In the past century, numerous developmental psychologists have attempted to explain the development of a child. According to different developmental theorists, children centre their development on separate aspects of development; cognitive, physical, social and behavioural. Biology over time has sculpted our behaviour as human beings yet we are also a product of experience. Developmental psychology studies the various skills and knowledge we have including how we acquire them and it is so important that we have an understanding of it so that parents/caregivers know what to expect and how to support their developing child. Jean Piaget, born in Switzerland in 1896, is one of the developmental theorists; he suggested that children develop through …show more content…
Piaget said that ‘from around puberty the ways in which many children think change again. They become more adult like, and can rely more on ideas rather than needing to manipulate real objects. By 12 years of age most children can do some mental arithmetic. Teenagers start to think about moral and philosophical issues too’. (G.C. Davenport 1994). However I find this part of the theory difficult to relate to because I don’t feel that at the age of 12 I was thinking morally about many things. For example, as I started high school I didn’t understand that some of the things I said, other people would find offensive because I wasn’t thinking morally and I didn’t understand that other peoples views are not always the same as mine. So much so that at the beginning of high school I said something which offended someone (unintentionally) and subsequently, my head of year arranged a meeting with me where she explained why it wasn’t okay for me to be saying things like it, which was an eye opener for me because I had never recognised that other people think differently before. From this point I was a lot more conscious of what I would say to people. Philosophical issues were another thing that I didn’t tend to think about just because I never really needed to until I got to high school. I had an hour a week in an RE class where we looked at different topics which wasn’t really enough for me to be able to …show more content…
Leo Vygotsky was born in 1896 and died at the young age of 37, so a lot of his theories are incomplete simply because he hadn’t had the time to do the research. His theory is a cultural- historical theory, the main focal point of the theory is the role of culture and social interactions the child has with others which able him/her to develop. The first main assumption of Vygotsky’s theory is that when a child communicates with an adult, the adult is able to channel how their culture thinks and feels about the world on to the child. An example of this from my own experience is that with no conversation with any adult, me being a child had no idea about food and how food differs from country to county until it was explained to me. As a child my parents would often explain what types of food belong to our country and what different types of food belong to other countries as well as where the specific foods came from. From having types of food explained to me from an adult, only then I began to understand our food culture. Vygotsky would explain this by me developing an understanding of food because of knowledge that someone else is reflecting on to
When studying human development, it is helpful to understand the main developmental domains (i.e physical, cognitive, emotional and moral) and the ways in which people develop within each domain at certain age stages. Use of psychological theories is also helpful to understand the reasons for this development and the ways in which it manifests at different age stages. The objective of this essay is to analyse the influences on development from conception to late adolescence. It will describe theories of lifespan development with information regarding my own development used to support these theories. It will be concluded that theories of lifespan development can be used to explain life experiences in the different developmental domains at different
There were different theories made by different philosophers and scholars. Piaget’s argument was based on logic of adaptation and bodies. He conducted research on his own child and made assumptions that children think differently of the world. Children cannot
Jean Piaget (1896 - 1980), was a Swiss psychologist who was the first to make a systematic study of cognitive development. Before Piaget’s work, the common assumption in psychology was that children were merely less capable thinkers than adults. After Piaget’s work it was realized that fact of the matter was that young children think extraordinarily different than adults (McLeod, S. A). According to Piaget’s study, we are born with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all subsequent learning and knowledge is based. The theory explains the methods and procedures by which the infant, and then the child, develops into an individual (Boeree, G.). Piaget’s theory focuses more on development than learning, it doesn’t seem to address learning of information or specific behaviors. The theory seems suggest distinct stages of development, marked by qualitative variances, rather than a regular increase in number and complexity of behaviors, concepts, and ideas (Atherton J S).
Piaget's theory of cognitive development is at its peak from ages 6-8 but doesn't end until around adulthood. Again, this was the first theory to address children as being able to adapt logically and creatively instead of being mindless and ignorant. It showed the capabilities of children and helped us take a closer examination of what was going on in children's learning abilities. However, this is not the only theory. This paved the way for a new theory to emerge which is Lev Vygotsky’s theory of social development. Vygotsky’s theory differs in that he did not believe that development occurred in stages but was rather a process dependant upon a child's environment and experiences. It stresses the importance of a child's social interaction
in traditional ways such as how well they could spell, count, or solve problems. He was more concerned with the processing of these things much more than the result came up with. Many people had the idea that children were less competent of thinkers then those older than them. Piaget did not think this way however, he designed a systematic study and was the first psychologist to do this. Piaget believed that genetics played a role in mental structure do to children being born with a certain mental structure. One of the biggest difference in Piaget’s theories was he was not concerned with all learners and narrowed it down to only involve children. With the children he was not concerned with how much they learned but how much they were developing. Piaget’s theory was to identify mechanisms and processed infant and children use to
Piaget brought new insight into the area of cognitive development. He described intellectual development as a sequence of four principal stages, each made up of several sub-stages. All children move through these stages in the same order, but each moves at his or her own pace. The Preoperational Phase is associated with the child of approximately two to seven years. The child’s thought process in this phase is characterized by egocentrism; that is, the child cannot look at something from another’s point of view.
Development in psychology is the study of changes that occur in human over the course of their life. Studying development of children has been expanding including through adolescent and the entire lifespan. Theorist Piaget and Vygotsky both studied what drives development. Erikson took a different route and studied the psychosocial development of how people feel. All three theorists explains how children learn and what they learn. When looking at the learning process it will also determines their outcome of adulthood. Broken into three topics cognitive, physical, and social development helps each theorist explain their theories.
Jean considered himself a genetic epistemologist that focus on “How we come to know.” Piaget theory proposed by various stages of a child where transition from one stage to the other follows a sequence. While some of his ideas have been supported through more correlational and experimental methodologies, others have not. For example, Piaget believed that biological development drives the movement from one cognitive stage to the next. Data from cross-sectional studies of children in a variety of western cultures seem to support this assertion for the stages of sensorimotor, preoperational, and concrete operations (Renner, Stafford, Lawson, McKinnon, Friot & Kellogg, 1976).
Jean Piaget was a successful and inspirational man. He is known all over the world and has contributed to the fields of psychology, sociology, philosophy, and education. Jean was born in Switzerland in 1896 to Arthur Piaget, a professor of literature at the University. He developed an interest in psychoanalysis at the University of Zurich. He was employed at the Binet Institute where he realized through his studies that there are differences in the way children and adults think. Piaget developed four stages of cognitive development. He was very interested in the way children think and so he did many case studies. Jean Piaget formed a theory of cognitive development that deals with “the process of coming to know and the stages we move through
Developmental psychology is an area of research devoted to explaining the continuing growth and change that occurs over the course of one’s life. Throughout history many varying theories have been used to attempt to explain the complex process of childhood experiences altering who individuals become as an adult.
Jean Piaget was born in Neuchatel, Switzerland. Here he studied at the university and received a doctorate in biology at the age of 22. Following his schooling he became increasingly interested in psychology and began much research and studying of the subject. From this research Piaget created a broad theoretical system for the development of cognitive abilities. His work, in this way, was much like that of Sigmund Freud, but Piaget emphasized the ways that children think and acquire knowledge.
Piaget sets a simple standard that everything a child does in life is learned from others and the environment. Gradually as a child matures they gain insight about the world and learn new things. In the first stage of Piaget’s theory, he discuses how infants and toddlers learn by using their senses and participating in physical engagement. He then discusses how children from a young age to seven years old start to experience the world through play and discover how things work. Next, Piaget talks about how children then move on to logically thinking and understanding others thoughts, feeling and opinions. In the final stage, he interprets how after you learn to think logically, you then start to think scientifically and more complex, this is obtained from adolescence to adulthood. I believe this is the most sufficient theory out of the three ideas of development because Piaget explains how the mind and behavior of a child works through each major stage of life. Piaget does not compare each stage to the moral good or bad of anything. He gives scientific reason behind each of his stages of cognitive
According to Lourenco (2012), Piaget whole take on cognitive development is that individuals create his or her knowledge individually or solitarily, meaning they learn from their personal understandings and capabilities. He was more interested in how children think differently from
We first need to know who created the Cognitive Development Theory. Jean Piaget was born in
Piaget “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 thinking of adults and children” (McLeod, 2015). Dr. Klaczynski who is a Professor at the University of Northern Colorado and whose primary focus is developmental psychology has stated in a lecture of his that Jean Piaget is known as one most influential researchers in the field of developmental psychology. He explained that this is, because before Piaget, it was commonly believed and accepted in the field of Psychology that children were simply “less competent thinkers” (Klaczynski, 2016) as compared to adults. Through Piaget’s numerous studies he was able to come to the conclusion that children were not “less competent thinkers” but, rather they had a whole different way of thinking as compared to