What Is Piaget Theory Of Cognitive Development

Piaget's Theory of cognitive development consists of four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. A 3-year-old preschooler falls into the preoperational stage and a 9-year-old student falls into the concrete operational stage. By definition, the preoperational stage is being able to think beyond the here and now, but being unable to perform mental transformations. The concrete operational stage is described as being able to perform mental transformations, but only on concrete objects. A child would move from the preoperational stage to the concrete operational stage once they master conservation tasks and organization skills.

Piaget suggests that development in children occurs in four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational.

Piaget also hypothesised four different stages – sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational- in which children develop (Woolfolk & Margetts 2013, p.83). It was thought that every person passes through the stages in the exact same order, never skipping a stage. The stages are often categorised by age, from birth to adulthood. However, it was stated that people may experience long periods between stages, and others may show characteristics from different stages at different times. The sensorimotor stage is approximately from ages zero to two years old and involves the development of thinking and understanding through the five senses, and movement. Object permanence, which is the understanding that objects exist whether they are seen or not, and goal-oriented actions are

The Psychoanalytic theory is about personality development and emotional problems. Psychoanalytic theories look at development in terms of internal drives that are unconscious, or hidden from our awareness. There are three basic drives: sexual, survival, and destructiveness. Freud outlined development in phases of “psychosexual stages” (Gordon and Browne, 2016, p.94) with a body part representing each stage. Oral (birth -2) Mouth source of pleasure: eating, teething. Anal (2-3) Bowel movement source of pleasure: toilet learning. Phallic (3-6) Genital source of pleasure: sex role identification and conscience develops. Latency (6-12) sexual forces dormant: energy put into school work and sports.

THE PREOPERATIONAL STAGE: GROWTH OF SYMBOLIC ACTIVITY Some time between the ages of 18 and 24 months, According to Piaget, children develop the ability to form mental representations of objects and events. At the same time, language develops, as well as the beginning of thinking in words. These developments mark the transition into the preoperational stage. During this stage, which lasts up until about age seven, children are capable of doing many task they could not perform earlier. For example, they begin make-believe play which includes enacting familiar routines.

Piaget’s Cognitive Developmental Theory states that children go through four stages of cognitive development as they actively construct their understanding of the world. Stage one of this theory, or the sensorimotor stage, infants of the age newborn through two years construct an understanding of the world by sensory skills (hearing and seeing) with physical actions. This for example could be a simple game of peak-a-boo. Skye, the infant in the video clip, giggles at his mother playing the game. According to Piaget’s theory, young infants do not know what happens when object go out of sight. During the first year, infants learn that objects have life of their own, even when not visible. This is known as object permanence. Mya knew to look

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.

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.

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).

During the preoperational stage, a child starts to learn how to communicate by the use of symbols. They are now able to use a more simple form of logical comphrendsion. This stage last from when a child is 2 years of age, all the way up to the age of 6. Another stage in Piaget’s developmental theory is the concrete operational stage. This stage consist of a child being able to rationalize simple “what if” types of questions. At this age children start thinking more logically. They are now capable of performing a variety of mental operations and thoughts using concrete concepts.

The purpose of this paper is to use the habituation technique in young infants to evaluate one hypothesis derived from Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. I will compare 5-month olds in a task that involves possible and impossible outcomes. Piaget’s theory specifies the cognitive competencies of children of this age. When a child’s mind first start to form they go through fase called sensorimotor.

Piaget is a theorist who believes strongly that children develop cognitively in age stages. In his stages of cognitive development, ages 2 to 6 is the preoperational stage. This means that children can represent reality to themselves through the use of symbols, mental images, words and gestures. To these children, objects no longer have to be present for them to be able to think about them. Children also may fail to see through the point of view of others and may be confused with appearances and their relations. Other characteristics of this stage include how children tend to talk in collective monologues rather than in dialogues in the presence of others. They also may confuse height and width in relation to volume and confuses classes with subclasses. These characteristics are something Piaget found similar for this specific age group in regards to their cognitive development.

The first example I saw Child A perform that came from the textbook comes from Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, specifically his concrete operational and preoperational stages. The unusual thing about this boy is because the Child A is eight years old an observer would assume Child A’s ability to reason logically would be at an eight-year-old level yet what I observed proved otherwise. The situation went like this, Child A found a metal jet plane he started flying it around, then he tried to push the wheels up into the plane, but they are welded in place so he gave it to his mother to have her accomplish it, but she could not do it so he said maybe if the plane flies (the word independently was implied) then maybe the wheels will

During this stage the child starts to use symbolism so the development of language is very fast during this period, but they can not see other points of view, it is all from their own perception. Piaget believed that the child in this stage was not capable of logical thought (Lee and Gupta).

On Piaget's task for conservation of length, Piaget shows the subject two pencils equal in length and subject knows the pencils are the same length. But once one of the pencils is moved longer than the other one, the subject fails to recognize that they were the same. Piaget's task for conservation for liquid, he shows the young child two identical glasses, then he pours the same amount of water both glasses. The subject knows that the two glasses of water are equal. But if water from one glass is poured into a longer thinner glass, the subject couldn’t comprehend this glass contains the same amount of water as the original two identical glasses. Piaget's explains that children's thinking is "perception bound" in preoperational stage, so they can’t focus their attention on two aspects of the new glass, they were attentive only to one aspect which is that one glass is taller than the other two; failing to realize the taller glass had the same amount of liquid.