Jean Piaget's Cognitive Development In Children

Education today is focused mainly on how children learn and how they use what they learn in way to incorporate it into their environment. Going to school allows children to stay on the right path and explore their minds and interests. It allows children to be tested on their own cognitive development in order to see what they need to be working on. However, education and especially children’s knowledge were not always pertained this way until Jean Piaget. Jean Piaget found out that children think differently then adults that they have their own unique way of learning. Piaget believed that a child’s cognitive development is based off of four stages, sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete, and formal. Each stage having to deal with different

The first stage I looked at is the stage before concrete operational stage, because I wanted to see if her cognitive learning abilities were passed this stage, known as pre-operational. During the pre-operational stage, a child “can mentally represent events and objects (the semiotic function), and engage in symbolic play”(McLeod, 2010). Children’s cognitive thought is also very egocentric, meaning that they think only about themselves. Children during this stage believe that everyone sees, hears, and feel what they see even when they are at a different position (McLeod, 2010). In addition, children during this stage lack conservation and logical reasoning. So, the first test I gave to my sister was on conservation. I placed water in two wide and squatty glasses both even with the amount of water and asked her if they had the same amount or if

Within this stage the child understands conversation, reversibility, and is able to think more logically, especially when it come to physical objects (McLeod, 2010). However, the child does have trouble with thinking abstractly. They also loose the ability of egocentrism and think more about others and their feelings. “The concrete operational stage is also characterized by the child’s ability to coordinate two dimensions of an object simultaneously, arrange structures in sequence, and transpose differences between items in a series”(Swift, 2015). In addition, the children during this stage also realize that his opinion and thoughts are different from others (Cherry, 2015). Also, classification and seriation is another ability that these children gain. An experiment that I did in order to test my sisters seriation skills was I told her to place the sticks in order from shortest to longest. Another test I gave her was a bag containing black and white beads and I asked her which color has more? I also tested her on reversibility. I gave her two clumps of clay one in a sphere and the other rolled like a snake. I asked her if both were the same object or different. Lastly, I tested my sister way of thinking. I told her that the rule was that if a hammer hits the glass the glass shatters, so if I hit the glass with a hammer what would happen? The second