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More handpicked essays just for you.
Strengths or critiques of Piaget’s stages of cognitive development theory
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From the time that we are all born, we learn to interact and explore the world that we were brought into. Swiss cognitive theorist Jean Piaget, came up with a theory that separates the different stages that all individuals go through starting from birth, during these stages there are certain developmental characteristics that will set one aside from one stage to another. “Children actively construct knowledge as they manipulate and explore their world” (Beck, 2014). From the minute a baby is born the are expect to do certain things, The Apgar Scale, this is used in order to test a newborn's’ physical condition. From there on out the environment plays a major role in development. I decided to observe my infant nephew and see how he matches up with other children in terms of how he is developing and interacting with the world around him. At the time of my observation my …show more content…
Jeremiah’s face lite up and a big smile emerged on his face, he was happy to see me. Jeremiah was filled with curiosity and excitement as he observed me take out a pen and notebook, he tried grabbing the pen but was unsuccessful. I was informed that Jeremiah had never played or been close to a pen, so I decided to let him play with it. He reached for the pen, looked at it and moved it straight to his mouth, I had to take it away from him. His parents are very cautious about what anyone gives him. From there on out I watched as he played with his toys and played with just about anything that he could get his hands on. According to Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development, Jeremiah is in the Sensorimotor stage, since he is just about 12 months old. This means that at the time being Jeremiah is learning by using his senses of sight, hearing, touch, and taste to help him explore and interact with his surroundings, this will help with a smoother transition into the following stages of
Jean Piaget's legacy is one that has affected a wide disparity of disciplines. Commonly acknowledged as one of the foremost psychologists of the 20th century, certainly the premiere child developmental psychologist, Piaget preferred to be referred to as a genetic epistemologist. This is because he identified child psychology as being limited to merely the study of the child, whereas his main focus was the study of the origins, characteristics, and limitations of knowledge, usually as seen in the development in children. It has been said of him that "he approached questions up until then exclusively philosophical, in a resolutely empirical manner, and made epistemology (the study of knowledge), into a science separate from philosophy, but related to all of the human sciences." (Gruber and Voneche, 18)
Although he identified himself as a genetic epistemologist, Jean Piaget was a psychologist from Switzerland. When he was just eleven years old Piaget started to take steps in starting his research career without even realizing it when he wrote a brief paper over an Albino Sparrow (Bringuier, 1980). He originally studied natural sciences and was involved in the branch of philosophy that was focused on origin, nature and the extents and limits of human knowledge. But as he progressed in his studies he realized that he was also interested in how thought develops and wanted to understand how genetics impacted the process (Mayer, 2005).
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
The first stage is called sensorimotor which defines behaviors associated with infants up to two years of age. During the sensorimotor stage, children are seeking everything in which they can obtain a new taste, sound, feeling, and sight. Generally, children do not have understanding of these new experiences; it is more of exposure. The second stage is called preoperational which includes children from ages two through seven. “Children at this stage understand object permanence, but they still don’t get the concept of conservation. They don’t understand that changing a substance’s appearance doesn’t change its properties or quantity” (Psychology Notes HQ, 2015, Section Preoperational Stage). Piaget conducted an experiment with water, two identical glasses and a cylinder. Piaget poured the same amount of water in the two glasses; the children responded that there was indeed the same amount of water in the two glasses. He then took the two glasses of water and poured them into the cylinder. When asked if the tall beaker contained the same amount of water, the children responded that the beaker had more water than the glass. However, by the age of seven years of age, children can understand more complex and abstract concepts. At this point, the child is operating in the concrete operational stage. Children also can learn different rules; sometimes, they lack the understanding associated with those rules. When a child
While interviewing a kindergarten teacher at PS.142 in Piaget’s context, the first thing that Ms. Martini mentioned to me is that all children grasp things differently. In her class she encourages a lot of engagement in order for her students to develop reasoning. One thing that she mentioned to me that she does with her students is that they all have a journal and in that journal she has then draw and write whatever they want. She then picks several kids a day to share what they did and as a class they talk about the drawing. Another thing that she does with her class is that she has them do a lot of role playing. She says that this helps build confidence in the class. What Ms. Martini does to accommodate the differences in understanding her
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
Essay Topic: Jean Piaget proposed a step-wise sequence of mental development during childhood. Provide an overview of Piaget’s core ideas, discussing the evidence for and against these ideas.
The cognitive aspect utilizes Piaget’s theory of development. Piaget’s theory includes four stages: The Sensorimotor Stage, The Preoperational Stage, The Concrete Operational Stage, and The Formal Operational Stage (Siegler et al.,135). For children, ages 0 to 6, the stages focused on are the sensorimotor and preoperational stages. Piaget’s focus was on nature and nurture to encourage cognitive development. Nurturing is the everyday interactions that a child experiences not only with parents but with other children and community members. Nature is a child’s biological development and their ability to learn and make perceptions of the world around
This paper aims to study the relation between birth order and cognitive development in young children. this study will be looking at the cognitive development of these children in the age group of 3-6 who are in their preoperational stage (Piaget,) This qualitative study involves 13 children between the ages of three and six who attend a Kindergartens in singapore. Their cognition is tested on the basis of three categories- Conservation, ego centrism and Mental representation.
Over time, there has been an expansion in our knowledge of the ways in which humans develop and learn. It is now known that babies are beginning to learn even before they are born. I often find myself wishing I had known these things when my children were developing. We all want our children to be the best that they can be; with some knowledge of how children learn and the sequential steps they must go through in many areas of development, we can provide many experiences at home to help them reach their potential. When educators discuss children 's development, they usually talk about physical, mental, social, and emotional development.
Jean Piaget first established the foundational concepts of his cognitive theory in 1936 (McLeod, 2009), it focused on cognitive development, which is the obtaining of the capacity to understand, communicate and remember information over time (Lilienfeld et al. 2015, p. 408). Piaget structured his theory by conceptualising four key stages of cognitive development that a person progresses through via the processes known as assimilation, accommodation and adaption.
By the age of two my family realized that I was really active baby. I would touch everything and anything that i saw interesting. I was curious about everything and my perceptual and motor skills were rapidly changing. When my mom told me how I was as a baby, I thought I was smart, but not really. All babies do this at that stage explained by Jean Piaget and her Piaget theory. Piaget believed that children are naturally curious and construct their understanding of the world. According to Piaget “assimilation occurs when new experiences are readily incorporated into a child’s existing theories”(p.g 162). Piaget also designates the first two of an infant 's life as the sensorimotor start. As an infant I was on Sensorimotor stage. This stage spans birth to two years, a period during which the infant progresses from simple reflex action for symbolic processing. The sensorimotor stage is the first of the four stages Piaget used to define cognitive development. So at the age of two I was busy discovering relationships between my body and the
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
By exploring children will increase their knowledge and understanding of the world. A child must have physical development before motor development can occur (Charlesworth, 2000). According to Piaget infants acquire knowledge from their environment. Through sight, smell, hearing, and touch this is accomplished. Adults are responsible for seeing that the children have a chance to explore to acquire the knowledge.
The development of the human brain is largely based on relationships acquired during the first few months of life. Traits that a child is born with differ from the ones that he or she gains from an outside environment. The types of things that affect the acquisition of these traits are the environment that the guardian provides, and the interaction between baby and guardian in that environment. A household containing a newborn can be quite a hectic place, but when the parent handles themselves correctly, the baby soothes faster and quietly. When a child is in the mist of throwing a tantrum and you do not give up on the situation until it is completely resolved, it affects the social and emotional development of the child.