Piaget's theory of cognitive development

PIAGET'S THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT: 

Greatest contribution was to realise that children do not simply know less than adults, they think in entirely different ways to adults. From this understanding Piaget divided childhood into stages, each of which represents the development of new ways of reasoning. Piaget also looked at how children learn, in particular: the role of motivation and the question of how knowledge develops. 

STAGE 

AGE - approx. 

EXPLAINATION 

Sensorimotor  

0-2 

  A baby's early focus is on physical sensations and on developingsome basic physical co-ordination. They learn by trial and error that they can deliberately move their body in particular ways, and eventually move objects. Also learns to understand that people are separate objects and they acquire some basic lang. 

  By 8 months they are capable of understanding object permanence*. 

Pre-operational  

2-7 

By the age of 2 a toddler is able to move – it is mobile -  and can use lang. But it still lacks reasoning ability. This means that they display some characteristic errors in reasoning. 

--> Conservation* is the basic mathematical understanding that quantity remains constant when theappearance of objects changes. Piaget demonstrated this in a number of situations – with rows of counters and liquid in a beaker. Pre-operations children struggled to conserve.  

--> Egocentrism* means to see the world from one perspective – one's only viewpoint. Children were given the three mountains task (Piaget and Inhelder 1956). Pre-operational children struggled with this task and tended to choose the picture that matched the scene from theirpoint of view. 

--> Class inclusion* early on in the pre-operational stage children begin to understand the idea of classification – the idea that objects fall into categories. Most pre-operational children can classify pugs, bull terriers and retrievers as dogs. However, (Piaget and Inhelder 1964) found that children under the age of seven struggle with the more advanced skill of class inclusion, the idea that classifications have subsets. 

Stage of concrete operations 

7-11 

Piaget found that from the age of around 7 most children…