Jean Piaget Theory Essay

Theory of Cognitive Development -By Jean Piaget

Piaget's (1936) theory of cognitive development explains how a child constructs a mental model of the world. He disagreed with the idea that intelligence was a fixed trait, and regarded cognitive development as a process which occurs due to biological maturation and interaction with the environment.
Piaget was employed at the Binet Institute in the 1920s, where his job was to develop French versions of questions on English intelligence tests. He became intrigued with the reasons children gave for their wrong answers to the questions that required logical thinking. He believed that these incorrect answers revealed important differences between the

When a child's existing schemas are capable of explaining what it can perceive around it, it is said to be in a state of equilibrium, i.e., a state of cognitive (i.e., mental) balance.
Piaget emphasized the importance of schemas in cognitive development and described how they were developed or acquired. A schema can be defined as a set of linked mental representations of the world, which we use both to understand and to respond to situations. The assumption is that we store these mental representations and apply them when needed.
For example, a person might have a schema about buying a meal in a restaurant. The schema is a stored form of the pattern of behavior which includes looking at a menu, ordering food, eating it and paying the bill. This is an example of a type of schema called a 'script.' Whenever they are in a restaurant, they retrieve this schema from memory and apply it to the situation.
The patterns Piaget depicted have a tendency to be less difficult than this - particularly those utilized by babies. He depicted how - as a tyke gets more established - his or her patterns turn out to be increasingly various and

Sensorimotor stage (birth to age 2)
2. Pre-operational stage (from age 2 to age 7)
3. Concrete operational stage (from age 7 to age 11)
4. Formal operational stage (age 11+ - adolescence and adulthood).

Every youngster experiences the phases in a similar request, and kid advancement is dictated by organic development and association with the earth. Albeit no stage can be passed up a great opportunity, there are singular contrasts in the rate at which kids advance through stages, and a few people may never accomplish the later stages.
Piaget did not assert that a specific stage was come to at a particular age - despite the fact that depictions of the stages frequently incorporate a sign of the age at which the normal kid would achieve each stage.
Sensorimotor Stage (Birth-2 yrs)
The main achievement during this stage is object permanence - knowing that an object still exists, even if it is hidden.
It requires the ability to form a mental representation (i.e., a schema) of the object.
Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)
During this stage, young children can think about things symbolically. This is the ability to make one thing - a word or an object - stand for something other than