Theories Of Jean Piaget's Theory Of How Children Learn

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 has introduced theories on child development from 1896-1980. He is the the most cited and most influential on cognitive development. Piaget is the foundation of current child developmental in psychology. His inspiration came from observing children’s as he even used his own. His development of the cognitive deployment focused on mental process, remembering, believing and reasoning. To help explain his theory, Piaget’s came up with Stage-bound cognitive development. “Stage-bound is the development progresses through a series of stages as a result of assimilating (using the environment for already-learned activities)and accommodating (changing behaviors—and mental structure—in the face of environmental demands)” (Lefrancois, G. R. 2012). Piaget’s stage theory makes up four components, Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete operations, and Formal operations. With these components a teacher or educator can designs its class room and better understand the deployment a child goes through. Once the knowledge of the theories is understood the teacher can teach the child the correct development that they are in. It’s important to know the characteristics of the development a child is going trough because all different age group have their own development stages.

Jean Piaget was born in Neuchatel, Switzerland on August 9, 1896. He was the eldest child of Rebecca Jackson and Arthur Piaget. His father was a dedicated historian who studied medieval literature with great passion. Piaget 's childhood was influenced by his father’s dedication and passion to his studies and work. He learned from his father to value a systematic work ethic, this would later impact his theory tremendously. His mother, on the other hand, was very intelligent, energetic, and kind, but had an anxious outlook on life which affected his family life negatively. Her mental health would later influence his studies of psychology in the sense that it spiked his interest in psychoanalysis and

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.

Who is Jean Piaget, and impact has he made on psychology? According to Les Smith, Piaget was born in Switzerland on August 9, 1896. Piaget was an extremely brilliant child, and he excelled at his studies. By age 11, he wrote a short paper on an albino sparrow. Many people believe that this paper ignited his scientific career. Once he graduated high school, he attended the University of Neuchatel. Piaget received a Ph.D. in natural sciences. He was extremely interested in the development of knowledge, so he worked with Alred Binet and De Simon to do experimental studies on the growing mind. Piaget eventually married Valentine Chatenay and had three children. His children are Jacqueline, Lucieene, and Laurent. Piaget continued his study on intellectual development by studying his own children. Les Smith describes Piaget’s scientific conclusion as “the growth of knowledge is a progressive construction of logically embedded structures superseding one another by a process of inclusion of lower less powerful ones up to adulthood. Therefore, a children’s logic and modes of thinking are initially entirely different from those of adults.” As a result of Piaget’s experiments he made Piaget’s Stages of Development. These stages represent the normal intellectual development that occurs during infancy to adulthood. The stages are sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.

Piaget also studied children in his own family, these studies would eventually contribute to his theory. For example, he noticed something interesting when he was watching

Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist. He worked in the fields of Developmental Psychology and Epistemology. He’s known for his works and theories in the field of child development. His theories of cognitive development and epistemological views are called, “genetic epistemology”. Piaget placed the education of children as most important. His works and theories still play a huge role and influence the study of child psychology today.

“Piaget was one of the most high-ranking researchers in the area of developmental psychology in the 20th century whose most important interest was in biological influences on how we come to know, and the developmental stages we move through as we acquire this ability” (Singer & Revenson, 1997, p. 13). His work

Piaget’s research ideas have resulted in new insights as to how children think, reason, and perceive the world. Piaget was interested in the qualitative, not quantitative, characteristics of development. It does not matter that a child can recite multiplication tables unless he understands the concepts behind addition and multiplication of numbers or quantities.

Jean Piaget 's theory of cognitive development gives a broader way of explaining the way of how the process of thinking is developed, based off of different age groups. He became interested in how organisms adapt and conform to its environment. He believe that it was labelled as intelligence. He observed these behaviors by controlling them through schema or schemes. In other words, Piaget organized experiments that are based off of intellectual properties of thinking (McLeod, 2009). This is also where he describes two processes that are used in the conformity of an individual. Assimilation, which is the process of using the environment to change it into previous cognitive structures; and Accommodation, which is the process of changing these cognitive structures in order to accept that specific item or object for the environment (Feldman, 2013). The theory is broken up into four stages. Sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational. We focus on the pre-operational and concrete operational stages of the cognitive development theory.

The Cognitive Learning Theory came into the forefront of educational psychology predominately in the 1950s. At the end of the era of behaviorism, many theorists questioned whether or not behaviorism fully explained learning. Sure, there was an understanding of observable behaviors, but what about what was going on in the mind? Theorists such as Tolman, Piaget, Vygotsky and Bruner all helped to pioneer a movement away from behaviorism to a cognitive approach (Yilmaz, 2011).

Jean Piaget, a Swiss clinical psychologist was the main theorist to develop the theory of cognitive development (Woolfolk & Margetts, 2016). He was born on August the 9th 1896 in Neuchatel, Switzerland where he would spend his childhood growing up with his family (Kohler, 2014). The relationship Piaget had with both his parents was an ambivalent yet fundamental one, as the respectful yet fearful relationship he had with his father and his urge to stay away from his mother’s temper issues had allowed him to isolate himself and focus on prospering in his studies, thus making him the success he is today (Kohler, 2014).

In the twentieth century some of the psychologists became interested of mental activities studies in humans, including information processes, memory and communication. This new direction received the name of cognitive psychology. One of the pioneers, who established this path in psychology science, was Swiss biologist, Jean Piaget. Piaget’s discoveries and principles have made a significant contribution in expansion of cognitive psychology ideas. His research and concepts that were based on kids learning and progressing helped him to form his famous theory of four developmental stages, which later found supporters and critics among many psychologists. Although much of his work included analyses of child’s development, he described himself as “genetic epistemologist”, not child psychologist. He emphasized that his studies were devoted to the epistemological question: How do we get the knowledge? (Milton Schwebel, Piaget in the classroom, 1973, p. 74)

Jean Piaget was born in Switzerland on August 9th, 1896. He showed signs of interest in the natural sciences very early in life and received his Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Neuchâtel. He eventually took a job at the Binet Institute in 1920. “His job included developing versions of questions on English intelligence tests” (Mcleod,1970). It was then that Piaget moved to work in the Psychology field. This job intrigued him and brought up some other questions that still needed to be studied. He became interested with why children answered questions wrong that required some type of logical thinking, more importantly, why the adults would answer the questions correctly and why the children would

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.