Jean Piaget's Four Stages Of Cognitive Development

During the birth to two years stage children are learning about the world through their sensations and through their movements. One of the most influential theorist’s Jean Piaget developed four important stages of cognitive development. In the first stage, known as the sensorimotor stage, direct sensory experiences are occurring. Motor actions are occurring as well, which are important for the learning of children as they get older. Since infants at this age are learning through their movements they are using basic actions such as grasping onto objects with their hands, sucking, listening and observing the world around them. With these movements, they are beginning to understand that their actions cause things to happen around them. When this

“Approaches to learning are established in the brain in the first three years of life. These include curiosity, memory, exploration, constructing knowledge, solving problems, persistence, imitation, and the ability to focus attention.” (197) It teaches object permeance as discussed in the previous paragraph, language skills and early literacy skills. The development of language and other communication strategies as well as the early beginnings of literacy are among the most important accomplishments of the first year according to our

Piaget’s second stage in his four stages of cognitive development is the preoperational stage. However, this stage is divided into two substages. The first being the preconceptual thinking stage. During this stage children are beginning to gain the ability to mentally represent objects and identify them based on their certain classes, and characteristics. However, when objects are too similar children at this stage will react to them as if they were all identical. These children are still unable to distinguish between the apparent identical members of the same class. Similarly, children are beginning to think symbolically, and use words and pictures to represent objects. A good example of this is when using flashcards with pictures and words on it to help children name their animals, etc. This is still a time for a lot learning to be done in children, and although they are becoming better with their language skills, they are still thinking about certain things in concrete terms. Transductive reasoning is also extremely important in understanding the child’s thinking during this substage. “transductive reasoning can be described as thinking with illogical and incomplete concepts (or pre-concepts). Pre-concepts result from the young child’s inability to focus attention on any but a few aspects of an object or experience, sometimes the most inconsequential aspect. Transductive