Piaget Theory Paper

The teacher could place two cups that have the same amount of liquid in the cups but because one of the cups is taller than the other the child is going to think the taller glass has more liquid in it. The third stage is the concrete operational stage which occurs during ages seven to eleven. The term concrete operational means the child can reason only about tangible objects presents. So the child can conserve and think logically but only with practical aids. Thinking becomes less egocentric with increased awareness of external events. The fourth and final stage is the formal operational stage which occurs during ages eleven to fifteen. This stage focuses on hypothetical thinking and scientific reasoning. Piaget believed that only children can learn when they are ‘ready’ to learn. He also believed that development couldn 't be ‘sped up.’ Piaget believed that children learned through the resolution of disequilibrium (self discovery, active participation). He believed that teachers should ‘bend’ to children’s needs, provide an appropriate environment, promote self discovery, exploratory learning, self-motivated learning, and set challenges to existing schemes.

A well-intentioned, but meddling, relative comes to visit the weekend before your child's first birthday, in April. She cautions you that you must be spoiling the child, because he hides behind your leg and clings to you when she tries to give him a hug, and he did not do this when she visited at New Year's. How will you explain what is happening with your child?

Jean Piaget investigated how children think. According to Piaget, children’s thought processes change as they mature physically and interact with the world around them. Piaget believed children develop schema, or mental models, to represent the world. As children learn, they expand and modify their schema through the processes of assimilation and

| in Piaget's theory, the inability of the young child to mentally reverse an action

The Critique of Piaget's Theories Jean Piaget (1896 – 1980) was a constructivist theorist. He saw children as constructing their own world, playing an active part in their own development. Piaget’s insight opened up a new window into the inner working of the mind and as a result he carried out some remarkable studies on children that had a powerful influence on theories of child thought. This essay is going to explain the main features and principles of the Piagetian theory and then provide criticism against this theory. Cognitive development refers to way in which a person’s style of thinking changes with age.

Piaget’s theory is that he believed it is in a child's nature to be curious about their surroundings, children want to grasp an understanding of what is going on around them, sometimes their ideas may or may not be correct. According to Piaget, “Assimilation which occurs when new experiences are readily incorporated into a child’s existing theories” (172). For example, this means that a child knows when the family dog barks and licks his face. When the child has the same experience at another house it makes sense because they child has already learned that theory of the dog.

Piaget introduces the concept of equilibration in cognitive development. Heather demonstrates this concept because of the high confidence she displays while talking about a particular topic. According to Piaget’s theory, one develops a scheme or plan to tackle finding balance within other events, such is noted as equilibrium (Woolfolk, p. 46). For example, Heather in the first video was interviewed on where the stars go in the daytime, she responds quickly, indicating assurance that she knows the correct answer. This would fit her existing scheme of stars still being present in the sky, but we cannot see them because of the daytime.

Jean Piaget a clinical psychologist was well known for his theories on cognitive development in children. One of Piaget’s theories included how children make sense of new information. He theorized that children used processes called adaptation, which work by changing the schemes. Adaptation is comprised into three sub processes, assimilation, accommodation and equilibration. Piaget theorized that these three processes helped the children to fit new meanings into their mental repertoire. Piaget believed this to be a key process in a child’s cognitive development.

Piaget considered the process of equilibrium an important factor in the cognitive growth and development of a child.(Piaget , 1952) This was the ground were he was criticize because he said that children must be allowed to do their own learning(Piaget,1952). Lourenco & Machado (1996)in defense of Piaget theory realized that Piaget has took into consideration the fact that humans progressively develop or mature to higher states of cognitive development and realized that children acquire knowledge transmitted by parents, teachers ,and books, Piaget called this "social transmission." Piaget believed that when a child hears contradictory statements that challenge established schemes, equilibrium is disturbed. Piaget called such a disruption in equilibrium cognitive conflict or disequilibrium. When children experience cognitive conflict they set out in search of an answer that will enable them to achieve states of equilibrium.(Lourenco & Machado,1996)

Focusing on children’s development and developing a proper classroom and lesson plan well help you to properly prepare and help each student in your center. Throughout this paper we will summarize Piaget’s Stage Theory, identify and describe the developmental characteristics of the age group of 2-4 years old, design and describe the physical layout of facility or classroom that aligns with Piaget’s Stage Theory, and create an activity for each developmental domain.

Piaget’s theory also allowed us a way to accept and understand that children's cognitive behavior is intrinsically motivated. Social and other reinforcements do influence children's cognitive explorations but children learn because of the way they are built. In Piaget’s mind cognitive adapts to the environment through assimilation. Also accommodation is a type of biological adaptation (Flavell, 1996). According to Piaget in order to characterize cognitive development in humans we need to understand co-present in cognitive activity which is cognitive structure (Flavell, 1996). Piaget was the first psychologist to try explaining describing cognitive development. His argument is that intellectual advances are made through the equilibration process that has three steps: the first step is for the cognitive equilibrium to de at a low development level; then, cognitive disequilibrium has to be induced by discrepant or inassimilable phenomena and lastly cognitive equilibration has to be at a higher developmental level.

Not everything can be assimilated into existing schemas, though, and the process of accommodation must be used. In accommodation, existing schemas are modified or new schemas are created to process new information. According to Piaget, cognitive development involves an ongoing attempt to achieve a balance between assimilation and accommodation that he termed equilibration. He formulated a theory that systematically describes and explains how intellect develops. The basis of his theory is the principle that cognitive development occurs in a series of four distinct stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operations, and formal operations.

Next, the "pre-operational stage" is the second stage of Piaget’s theory. This stage lasts from around 2 - 7 years. In this stage, Piaget proposed that a child fails to understand the concept “conservation” - the belief that things remain constant in terms of number, quantity and volume irrespective of variations in appearance. In experiments to test number conservation, Piaget showed the child two sets of checkers, which had exactly the same number of checkers in each set. He then changed one of the checker sets, keeping the same amount of checkers in it, so that it was only different in appearance. When the experiment ended, the results showed that the children believed that the sets were of different quantity, thereby, proving Piaget’s theory factual. (Piaget 1952)

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

The concept of equilibrium and disequilibrium are important to the four stages of development. Equilibrium is achieved through balance and successful stage transition while disequilibrium is the opposite. In achieving this balance the child “adjust his or her thinking (schema) to resolve conflict” (Powell & Kalina, 2009, p. 241). According to Piaget, assimilation occurs when knowledge matches children’s schemas and accommodation occurs when children change their schemas to fit new knowledge.