is from birth up to twenty- four months of age. Preoperational which is toddlerhood includes from eighteen months old all the

Most of the criticism of Piaget’s work is in regards to his research methods. A major source of his inspiration for the theory was based on his observations of his own children. And because of this small sample group, people believe that it is difficult and incorrect to generalise his findings to a larger population. Similarly, many psychologists believe that Piaget underestimated the age which children could accomplish certain tasks and that sometimes children understand a concept before they are able to demonstrate their understanding of it. For example, children in the Sensorimotor stage may not search for a hidden object because their motor skills are not developed, rather than because they lack object permanence. This has been supported by evidence from Bower & Wishart (1972). They found that the way that an object is made to disappear influences the child’s response. As well as this, Piaget’s theory has been said to overestimate that every child and adult reaches the formal operational stage of knowledge development. Dasen (1994) claims that only a third of adults ever reach this stage.

The cognitive developmental theory comes from the work and research done by Jean Piaget which we believe is an empiricist approach which goes hand and hand with Piaget’s constructive approach. Empiricism is a theory that states that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience. The constructive approach is viewed as children discovering all knowledge about the world through their own learning and knowledge. According to Piaget, children pass through these stages at different times in their lives and cannot skip a stage which causes them to be seen as invariant.

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

preoperational stage age 2 to 4, concrete operations age 7 to 11, and finally formal operations age

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.

Jean Piaget Believed in Cognitive Development. “ Cognitive development is the construction of thought processes, including remembering, problem solving, and decision-making, from childhood through adolescence to adulthood” (Cognitive). He came up with four stages to his theory, sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. Children between the ages of 0-3 years go through the Sensorimotor and the preoperational stages of development. The other stages do not impact a child’s development until the age of elementary to adolescence and into adulthood.

While CIP explains some of the processes the information goes through in order to create learning, Piagetian theory is more relevant to the processes that the learner goes through. Kermit is an adult and so is presumably at what Piaget terms the formal operational stage (Piaget, 1950). This is the final stage of cognition for Piaget and as such there is little to offer specifically to Kermit’s case. However if Kermit had been a child, he would have first progressed through the sensorimotor stage in which he learns the physical feel of the keyboard and the placement of his

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

The field of child development has been greatly influenced by Jean Piaget’s cognitive-development theory. According to this theory, as a child’s brain develops and their knowledge increases they transition through four cognitive developmental stages, sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.

According to Piaget’s point of view, Kermit’s learning outcome and the process of learning has no bearing on his theory. This is due to the fact that Kermit is an adult and has reached the formal operational stage of development. With this in mind, the 4 stages that focus on the processes of assimilation, accommodation and equilibrium in the development of the cognitive structuring process is not in the process of development in learning how to play the keyboard. However, there are some insights that can be attributed to this learning style. The type of knowledge is a point that we can certainly consider as it relates to Piaget’s theory of learning. Physical knowledge is one type of knowledge that can be focused upon and this would include the actual touch of the keys when playing the keyboard, the amount of force that would need to be exerted on the keys to produce a sound and what sound the keys make as it relates to what functions they are under when producing a sound. Piaget believes that this knowledge is gained through doing; therefore, Kermit had to experiment with the keyboard in order to meet this concept of knowledge attainment according to the theory of Piaget. And as the

At the age of 21, Jean Piaget earned a PhD from the University of Neuchatel with an interest in human organisms and the mechanisms that created scientific bodies of knowledge (Good, Mellon, Kromhout, 1978, p. 688). He began to study child development and through observation of his children and other children, he began to form a theory that focuses on the mental structures created to help children adapt to the world. Piaget felt that in order to help children adapt they use schemas. These schemas were used by children to understand and organize different knowledge and distinguish one thing, or group of things from another. After collecting this knowledge Piaget felt that children processed it in two different ways. The first was through

One of the most prominent, and at least foundational, theorists of the cognitive development of children was Piaget who posited that children progress through 4 stages and that they all do so in the same order. The four stages that Piaget posited are:

Educational Implications of Piaget’s Theory. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is well-known and provides a basic understanding of the cognitive process and how children

Jean Piaget, a cognitivist, believed children progressed through a series of four key stages of cognitive development. These four major stages, sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational, are marked by shifts in how people understand the world. Although the stages correspond with an approximate age, Piaget’s stages are flexible in that if the child is ready they can reach a stage. Jean Piaget developed the Piagetian cognitive development theory. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development proposes that a child’s intellect, or cognitive ability, progresses through four distinct stages. The emergence of new abilities and ways of processing information characterize each stage. Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development suggests that children move through four different stages of mental development. His theory focuses not only on understanding how children acquire knowledge, but also on understanding the nature of intelligence.