Analysis Of Piaget's Stages Of Cognitive Development

Over the last couple of months I have had the opportunity to student teach at Crim Elementary School. During the few months that I was there, I was placed in a preschool classroom. I was able to learn a lot of different techniques and strategies that I will be able to use in my future classroom. Every student has a different personality so I was excited to get into the classroom and observe how to help each student. For this paper, we were asked to choose three different theories. These theories were used to help us understand every child’s developmental level. The three theories that I chose to do were Piaget’s three stages, temperament, and behaviorism-operant conditioning. One thing that I was excited to see was how often these theories

Piaget worked in the 1920s, where he had to develop French versions of questions on English intelligence tests. Previous research shows that Piaget became interested with the reasons that children had the wrong answers, (McLeod, S. 2010) and he believed that these answers showed the different thinking process of adults and children. Before Piaget put together his stages, it was thought that adults were able to think more than children. But, after his work he realized that children’s thought processes were much different than adults (McLeod, 2010). Piaget has four major stages of Cognitive Development. These four theories explain the types of stages that children go through, as they grow older. The four stages are The Sensorimotor Stage, The Preoperational Stage, The Concrete Operational Stage, and The Formal Operational Stage. All four of the stages are very different from one another but they are a perfect fit for when the child reaches that certain stage in life. The first stage, Sensorimotor, Piaget described this stage from birth to two years old (McLeod, 2010). During this stage, the children are

There are three important concepts that are in this theory. They are antecedent, observable behavior, and consequences. When we are observing a child the first thing we want to do is understand what “triggers” their behavior. This concept is called antecedent, which is anything that comes before the behavior (Rizza 2014). There are two types of antecedents, direct and indirect. Direct is what happens immediately beforehand and indirect is not immediately before. The last concept is consequences, which is anything that happens after and is caused by the behavior performed (Rizza 2014). Once again, there are two different kinds of consequences, reinforcement and punishment. Reinforcement is what increases or strengthens a behavior so it will happen in the future. For example, one day Ms. W was so excited that a little boy named M was able to zipper his own jacket. She proceeded to give him a sticker and a high five. All of the other students saw how excited that Ms. W got and then they all wanted to zip their own jackets. The other concept is punishment; punishment is a way to decrease a child’s bad behavior. A punishment is anything from standing in the back of the line, going to the principles office, or taking a time out in the corner. Punishments are a way for a student to know what they did was wrong and not to do it again. An example of a punishment in my classroom