Piaget’S Cognitive Developmental Theory States That Children

A major theory that works well with this stage is Piaget’s cognitive-developmental theory. His theory focuses on the mental activities such as thinking, perceiving, remembering, believing, and reasoning. Piaget believed that children go through four universal stages of cognitive development. Apparently, a child goes through these four stages of cognitive development because they are trying to construct a mental model of the world. In this stage of life, a child is in the third stage, the concrete operational stage. The concrete operational stage is just as it sounds, children at this point think more logically, but cannot grasp abstract and hypothetical concepts. Interestingly, this is also the door to when the child starts to think about what people say of him. This concrete way of thinking helps to let the child understand their thoughts and how they are unique to their environment. Around this stage, most children begin to lose their childlike imagination and start to see the world for how it really is, even if they fully understand everything. For school-age children, the beginnings of cognitive self-regulation are shown to be understood yet not fully followed through. Cognitive self-regulation is the process of continuously monitoring progress toward a goal, checking outcomes, and redirecting unsuccessful efforts (Berk 2014). Piaget's theory works best with this stage in life because it pertains to school-age children that start their way into

“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).

They can now realise that they can reverse their thought process and when water is poured into a different beaker they automatically realise that in actual fact the amount of water is the same as before. They will also be able to process differet information at the same time in order to figure out a task- as in this case when it came to height and width of the new beaker. At this stage, though children will only be able to think of actual objects and events, for example if 4 children were given 4 cars of different sizes and asked to put them in size oredr from smallest to biggest they would be able to do it, but if asked to think about their parents cars and then put them in size order they would be unlikely to be able to do it. At this age and stage of a childs thinking they tend to use what is called inductive logic, this is where they can figure out the principles of real life experiences that they come across in life. The next stage would be the Deductive

The next stage is at the age of 7-11 years old. This stage is known as the concrete operational stage. This stage is when the children learn the idea of conservation. What is conservation? This is where you take two identical cups and pour the same amount of water into each of the identical cups. Then you ask the child which glass contains the most amount of water? The child will respond with the answer that bother glasses contain the same amount of water. Then right away without waiting grab a small fat glass and a tall skinny glass. Fill both of the glasses up with the identical glasses of the same amount of water in to the small fat glass and then the tall skinny glass. Ask the child now which glass contains the most amount of water.

In the concrete operational stage between the ages of seven and twelve, children become capable of logical thought, they also start to be able to think abstractly. However they are best suited to visible or concrete objects and things they can see (Lee and Gupta). Once the child has reached the formal operations stage from twelve years onwards it becomes more practiced at abstract processing, carrying out problem solving systematically and methodically thus completing the cognitive development process.

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.

During the ages of seven to eleven years, concrete operations begin. Children develop the capacity to think analytically, but only when they can refer to actual objects and use hands-on activities. Then they begin to internalize some tasks and they don’t depend on what they have seen.. They become capable of reversing operations. For example, they understand that 2 + 1 is the same as 1 + 2. When real situations are presented, they are beginning to understand others’ points of view.

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).

Logical thinking at this stage accelerates. Children begin to question and put thoughts together. Such as how does Santa Claus visit everyone in the world in one night? Or how does he get into the house we have no fireplace? Children are school age at this stage and begin learning foreign concepts and display this new found knowledge thinking they know more than their parents. However, children struggle with abstract concepts at this stage. The need of proof is constant the ability to see or touch something as proof of its validity. A concept such as freedom as an example is hard to understand. Concrete concepts is what children understand at this age. Objects, written rules, and real things is what children really understand at this

During the Sensorimotor stage (between birth and the age of two), Piaget claims that sensory and motor skills are developed, as well as claiming that infants are unable to grasp object permeance until eighteen to twenty-four months; Piaget argued that if a child could not see the item, it no longer existed to them. When the child’s age was between nine and ten months, more experiments were done into object permeance, resulting in the 'a not b ' test, in which one object was hidden underneath an item, and then switched. Despite the obvious difference in sizes underneath the two objects, the child would still believe the item to be under where it was originally found. Furthermore, Aguiara and Baillargeon (2002), suggested the violation of expectation; using the example of a doll moving between two opaque objects and reappearing in the centre – the child will then be surprised, as to them the object had no longer existed.

The task was appropriate to compare the two children. My experiment is to test children’s ability to conserve liquid, and according to Piaget, children that have not entered the concrete operational stage tend to fail to conserve liquid. People can easily see the differences of logical reasoning between children in these two different stages. The concrete operational stage is Piaget 's third stage of children’s cognitive development. In this stage,

In Piaget’s stage theory, children fit into a specific developmental stage based on their age. For example, the sensorimotor stage lasts from birth to two years of age and is largely determined by the infant exploring their world through their reflexes and then adapting them into more integrated movements. One central tenant of the early sensorimotor stage is the lack of object permanence. Object permanence refers to the knowledge that something continues to exist, even when it is outside of the child’s view. Determining whether an infant has mastered the idea of object permanence is critical to nursing. Before a child understands object permanence, they might not care if they are taken away from their mother for a physical exam, such as being placed on the examining table. On the other hand, a child who has mastered object permanence might become easily upset if they are taken away from their mother, as they

What Piaget found was that the baby would simply loose interest in the toy. Piaget’s findings in this case state that the baby believes the toy is no longer there because it is away from sight. For a child aged four to eight months the experiment develops to be a little more complex. We can make the experiment more complex because the child will now have improved control of vision, this means it has the capacity to follow an object with its eyes and when movement ceases it can fixate. Now if the experimenter moved the toy from baby’s sight it will search for its whereabouts.

According to Piaget (1929, 1954, 1963), the process of adaptation helps us to understand how a child constructs his/her world. Taking Piaget's theory of Cognitive Development with particular focus on the Sensori-Motor stage of development, I am going to discuss how understanding this stage might influence me when working with a baby as a nursing student in the future.

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