Piaget's Cognitive Development: Four Stages Of Adolescence And Development

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Adolescence and Development
Adolescence is the time-frame when children transition into adulthood, usually beginning between age 11 or 12 concluding in the late teens or early twenties. Adolescence offers the fortuity for psycho-social, physical, cognitive and physical growth, with a stipulation of risk to healthy development by making poor choices and risky behavior such as unsafe sexual activity, substance abuse and inferior peer relationships. The impact of adolescence physically; puberty marks the termination of childhood as we know it, these changes can have a profound affect psychologically. Hormonal changes present during puberty can trigger mood swings, erratic and fluctuating behaviors. Generally, puberty takes four years to complete, …show more content…

This stage is when individuals develop their cognitive ability to utilize abstract concept, logical thought is one of these skills. Piaget’s cognitive development theory is a comprehensive model of the natural development of human intelligence, believing that childhood plays a critical and active role in the development of an individual. Piaget identifies four stages of cognitive development, these include sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and the formal operational stage. Piaget determined the concrete operational stage of cognitive development when an individual is cognitively capable of successfully preforming various mental operations utilizing concrete concepts to begin critical thinking skills. Consequently, the lack of deductive reasoning that accompanies this stage of cognitive development impedes an individual’s ability to predict the outcome of their actions. While testing their physical boundaries, a lack of cognitive maturity disallows the adolescents the ability to predict outcome of their actions. Formal operational thought, is when an individual can visualize the conclusion of a potential action before it begins. Formal operational thought, require the ability to think in an abstract manner that will combine the ability to classify items in a deductive order of reason, utilizing, higher levels of critical thinking

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