Should We Abandon Piaget’s Theory Given the Amount of Criticism It Has Received over the Year?

His views of how children and young people’s minds work and develop have been enormously influential particularly in educational theory. His particular insight was the role of maturation and increasing the capacity to understand their world, they can’t undertake certain tasks until they are psychologically mature enough to do so. The research has spawned a great deal more, much of which has undermined the detail of his own, but like many other original investigations his importance comes from his overall vision. Today Piaget’s theories have helped to change how people viewed the child or young person’s world and the way they study them he has inspired many theorist to improve on his studies. Piaget’s ideas have been of practical use in understanding and communicating, particularly in education. What he didn’t consider was the effect in the

Most of the criticism of Piaget’s work is in regards to his research methods. A major source of his inspiration for the theory was based on his observations of his own children. And because of this small sample group, people believe that it is difficult and incorrect to generalise his findings to a larger population. Similarly, many psychologists believe that Piaget underestimated the age which children could accomplish certain tasks and that sometimes children understand a concept before they are able to demonstrate their understanding of it. For example, children in the Sensorimotor stage may not search for a hidden object because their motor skills are not developed, rather than because they lack object permanence. This has been supported by evidence from Bower & Wishart (1972). They found that the way that an object is made to disappear influences the child’s response. As well as this, Piaget’s theory has been said to overestimate that every child and adult reaches the formal operational stage of knowledge development. Dasen (1994) claims that only a third of adults ever reach this stage.

A major theory that works well with this stage is Piaget’s cognitive-developmental theory. His theory focuses on the mental activities such as thinking, perceiving, remembering, believing, and reasoning. Piaget believed that children go through four universal stages of cognitive development. Apparently, a child goes through these four stages of cognitive development because they are trying to construct a mental model of the world. In this stage of life, a child is in the third stage, the concrete operational stage. The concrete operational stage is just as it sounds, children at this point think more logically, but cannot grasp abstract and hypothetical concepts. Interestingly, this is also the door to when the child starts to think about what people say of him. This concrete way of thinking helps to let the child understand their thoughts and how they are unique to their environment. Around this stage, most children begin to lose their childlike imagination and start to see the world for how it really is, even if they fully understand everything. For school-age children, the beginnings of cognitive self-regulation are shown to be understood yet not fully followed through. Cognitive self-regulation is the process of continuously monitoring progress toward a goal, checking outcomes, and redirecting unsuccessful efforts (Berk 2014). Piaget's theory works best with this stage in life because it pertains to school-age children that start their way into

Teach certain concepts until they have reached the appropriate stage of cognitive development. Learning should be student centered accomplished through active discovery learning” (Sousa, 2011, p.57). Additional, strategies that are encouraged based on his theory are focusing on the process of learning, rather than the end product of it. Children should be encouraged to learn from each other. Teachers should assess the level of the child's development, so appropriate tasks can be set (Woolfolk, 2014, p. 46). This will ensure that each child’s individual needs are met. Piaget’s theory focused on the study of the individual rather than the group or

According to Flavell (1982) and Siegal (2003), they argued that although Piaget’s theory has had great reach and significance, it has encountered criticism of some aspects of it. Problems with his theory have gradually surfaced.

Jean Piaget was a biologist in the 1900s who studied the development of children's understanding. He believed that children didn't just gather information and add on it as they got older. Instead, he suggested that intelligence develops and progresses as one gets older through a series of four stages; the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational stage. The sensorimotor stage begins from birth until the age of 2, during this stage knowledge is limited, an infant tends to use motor activity without the use of symbols. They spend this time experimenting constantly, For example, putting things in the

Research done by Piaget involves the theory of cognitive development in children (Packer, 2017). Piaget used his own child to develop what is considered the most comprehensive methods for understanding the phases of child development. Dr. Franco uses Piaget’s research to build upon her own research. All

I was unsure of the model that you argued from, it just sounded like you were pointing out the flaws in Piaget’s model. Every model has flaws, but it can still be the best one currently available. New models are created all the time and they all eventually have some sort of flaw, that doesn’t make the entire thing invalid. As Piaget was the first to study cognitive development and is still relevant today, his theory is groundbreaking. The basic arithmetic, which is your largest point, is said by thorities to be prewired in the human brain. This, being in the human brain at birth, cannot be developed and could be outside Piaget’s cognitive development theory. A lot of what Piaget says in his theory is undeniably true. The younger a child is

What are the major challenges to Piaget's theory of cognitive development and what aspects still have value?

Experts have argued “...the clear-cut ages and stages forming the basis of Piaget 's theory are actually quite blurred and blend into each other” (Donaldson, page 57). In Donaldson’s book, ‘Children 's Minds’, she suggests that Piaget may have underestimated children 's language and thinking abilities by not giving enough consideration to the contexts he provided for children when conducting his research (Castella, 2011). Although Piaget’s theory gives us a brief understanding of how children’s learning develops, not all children are taught the same way nor do they learn at the same pace. Each of the four stages have been criticised by experts. For instance on evaluation of the sensorimotor stage; Bower (1982) found that children display object permanence at a much younger age than Piaget suggested. We can agree or disagree with Piaget’s theory but one thing is certain, we will always imagine the stages whilst observing our children grow “... it is certainly true that, whether we agree with the theory or not, Piaget has changed the way we think about children’s thinking” (Sternberg, page 761).

Much of Piaget’s early work involved the “clinical method” – children being asked questions in a somewhat unstructured way, the onus being to establish whether they understood different problems. This approach was criticised for being unscientific, with Piaget and his fellow workers eventually being more precise in their experiments. It was agreed however that Piaget posed problems in a way that young children found difficult to comprehend. (Eysenck,

Several years ago, an insightful and profound man, Jean Piaget, established a theory of cognitive growth during childhood. This theory was viewed as a major model for understanding the intricate steps of mental development from the thinking to understanding for a child. This theory also gave rise to the mentality that cognitive processes during childhood are not minuscule versions of adults but rather an irrational yet unique process with its own rules. Even though Piaget’s theory seems quite reasonable and logical, under the light of recent speculation his theory has been widely challenged. However, Piaget’s theory holds great impact in today’s psychology.

Educational Implications of Piaget’s Theory. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is well-known and provides a basic understanding of the cognitive process and how children

According to Atherton (2011), Jean Piaget’s Developmental Theory is a seminal work in the field of education. Although Piaget was a biologist and he devoted most of his early works to the study of mollusks, he later on moved into the study of children’s minds and their progress as they grew up. He mainly worked with the children in his family and his methodology was mainly interactional.

There were many criticisms on Piaget’s work. Many questioned were the stages even real. Vygotsky and Bruner didn’t even speak about the stages in their writings and study of human development. There are even some studies that show and prove that there is no guarantee that humans will make it to the formal operating stage. Piaget mainly concentrated on the