There is a misconception that children are like miniature versions of adults and that they think in the same way adults do. This misconception was debunked by a developmental biologist named Piaget who theorized that children reason quite differently. Piaget formulated a theory of cognitive development that explains how children create a mental model of the world. He did not support the idea that intellect is a fixed feature. Rather, he believed that cognitive development is more like a process which occurs due to biological maturation and interaction with the environment.
Piaget’s stages of cognitive development start from birth to adulthood and it begins with the sensorimotor stage, a child from birth to the age of 2 years old learns and thinks by doing and figuring out how something works. The second stage is the preoperational stage and in this stage children from ages 2 through 7 years are developing their language and they do pretend play (Berk, 2005, p.20). Concrete operational is the third stage and children ages 7 to 11 years old lack abstract but have more logic than they did when they were younger. The last stage is formal
It is impressive that most of his research is based on observation and studying of his own children. Cognitive development stages are the central part of Piaget’s theory, which demonstrate the development stages of children’s ability to think from infancy to adolescence, how to gain knowledge, self-awareness, awareness of the others and the environment. These stages are respectively relative to 4 ranges of age. It consists of characteristics of each stage and phenomena of each. The first stage between birth to 2 years old, children learn the external through senses and action, instinctively.
It proposes four distinct phases in the cognitive evolution of children (Berger, Kathleen Stassen, 2008) these are the Sensory Motor Stage, Pre operational stage, Concrete operations stage and the formal operations stage. As the baby is under one year old the only relevant stage to be discussed here is the sensory motor stage. Piaget’s concept of this first stage was based on the assumption that the in order to understand the world around them infants must create schemas, Schemas are subjective mental representations of the objective world around us. Infants will incrementally build up knowledge and insight of their surroundings via coordinating sensory experiences with physical interactions involving objects in their environment. A normal healthy infant will progress from instinctual reflex actions (palmer grasp, rooting) to informed voluntary actions as it acquires information about objects and the methods by which they may be manipulated (Bernstein, Penner, Clarke-Stewart).
Jean Piaget 's contribution focused on cognitive development through adolescence and the way individuals understand the world by creating concepts and categorizations. Concepts are those ideas or mental representations that individuals developed based
the common assumption in psychology before Piaget's theory, it was that children are merely less competent thinkers than adults. (5) According to Piaget, children are born with the basic mental structure on which all following learning and knowledge are based. (5) Piaget's theory consists of four stages cognitive development. The first stage called Sensorimotor stage, it is from birth to two years. During this stage, infants are aware only of what is in front of them, they just pay attention to what they are seeing, doing, or physically interacting with.
heory of cognitive development. It is one of the most influential theory in cognitive development psychology and it is concerned with the growth of intelligence which Piaget describes as ability to more accurately represent the world and perform logical operations. According to Piaget, cognitive growth occurs through three principles namely organization, adaptation and equilibration. From the time that we are infants we organize our knowledge into mental representations that help us make sense of the world around us. Our representation contains cognitive structures which are known as schemes which become more complex as we grow old.
Piaget’s four stages of Cognitive Development is a theory that maps out the stages of cognitive development that takes place from the moment of birth all the way adulthood. Each developmental stage consists of new milestone in thought, judgement, and knowledge, and each stages were created by a psychologist and a developmental biologist Jean Piaget. Piaget’s four stages takes place in different age of a child, it start with the sensorimotor stage that takes place from birth all the way through the age of two. Then you have preoperational stage and that takes place from the age of two years all the way through the of seven years old. Next is the concrete operational stage which takes place from seven year all the way through twelve years old.
Haney, Rusell and Bebell (2004), used the drawings to explore the child’s perspective of the school and the learning environment. These researchers show how using the drawings made by the children can help not only to understand them but also the learning environment as well as their school better. This can act as a reference tool for the teachers to help make the environment better suited to the child. However, these can’t always be relied upon. As we can see clearly, using children’s drawings can be beneficial in many ways but do not come without disadvantages and therefore these should be considered before using these drawings to assess the emotional state, perceptions etc of the child.
The preschool child of 3 or 4 learns, perceives, thinks, reasons, and solves problems in ways that are vastly different from those that characterize the 1 or 2 year old (Mussen, Conger, and Kagan 298). A child uses their imagination which helps them to develop mentally. The very young infant is not only maturing, but also having experiences which are important for mental development (Breckenridge and Murphy 278). A child like to use their imagination which is a form of thinking. At the age of 3 to 6 years they are able to separate reality and fantasy (“The stage of self-awareness and imagination” par.