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Two strengths and weaknesses of jean piaget theory
Jean piaget's theory - weaknesses and strengths
Two strengths and weaknesses of jean piaget theory
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According to Jean Piaget, a Swiss developmental psychologist, children build their cognitive world through a series of stages. The way he saw it, children understand the world and make sense of their experience by using schemas or a mental concept. In Paget’s view, two processes needed to happen in order to develop a schema: assimilation and accommodation (King 298). With assimilation we take in new information and apply them into our already existing knowledge. For example, my 4 year old niece believed that dogs weren’t animals. She was told they were dogs so every time I would see a dog and call it an animal she used to say “No! That’s a doggie.” On the other hand we have accommodation which is an adjustment of schemas that are changed because …show more content…
In addition, Piaget believed that humans go through four stages to have a better understanding of the world. First, the sensorimotor stage (from birth to two years of age) in this stage infants form an understanding of the world by sensory experiences, like hearing and seeing, and also by physical actions (King 298). By the end of this stage infants start to use words or symbols in their thinking. At this stage a baby is able to know that if a toy has been taken away from them they can’t see the toy but they understand the toy still exists; Piaget called this object permanence. I don’t remember this stage of my childhood, but my mother says that I was a very peaceful and serene baby. Second, the preoperational stage which starts from two to seven years of age. At this stage children begin to express and represent the world through drawings, images, and words. Also, children make decisions on gut feelings instead of what makes sense or logic (King 299). However, I’ve always been a very responsible person and since I was little I used to make decisions on what was more …show more content…
I also remember being a very curious little girl during this stage. I was always asking questions and my mother used to get annoyed because of my questionnaires. Third, is the concrete operational stage which starts from seven to eleven years old. According to Piaget at this stage children switch instinctive thinking to logical thinking, in real situations (King 300). Children also develop classification skills during this stage. During this stage I became very mature. My mom and dad weren’t happy, so they decided to file for a divorce. They were making the best decisions for us by separating at that time. In the beginning I had an idea of what was going to happen. However, it didn’t really hit me until we moved with my grandmother. It was helpful to have my families support and closeness at the time. Furthermore, my mom stepped up and took the role of a mother and a father. I understood what she was going through so I tried not to give her much trouble and started doing the things that I could by myself. Taking care of three kids by herself might have not been easy, but she always made sure that we had everything we
Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget developed a theory that separated the different stages of a child’s mind into four stages. The first stage is the sensorimotor stage; this stage starts at birth and goes until the child is nearly two years old. Piaget describes the sensorimotor stage as the stage when the child is first starting to experience the world through the senses, and through moving their limbs, they learn how to make things happen.(Myers, 137) Piaget believed that at this stage of cognitive development, the child goes through the phenomena called object permanence. Object permanence is when an object is out of sight, it
My interviewee, Alphonso Johnson, is a 19-year-old, African-American, recent high school graduate, and has experienced all stages of Piaget’s Stages of Development. I asked him to detail what he could about each stage from his memory and this is what he told me. For his sensorimotor stage, he remembers fairly little since he was at such a young age and so much time as passed; although he does remember times of misconstruing object permanence, he remembered a time where his mother would play peak-a-boo with him and when she put her hands in front of her face, it was like he disappeared from existence. For the preoperational stage, he remembers this stage vividly as this was the time where he had an invisible
In his book written in 1954 Piaget stated that “for young infants objects are not permanent entities that exist continuously in time but instead are transient entities that cease to exist when they are no longer visible and begin to exist anew when they come back into view.” He proposed the notion that infants do not begin to understand the object of object p...
I am a firm believer that as a child, there are stages you go through to become the person you are today. Many theorists have developed their own propositions as to how we are who we are and why. Jean Piaget, a swiss psychologist, was one of the few who believed that all individuals progress through a set of fixed stages of cognitive development. Cognitive development is the building of thought processing or in simpler words known as remembering, problem solving, and decision making. He believed that you not only increase knowledge in every stage, but that your ability to understand increases as well. Piaget focused his research mostly on the change in cognition from childhood to adulthood using the stages Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete
Piaget proposed that cognitive development from infant to young adult occurs in four universal and consecutive stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operations, and formal operations (Woolfolk, A., 2004). Between the ages of zero and two years of age, the child is in the sensorimotor stage. It is during this stage the child experiences his or her own world through the senses and through movement. During the latter part of the sensorimotor stage, the child develops object permanence, which is an understanding that an object exists even if it is not within the field of vision (Woolfolk, A., 2004). The child also begins to understand that his or her actions could cause another action, for example, kicking a mobile to make the mobile move. This is an example of goal-directed behavior. Children in the sensorimotor stage can reverse actions, but cannot yet reverse thinking (Woolfolk, A., 2004).
The child’s development is determined by biological maturation and interaction with the environment. Although all children go through each stage in the same order, there are individual differences in the rate at which children progress through stages, and some may never go through the later steps. Each stage of development reflects an increasing sophistication of children’s thought. The first stage is the Sensorimotor stage. This stage ranges from birth to two years of age and can be broken down to six substages. The main objective of this stage is goal-directed behavior and object permanence. Goal-directed behavior combines several schemes and coordinates them to perform a single act to solve a problem. Object permanence is the realization to form a mental schema of an object that is not present but exists. The Preoperational Stage is the second stage and ranges from age two to seven. During this stage children increase their ability to think symbolically, as well as increase the use of concepts, centration, conservation,and intuitive thought emerge , and thinking remains egocentric. The third stage is the Concrete Operational change. Occurring between ages seven and twelve. Piaget characterized this stage as a major turning point in a child’s cognitive development because it applies operational thought. In this stage, children are
This theory is crafted by Jean Piaget (1896– 1980) and his work concentrated on seeing how kids see the world. Piaget trusted that from outset, we have the fundamental mental structure on which all ensuing information and learning are based and because of natural development and ecological experience, the mental procedures will have a dynamic rearrangement. Piaget's presumption was that kids are dynamic takes part in the advancement of information and they adjust to nature through currently looking to comprehend their condition. He proposed that cognitive advancement occurs in four phases, 0 to 2 years being the sensori motor, 2 years to 7 years the preoperational, 7 to 12 years the solid operations, and 12 years or more the formal operations.
Piaget (1896–1980) came up with a theory called cognitive development, which occurs in four stages in every child's emotional development. The first two stages are from birth until the child reaches his or her seventh year of life where they will become aware of its environment by visual, touch and sound. During the third and fourth stage, which is the concrete and formal operations, the child will typically ask questions to better understand the complexions of things surrounding the child and to satisfy their curiosity and exploring mind. Children at these stages usually step out of their comfort zones and experiment new things. They develop different perspectives (Patient Teaching, Loose Leaf Library Springhouse Corporation, 1990). Here is where they are likely to display disobedience towards their parents or caregivers, usually people that are closest to them.
Piaget has four stages in his theory: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. The sensorimotor stage is the first stage of development in Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development. This stage lasts from birth to the second year of life for babies, and is centered on the babies exploring and trying to figure out the world. During this stage, babies engage in behaviors such as reflexes, primary circular reactions, secondary circular reactions, and tertiary circular
Jean Piaget is a Switzerland psychologist and biologist who understand children’s intellectual development. Piaget is the first to study cognitive development. He developed the four stages of cognitive development: the sensori-motor stage, preoperational stage, the concrete operational and the formal operational stage. Piaget curiosity was how children cogitate and developed. As they get mature and have the experience, children’s will get knowledgeable. He suggested that children develop schemas so they can present the world. Children’s extend their schemas through the operation of accommodation and assimilation.
“The influence of Piaget’s ideas in developmental psychology has been enormous. He changed how people viewed the child’s world and their methods of studying children. He was an inspiration to many who came after and took up his ideas. Piaget's ideas have generated a huge amount of research which has increased our understanding of cognitive development.” (McLeod 2009). Piaget purposed that we move through stages of cognitive development. He noticed that children showed different characteristics throughout their childhood development. The four stages of development are The Sensorimotor stage, The Preoperational Stage, The Concrete operational stage and The Formal operational stage.
Both Piaget and Vygotsky agreed that children's cognitive development took place in stages. (Jarvis, Chandler 2001 P.149). However they were distinguished by different styles of thinking. Piaget was the first t reveal that children reason and think differently at different periods in their lives. He believed that all children progress through four different and very distinct stages of cognitive development. This theory is known as Piaget’s Stage Theory because it deals with four stages of development, which are sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational. (Ginsburg, Opper 1979 P. 26).
In the first stage, children will undergo the process of assimilation where they will be using their existing schema to handle a new situation or something new when felt. In the second stage, they will go through the accommodation process in which if their existing schema does not work, it will be ‘upgraded’ or changed with newly acquired knowledge. During the third stage of adaptation process, they will go through the stage of equilibration when external pressure from knowledge acquire is being used to modify prior knowledge. This only happens when children are able to allow their existing schemas to handle new information through the first process, assimilation. The last of Piaget’s theory is the stages of development. We will look at the first two stages which are the sensorimotor and preoperational stages. During the stage of sensorimotor which happens during the first two years from birth, they will undergo a key feature of knowing and having object permanence that also means that if a particular object was hidden or covered by a cloth, he or she will be able to actively search for it. The preoperational stage takes place from two years of age till they are of seven years old. During this stage, children will be building up their incidents or encounters through adaptation and slowly move on to the next stage of the development as they are not able to
Jean Piaget’s cognitive theory states that a child goes through many set stages in his or her cognitive development. It is through these stages that the child is able to develop into an adult. The first of these stages is called the sensorimotor period in which the child’s age ranges from 0-2 years old. During this sensorimotor period of a child’s development, the child’s main objective is to master the mechanics of his or her own body. Towards the end of this period, the child begins to recognize himself as a separate individual, and that people and objects around him or her have their own existence. The child, however, does not have a sense of object permanence meaning that when an object is taken away, the child no longer believes that that object actually exists. As the child nears the end of this period of development, he may seek an item that has been hidden in the location where he or she last saw it, but does not look elsewhere (Smith). During the preoperational period, which lasts from age 2-7, the child has come a long way in his or her cognitive development since his or her birth. In this period, the child has a very basic understanding of the inner workings of his or her mind and is ready to interact with their environment in a more symbolic way. A limitation during this period is known as egocentrism. The child has a hard time realizing that though there are many other people and things in their world, none of them are more important that the child himself. The child believes that his point of view is the only point of view of the world. This is caused by his inability to put himself in someone’s else’s shoes (Smith). The concrete operational period, spanning between the ages of 7 and 11, is marked by the onset of logic to the young mind. The child is able to mentally manipulate objects and events. In other words, he or she can imagine squashing a clay ball ...
Piaget argued that cognitive development is based on the development of schemas. This refers to a psychological structure representing all of a person’s knowledge of actions or objects. To perform a new skill which the person has no schema, they have to work from previous skills that they have. This is called assimilation, where they have pulled previous schemas together then adapted and changed them to fit their task through accommodation.