Piaget's Cognitive Development Theory Analysis

According to Piaget’s theory between the age 2 to 7 years old children falls under the preoperational Stage. A toddler at this age make-believe play. He pretends with less realistic toys. For an example he uses a block for a cake. Slowly, the child can imagine objects and events without any support from the environment. 2 year old child’s vocabulary grows. The child combines two words in telegraphic speech and as three-words sentences appear the child slowly adds grammatical morphemes. Finally the child now engages in conversation and takes turn and maintain

Piaget asserts, children are born with inherited scripts, called schema, these schema are building blocks for cognitive development. As a child grows, he acquires more of these building blocks; moreover, these building blocks become more complex as the child progresses through different stages in development (Huitt, Hummel 2003). Piaget’s 4 stages of cognitive development are as follows. First, The sensorimotor stage where an infant has rudimentary motor skills, and can eventually

Piaget’s theory of development consists of four phases. The sensorimotor, the pre-operational stage, the concrete operational stage and the formal operational stage (Piaget, 1952). In the Sensorimotor stage which is the age of zero to two years, the infant’s knowledge of their environment developed through their senses, experiences and physical movements. Physical development increases the chances of the infant to develop new intellectual abilities. In the Pre-operational stage which is the age between two to seven years, understanding and reasoning is expressed by the use of symbols and language and imagination is developed, but reasoning is illogical and egocentrism prevails. The child develops object permanence (Woolfolk, A., 2004). In the Concrete operational stage which is from age seven to eleven years, intelligence is denoted by through logical manipulation of concrete objects and here

As each stage is accomplished, a person achieves a higher level of functioning. The sensorimotor stage (birth – 2 years) is where a child develops a sense of themselves as separate for the world and palpable objects still exist even though they cannot be seen. In the preoperational stage (2 – 6 years) the child develops the ability to express themselves through language, they understand the meaning of symbols, and they can classify objects. Concrete operations (6 – 12 years) is the stage when the child applies logic to thinking, is able to understand time and space, broadens social interactions, and is can apply rules; but thinking is still concrete. Egocentrism is central to their thought process with the inability to consider that other people have differing opinions. The last stage, formal operations (12-15 years and older) the child learns to think and reason in abstract terms, develops deeper logical thinking and reasoning, and achieves cognitive maturity. (Videback, pg.

At this stage, a child begins to perform roles and actions (imitation) of a grown up, along with familiar events. However, at the age of three or four years, the child’s skills then become symbolic; he/she learns substitution in the form of objects. For example, a child feeding a stuffed animal using a toy bottle, whereas an older child is feeding the stuffed animal using a highlighter in pretense that it would act as a feeding bottle for a baby. This stage also builds a solid foundation for children as they get their own experience through

Psychoanalytic was first discovered by Sigmund Freud which is a close look at the unconscious drives that make people do certain things or act a certain way. Freud was always talking about the way the mind worked because he believed our minds are responsible for the things we do weather we are conscious or unconscious. There are three characteristics according to Freud that made up a persons personality which are: The Id, ego, and the super ego.  The Id is the part of the unconscious that attempts pleasure, which people seem to act out when the Id is not lined up with the ego or super ego. Ego, for us humans to keep a real sense on earth in reality we need ego in order to maintain a balance between pain and pleasure,

The overall idea surrounding Piaget’s Cognitive Development theory is that development is solely dependent upon maturation. Piaget believed that people simply developed as they got older, without environmental factors affecting development. The concrete operational stage explains cognitive development in children that are seven to twelve years old. Children this age display logic skills, the ability to apply rules and categories, and are able to infer. This is also the stage where children are supposed to learn to take in multiple variables and develop the skill of conservation.

Jean Piaget used observations of his own children to develop the four stages that we know he created today. Piaget developed a stage theory of intellectual development that included four distinct stages: the sensorimotor stage, from birth to age 2; the preoperational stage, from age 2 to about age 7; the concrete operational stage, from age 7 to 11; and the formal operational stage, which begins in adolescence and spans into adulthood. He believed that there were four necessary ingredients for cognitive development which included: “maturation of the nervous system, experiences gained through interaction with physical world, social environment, and child’s active participation in adapting to environment & constructing knowledge from experience.” (Sullivan, 2014, Slide 3)

One of the most well known theories in cognitive development is Piaget 's theory. The psychologist Jean Piaget theorized that as children 's minds development, they pass through distinct stages marked by transitions in understanding followed by stability. Piaget describes four different stages of development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operation, and formal operations. Each stage describes the thinking patterns of a child depending on his or her age. In order to compare the thinking processes of a three-year old and a nine-year old using Piaget 's theory, you must compare two sequential stages of cognitive development: preoperational and concrete operations.

Sensorimotor Stage: During this stage parents can encourage the object permanence accomplishments, the feeling that the object exists even if they can’t be seen. Parents can hide the favorite toys of their infant’s partially, which makes the infant reach for the toys and as the infant grows, the toys can be hidden completely for the infant to look for.

During this stage of development, children are starting to use symbols such as the children who were playing with the blocks (Edwards et al., 2000). Also in this stage, the children able to use more complex and structured sentences (Edwards et al., 2000). This was seen in the children who communicated their thoughts while playing. Another aspect of the preoperational stage is moral realism, where children are learning the difference between right and wrong and that everyone shares the same moral view (Edwards et al.,

For this assignment, I have selected two theories, cognitive theory and socio-cultural theory, to compare and contrast for further understanding children development and both theories’ implication in current education. Cognitive theory studies how people think, what’s going on within people’s mind. Social-cultural theory studies how the society, the culture, other people or external environment impact individual development. This paper would firstly respectively demonstrate both theories’ basic philosophy, representative persons and their claims. In the part

Developmental psychology relates to the changes in behaviour and abilities that transpire over time as development advances. (Harwood & Miller, 2008). Infancy and childhood is a time of rapid development of social, sensory and cognitive abilities. Infants acquire perceptual and motor skills which allow them to comprehend the world they live in. Cognitive development is “the growth of cognitive abilities and capacities from birth to old age” (Colman, 2008). In this essay I will address Piagetian Theory, the cognitive performance of children from age seven to eleven, (the concrete operational period), and Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of cognitive development.

Cognition is a process where different aspects of the mind are working together that lead to knowledge. Piaget’s cognitive development theory is based on stages that children go through as they grow that lead them to actively learn new information. Cognitive change occurs with schemes that children and adults go through to make sense of what is happening around them. The change that occurs is activity based when the child is young and later in life correlates to mental thinking. 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

Piaget’s theory places an emphasis on how children actively “construct their own cognitive worlds” (Santrock, 2011, p. 172). The first stage in Piaget’s theory, known as the sensorimotor stage, starts from birth to about two years (Santrock, 2011). In this stage, infants use their senses in conjunction with their motoric actions (Santrock, 2011).