Piaget's Theory

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Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development describes his belief that children try to actively make sense of the world rather than simply absorbing knowledge as previously thought. Piaget’s theory claims that as children grow and develop they experience four different cognitive stages of life. As a child grows through each stage they not only learn new information but the way he or she thinks also changes. “In other words, each new stage represents a fundamental shift in how the child thinks and understands the world” (Hockenbury, page 368).The first stage of Piaget’s theory, known as the sensorimotor stage, begins at birth and continues on until about age 2. As the name suggest, this stage is when children begin to discover …show more content…

It is at the beginning of this stage that children start tobecome able to have complex logical thoughts and are able to focus on more than one part of aproblem at a time. These logical thoughts, however, are limited to real world objects and personal experiences or events. This limited thinking makes it very difficult for children in thisstage to understand and logically answer hypothetical situations or abstract ideas.The fourth and final stage of Piaget’s theory, beginning around early teens and continuing on all through adulthood, is the formal operational stage. Unlike the previous stage, adolescentsin this stage are able to logically use symbols related to abstract concepts and think about multiple variables to consider possibilities (WebMD.com). Although formal operational thought starts at the beginning of this stage, it always continues to increase in sophistication as a persongets older. It is for this reason why some people are better at thinking about hypothetical questions and ideas than others.Although Piaget’s theory has been used as a basis for many research studies, there are aspects of it that have been challenged. Some of the most criticized points of the theory is thatPiaget underestimated both the cognitive abilities of young children and the impact that socialenvironments and culture has on cognitive development. It is also …show more content…

In everyday life, it is possible to see the different stages of his theory at the ages thathe describes them as happening. For example, when I think about different children that I knowthat are in each of the four stages it is very easy to see how Piaget’s theory describes the way that each one of them think and behave. I think that Piaget was able describe the details of each stagewith the great accuracy that he did because as the textbook states, he developed the theory by watching his own children grow up and learn. I think by watching and studying his own children every day of their lives, Piaget was able to perfectly form the thoughts he had of how childrenlearn in different ways as they get

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