Professional Knowledge : Cognitive Development

Psychologist Jean Piaget developed the Piaget’s theory around the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. Piaget’s theory implies that cognitive growth advances in different stages, influenced by an instinctive need to know basis. The four stages of Piaget’s theory are, sensorimotor (birth to about two years old), preoperational (average two to seven years old), concrete operational (seven to eleven years old), and formal operational stage (eleven to undetermined years old).

Piaget’s stages of development are broken into stages of growth to bridge the connection between cognitive and biological development. According to Piaget, there are four stages to cognitive development; Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete Operations and Formal Operations. In the sensorimotor stage, children form babies to two years old, experience and gather information by using the five senses.

Piaget’s theory was introduced by Jean Piaget who established four periods of cognitive development. The four stages are; Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete Operational, and Formal operational. The sensorimotor is the first stage and begins when the child is born and proceeds until the age of two years. The second stage is the preoperational stage and begins with the child is two years old and continues until the child reaches six years of age. The concrete stage is the third stage and begins when the child is six years old and proceeds until the age of 11 years old. The formal operational stage is the fourth stage and

Piaget’s developmental stages are ways of normal intellectual development. There are four different stages. The stages start at infant age and work all the way up to adulthood. The stages include things like judgment, thought, and knowledge of infants, children, teens, and adults. These four stages were names after Jean Piaget a developmental biologist and psychologist. Piaget recorded intellectual abilities and developments of infants, children, and teens. The four different stages of Piaget’s developmental stages are sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. Sensorimotor is from birth up to twenty- four months of age. Preoperational which is toddlerhood includes from eighteen months old all the

At the centre of Piaget's theory is the principle that cognitive development occurs in a series of four distinct, universal stages, each characterized by increasingly sophisticated and

Jean Piaget is a developmental psychologist who studied young children and analyzed their development at a young age. Piaget is well known for his four cognitive development stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete, and formal operations; as mentioned by Siegler and Alibali (2004). Siegler and Alibali (2004) also stated that these four stages begin as soon as the child is born and it continues throughout their young adolescent years all the way to adulthood. Piaget conducted numerous research experiments towards young children in order to prove his hypothesis and drew conclusions for

Jean Piaget has introduced theories on child development from 1896-1980. He is the the most cited and most influential on cognitive development. Piaget is the foundation of current child developmental in psychology. His inspiration came from observing children’s as he even used his own. His development of the cognitive deployment focused on mental process, remembering, believing and reasoning. To help explain his theory, Piaget’s came up with Stage-bound cognitive development. “Stage-bound is the development progresses through a series of stages as a result of assimilating (using the environment for already-learned activities)and accommodating (changing behaviors—and mental structure—in the face of environmental demands)” (Lefrancois, G. R. 2012). Piaget’s stage theory makes up four components, Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete operations, and Formal operations. With these components a teacher or educator can designs its class room and better understand the deployment a child goes through. Once the knowledge of the theories is understood the teacher can teach the child the correct development that they are in. It’s important to know the characteristics of the development a child is going trough because all different age group have their own development stages.

“According to Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development, it states that all children go through specific stages as their brain matures. It also stated that these stages are completed in a fixed order within all children, according to their range of age (Atherton).” In other words, one cannot expect a two month old baby to solve simple math problems as that of a five year old. There are four stages in which Piaget grouped the development of a child according to their age groups, in which children interact with people and their environment. The sensorimotor stage (birth until age 2) children use their senses to explore their environment. During this stage, children learn how to control objects, although they fail to understand that these objects if not within their view continue to exist. The preoperational stage (2 until age 7) children are not able to see other's viewpoints other than their own. In other words, if the same amount of water is poured into a short wide glass and then a tall thin glass the child will perceive that the taller glass has more water because of the height. The concrete operational stage (7 until 12) children begin to think logically, but only with a practical aid. The last stage of Piaget’s cognitive theory is the formal operation stage (12 through adulthood) in which children develop abstract thinking and begin to think logically in their minds (Piaget).

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development proposes that a child’s capacity to understand certain concepts is based on the child’s developmental stage. He outlined 4 stages of development that spanned a child’s age from birth through 11 years old. The list below presents a summary of the characteristics typical at each stage:

The 1st stage of Piaget’s concept survives from birth to roughly age 2 and is centered on the infant attempting to make sense of the world. During the sensor motor stage, an infant’s wisdom of the world is restricted to their sensory observations and motor activities. Behaviors are restricted to trouble-free motor reactions produced by sensory stimuli. Children use skills and abilities they were born with, such as looking, sucking, grasping, and listening, to learn more about the natural environment. The sensor motor stage can be separated into 6 separate substages that are distinguished by the growth of a new skill. Throughout this substage, the child appreciates the atmosphere entirely through inborn reflexes such as sucking and looking. This substage involves coordinating sensation and new schemas. For example, a child may perhaps such his or her thumb by accident and then later intentionally repeat the action. These actions are repeated because the infant finds them pleasurable. During this substage, the

Jean Piaget is one of the pioneers to child development, he was an important factor in the growth, development and one of the most exciting research theorists in child development. A major force in child psychology, he studied both thought processes and how they change with age. He believed that children think in fundamentally different ways from adults.. Piaget’s belief is that all species inherit the basic tendency to organize their lives and adapt to the world that’s around them, no matter the age. Children develop schemas as a general way of thinking or interacting with ideas and objects in the environment. Children create and develop new schemas as they grow and experience new things. Piaget has identified four major stages of cognitive development which are: sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operations, and formal operations. According to the text here are brief descriptions of each of Piaget’s stages:

Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is one the most widely accepted, his four stages of development are age based.

For this paper I will be exploring Piaget's theory of cognitive development. Swiss Psychologist Jean Piaget, theorized that children progress through four key stages of cognitive development that change their understanding of the world. By observing his own children, Piaget came up with four different stages of intellectual development that included: the sensorimotor stage, which starts from birth to age two; the preoperational stage, starts from age two to about age seven; the concrete operational stage, starts from age seven to eleven; and final stage, the formal operational stage, which begins in adolescence and continues into adulthood. In this paper I will only be focusing on the

Piaget’s stages are divided into four main steps of cognitive development. Stage one

Jean Piaget, a cognitivist, believed children progressed through a series of four key stages of cognitive development. These four major stages, sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational, are marked by shifts in how people understand the world. Although the stages correspond with an approximate age, Piaget’s stages are flexible in that if the child is ready they can reach a stage. Jean Piaget developed the Piagetian cognitive development theory. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development proposes that a child’s intellect, or cognitive ability, progresses through four distinct stages. The emergence of new abilities and ways of processing information characterize each stage. Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development suggests that children move through four different stages of mental development. His theory focuses not only on understanding how children acquire knowledge, but also on understanding the nature of intelligence.