My Life Reflection

Developmental theory, with Piaget as the most prominent theorist, presents the idea that children actively construct knowledge as they manipulate and explore the world around them. Development is seen to take place in broad stages from birth through to adulthood, with each stage characterized by qualitatively distinct ways of thinking. However, some developmental theorists, in contrast to Piaget, place more emphasis on personal, social and emotional development rather than cognitive development and prefer to delay ‘academic’ experiences until later, for instance after the age of seven years in Steiner’s theory.

al (2005) suggest that minimal evidence and research has been conducted on spiritual development, however, they hypothesize that spiritual development is a dimension of human life that is as important as cognitive, social, or emotional development and interrelated to each other. It is a dimension that is a person's effort to mix various aspects of development. Spiritual development introduces questions about the nature of spiritual change, transformation, growth, or maturity through life phases or stages. The authors emphasize that "understanding the continuity of childhood and adolescence is as vital to understanding spiritual development as it is to recognizing the phases and stages that are part of that process" (Roehlkepartain et. al,

Children develop cognition through two main stages that Jean Piaget theorized. The stages run from birth and infancy to school age children. Sensorimotor is the first stage and goes from birth to about the age of two. This stage implies that the children learn about the environment they live in and they learn this through the reflexes and movements they produce. They also learn that they are separate people from their parents and they can say goodbye to them and know they will come back. The second stage is called the preoperational stage. During this stage of development, children will learn how to incorporate symbols to represent objects. This is also the beginning of learning the alphabet and speech. The child is still very much egocentric at this point in time, but with the help of understanding educators, the child will grow appropriately onto the next stages of development. Finally, the children need to develop emotionally/socially.

The Piaget's stage theory of cognitive development is also known as the stage theory. It introduces that, in the expansion of our thinking, we act through an organized and certain sequence of steps. However, the theory focuses not only on compassionate how the children obtain knowledge, but likewise on the discernment of the substance of intelligence. According to the Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, there are two stages in the thinking pattern of a 3-year old preschooler and 9-year-old student. They are the preoperational stage for the 2 to 7 year old and the concrete operations stage for the 9 year old. The preoperational stage (three years old preschooler), this is where a new child can intellectually perform and signify to the objects and issues with the quarrel or the images, and they can act. The concrete operations (nine year old student), where a child is at the stage and deliver the ability to maintain, reserve their thinking, and analyze the objects in conditions of their many parts. However, they can also assume logically and understand comparison, but only about the concrete events.

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

Jean Piaget is another influential theorist who is known for his development of cognitive theory. This theory focuses on the development of an individuals thought processes along with how these thought processes influence the understanding and interaction with the world. Detailed observational studies of cognition in children, Piaget proposed that cognitive development occurs throughout four stages. The first stage is the sensorimotor stage: from birth to the age of two. This stage is where the child experiences his or her world through senses and movement. A child begins to understand that one action can cause another action. The second stage is the pre-operational stage, from two to seven years old. At this stage, a child is aware of the separation from the environment around them. They are able to represent things with words and images while using intuitive rather than logical reasoning. The third stage is concrete operations: from the ages of seven to eleven. This is a period in which a child will begin to

“According to Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development, it states that all children go through specific stages as their brain matures. It also stated that these stages are completed in a fixed order within all children, according to their range of age (Atherton).” In other words, one cannot expect a two month old baby to solve simple math problems as that of a five year old. There are four stages in which Piaget grouped the development of a child according to their age groups, in which children interact with people and their environment. The sensorimotor stage (birth until age 2) children use their senses to explore their environment. During this stage, children learn how to control objects, although they fail to understand that these objects if not within their view continue to exist. The preoperational stage (2 until age 7) children are not able to see other's viewpoints other than their own. In other words, if the same amount of water is poured into a short wide glass and then a tall thin glass the child will perceive that the taller glass has more water because of the height. The concrete operational stage (7 until 12) children begin to think logically, but only with a practical aid. The last stage of Piaget’s cognitive theory is the formal operation stage (12 through adulthood) in which children develop abstract thinking and begin to think logically in their minds (Piaget).

For many years of human history, the developmental period of a child was truly misunderstood. The mind of a developing child was thought simply to be a miniature model of the fully developed engine of thinking. It is often hard to remember the earliest stages of the human development process. However, revered researchers like Jean Piaget, John Kohlberg, and Erik Erikson have made extensive efforts in observing the different stages of human development. In punctuating these stages, the consensus has demarcated the expanse of human growth into four major stages: Infancy (birth-2 years), Preschool (3-6 years), Middle Childhood (7-12 years), and Adolescence (12-18). The specific contributions made by the Psychologists above mentioned

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

In this stage children begin to learn and discover the world that is around them while they are developing their motor skills and reflexes (Siegler, 2005, p.29). In this stage children discover the world through their own ‘feel’ and ‘touch’. All of the reflexes they are discovering are natural skills/reflexes that a newborn is born with. They keep these for a short period as they develop more fully in later stages. Following the sensorimotor stage, comes the preoperational stage. Children who are at this stage in development are only able to see the world through one perspective. They miss an abundance of key details that an older child may have caught (Siegler, 2005, p.30). The next stage that a child goes through is known as the concrete operational stage. In this stage children have begun to develop the ability to have and perceive different perspectives, but they still continue to have trouble understanding and dealing with abstract situations (Siegler, 2005, p.29). The final stage in Piaget’s Stages of Development theory is the formal operational stage. At this stage of development adolescents and adults should be able to understand and apply abstract theories and ideas. They can also create and reason with things that are not ‘real’, they understand complex ideas that might not make perfect logical sense (Siegler, 2005, p.30).

“I have some works here, with which I need some help. Would you like to help me?” My invitation to Max, Sophie, Christian and Kate accepted, I proceeded to share, challenge, interview, and observe. The tasks I presented illustrated the phenomena of cognitive development in early childhood, the stage Jean Piaget calls preoperational. While Piaget refers to his developmental theory in “stages” he does not feel that the stages happen at specific times but that they are sequential and one depends on the previous. The distinguishing characteristics of the preoperational stage stand as barriers to logic and the

Piaget believed that human development involves a series of stages and during each stage new abilities are gained which prepare the individual for the succeeding stages. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the differences between two stages in Piaget's Cognitive Development Theory—the preoperational stage and concrete operational stage. Cognitive development refers to how a person constructs thought processes to gain understanding of his or her world through the interaction of genetic and learned factors. The development of new cognitive structures (mental maps or schemas) will be a result of the individual's ability to adapt through mental processes such

In order to understand the affections of this television program on each cognitive stage of children, I must introduce Jean Paige, a constructivist as well as an interactionist that developed a cognitive theory on children. He believed that children think and reason differently at different periods in their lives. He discovered that children are developed by passing through an invariant sequence that includes four distinct stages. The four stages are: sensorimotor, from birth to the age of 2; preoperational – 2-7 years old; concrete operational – 7-12 years old; and formal operational - 12 years and up.

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.