Understand How to Safeguard Children and Young People

When looking at children and young people’s development it is important to recognise and respond to concerns to ensure that the child or young person receives the help and assistance needed.

Psychologist Jean Piaget was the first to make a study surrounding the theory of cognitive development. The interesting thing about Piaget’s way of studying was that he was more concerned about how children’s thoughts got to the answer in relation to their IQ rather than simply their ability to answer a question correctly.

Piaget called his collective theories on child development a "genetic epistemology" (i.e. the origins of thinking). He also relied on the concept of schemas, defined as the cognitive structures and frameworks through which we understand the world, to help further explain his developmental theories. Piaget was the first psychologist to make a systematic study of cognitive development. His other contributions include detailed observational studies of cognition in children, and a series of simple but ingenious tests to reveal different cognitive abilities. Before Piaget’s work, the common assumption in psychology was that children are merely less competent thinkers than adults. Piaget showed that young children think in strikingly different ways compared to adults. According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all subsequent learning and knowledge is based.

Jean Piaget, was the first psychologist to do an in-depth study of cognitive development (McLeod, 2007). Piaget?s theory was focused on the cognitive development of children doing different stages of their lives. Piaget?s theory was that children could learn by themselves simply meaning that

The overall focus of Chapter 2 is the effect of the relationship between nature and nurture, on a child’s development. The three main important ideas of this chapter to me, a mother of young children, are the early perspectives that one factor, either nature or nurture has on development, the importance of context in a child’s development and finally the interaction among nature and nurture and its effects on development.

Although Piaget is many things, he is especially known for his groundbreaking work in child development psychology. He described his work as genetic epistemology, since genetic means the scientific study of where things come from and epistemology is about the basic categories of thinking. Ultimately, Piaget’s theory was known as, the developmental stage theory.

Jean Piaget’s theory focused on cognitive development as mental operations mature based on “simple sensory and motor activity to logical, abstract thought” (Papalia, et al., 2006). Piaget’s view was that growth occurs as a child matures and interacts with his or her surroundings; he looks at the human mind as a focal point and base for everything around it (Heffner, 2004). Cognitive development occurs in three interrelated processes, according to Piaget. The interrelated processes are organization, adaptation, and

Jean Piaget was a psychologist who spent numerous years studying children and writing on their development. Psychology played a major role in understanding the development of intelligence in children. Piaget’s methods for doing accurate research required meticulous observations then he reported on what was observed. He started out making observations using his own three children as they engaged in several different tasks, then moved to other children and young adults. After concluding very extensive research he created a detailed stage theory of development known as “Piaget’s 4 stages of cognitive development”.

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) is considered one of the 20th Century’s most influential naturalistic researchers in clinical psychology and child development. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is based in the belief that childhood plays a vital and crucial role in later development to an adult.

Piaget’s theory is based on the cognitive development that humans go through in life. The cognitive theory describes and explains the development of thought processes and mental states. Piaget established that children go through a series of stages. These stages are Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete Operational, and Formal Operational. In the Sensorimotor stage, children begin to associate their sense with objects and they are able to manipulate objects. In the Preoperational stage, children begin to learn from playing around with other children

Jean Piaget developed a theory about the cognitive development in childhood. He was convinced that the development of thinking is a linear and an universal development that occurs in four major stages. Each stage is characterised by a certain type of thinking. After resolving each stage you think qualitatively differently than in the stage before.

Throughout history, many individuals have made astonishing contributions to psychology, leaving an impact that influenced future individuals. One of these individuals is Jean Piaget. He had a intensive impact on the field of developmental psychology, particularly on children's intellectual growth. He gathered that children take on an active role in thier learning procedure, acting greatly like scientists as they execute experiments, make observations, and ultimately learn about the world. His central insight was that children think in an essentially different way from fully developed individuals. Piaget described this in four stages that children go through as they reach adulthood, and from his observations others in the field were able to expand on his ideas.

There have been many people that have made huge contributions to the school of psychology. Perhaps one of the most influential theorists was Jean Piaget. Piaget was a philosopher, biologist, educationalist, and psychologists. He decided to study the many ways in which children develop knowledge. He made many contributions to his theories on the cognitive development stages. Cognitive development is the process of acquiring intelligence an increasingly advance thought and problem-solving ability from infancy to adulthood (Oakley 2004). It was Piaget who first noted that children learned difficulty than adults do in the ways in which they thought about and interpreted the world (Oakley 2004). He’s ideas were that adults did not simply know more than children, but that their knowledge of the world was structured differently. Piaget suggested that children at different stages of their development thought about and interpreted their world in many different ways (Oakley 2004). There are three main principals of Piaget’s theory along with the four stage of cognitive development that will be discussed in the paper below. Thanks to Piaget, the theory of cognitive development has made a significant impact in the way that teachers teach in the classroom today.

According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all subsequent learning and knowledge is based.

Piaget’s theory was controversial at the time because he was adamant that the greatest influences on a child were the environment and how children interact with it. He claimed to be able to show that children acquire skills and knowledge as they mature and that is where cognitive development came from (Laungani, 2007). As a tester, Piaget was not concerned with whether the children could count, spell, or recite prose. He was more concerned with how the ideas came up in the first place.