Essay about Understanding Piaget’s Theory and Current Criticism

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.

Jean Piaget is known for his theories in cognitive development theory. His theory is based on the idea that children constantly construct knowledge as they explore and mold their environment. There are four stages in Piaget’s theory, sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operations, the stages also corresponds with how old the child is. Not every child will be in the stage that matches the child’s age because some children are exceptional. Piaget’s theory is based on the cognitive development of how the average child shows their learned behavior through performed tasks. As I went through the first interview, I realized that how the children came to develop their answers was what’s important about the assignment. each child with the Piagetian Task Kit, I started to realize The Piagetian Task Kit helped me examine and see where each child was at in their cognitive development level.

Piaget was the first psychologist to make a systematic study of cognitive development. Piaget’s work includes a detailed observational study of cognition in children. Piaget showed that young children think in different ways to adults. According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all subsequent knowledge is based.

Piaget theory was said to believe that children go through Four stages of Cognitive Development. Each stage marks development in how children understand the world. Piaget liked to say that children are “little scientist” and that they explore and make sense of the world around them. Through his observations, Piaget developed a stage theory that included four stages. The Sensorimotor Stage that begins from birth to age 2, is the first one. The Preoperational stage from age 2 to about 7, and the third stage is the Concrete Operational stage from the age 7 to 11. Piaget was interested in children's wrong answers that they’ve given on problems that require logical thinking. Piaget revealed

During this stage, the child can engage in symbolic play, and have developed an imagination. This child may use an object to represent something else, such pretending that a broom is a horse. An important feature a child displays during this stage is egocentrism. This refers to the child’s inability to see a situation from another person’s point of view. To test whether or not children are egocentric, Piaget used the ‘Three Mountain Task’. Piaget concluded that the four-year olds thinking was egocentric, as the seven year olds was not. Children, at this stage, do not understand more complex concepts such as cause and effect, time, and comparison.

The first difference is on the points of emphasis on the theory by the two psychologists. According to Vygotsky theory, more emphasis is on the culture as the main factor that affects cognitive development in human beings. However, Piaget theory contradicts this emphasis by maintaining his views that development happens in stages and the stages are universal, that means all children develop in the same way, that means environment, culture and social relationship have no effect on children development (Jones, & Reynolds, 1992). In summary, Piaget’s theory believes that there is uniform development of children across culture while, Vygotsky emphasizes every child different cognitive development depending on the social environment and culture.

Piaget’s theory is that he believed it is in a child's nature to be curious about their surroundings, children want to grasp an understanding of what is going on around them, sometimes their ideas may or may not be correct. According to Piaget, “Assimilation which occurs when new experiences are readily incorporated into a child’s existing theories” (172). For example, this means that a child knows when the family dog barks and licks his face. When the child has the same experience at another house it makes sense because they child has already learned that theory of the dog.

The teacher could place two cups that have the same amount of liquid in the cups but because one of the cups is taller than the other the child is going to think the taller glass has more liquid in it. The third stage is the concrete operational stage which occurs during ages seven to eleven. The term concrete operational means the child can reason only about tangible objects presents. So the child can conserve and think logically but only with practical aids. Thinking becomes less egocentric with increased awareness of external events. The fourth and final stage is the formal operational stage which occurs during ages eleven to fifteen. This stage focuses on hypothetical thinking and scientific reasoning. Piaget believed that only children can learn when they are ‘ready’ to learn. He also believed that development couldn 't be ‘sped up.’ Piaget believed that children learned through the resolution of disequilibrium (self discovery, active participation). He believed that teachers should ‘bend’ to children’s needs, provide an appropriate environment, promote self discovery, exploratory learning, self-motivated learning, and set challenges to existing schemes.

The Critique of Piaget's Theories Jean Piaget (1896 – 1980) was a constructivist theorist. He saw children as constructing their own world, playing an active part in their own development. Piaget’s insight opened up a new window into the inner working of the mind and as a result he carried out some remarkable studies on children that had a powerful influence on theories of child thought. This essay is going to explain the main features and principles of the Piagetian theory and then provide criticism against this theory. Cognitive development refers to way in which a person’s style of thinking changes with age.

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:

Although Jean Piaget proved his four stages and experimented in debt to reach a conclusion, observationists nowadays often contradict his facts and prove some errors. Hence, the sequence of the developments are usually accurate, the age base that Piaget assigned them to is underestimated. Children far younger than the suggested ages grasp concepts that Piaget believed unattainable at those years. All things considered, psychologists and researchers, although often in disagreement with Piaget's theories, still base their studies and observations on his

Piaget believed that an egocentric child assumes that other people see, hear and feel exactly as they do. Children in the preoperational stage (description of children’s thinking between 2 to 7 years old p.169) are more egocentric than the older, concrete operational children. When a child is egocentric, they interpret the world through only what they see and assume that everyone else sees it the way they do. Thinking is based solely around themselves, labeling it as “self-centered”. Also, it’s rather difficult for a child who is egocentric to view the world in another person’s perspective (p.174). This is considered to be beneficial as the child could take away an “adaptive advantage” to it (p.175). As the child grows up to learn the complexity of life, research has shown that when information is transmitted to the child to be relevant to their self-centered perspective, it’s easily remembered than not being able to relate it to

Cognitive development is the process of development and change in terms of mental abilities such as, thinking, reasoning, and understanding. However, there are three theories in which, all attempt to explain the development of cognition in childhood. Jean Piaget, whom was a swiss clinical psychologists known for his, pioneering work in child development believed that in his theory children experience four different inclusive phases of cognitive development. The four stages are the sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operational stage, and the formal operational stage. In these four stages, of cognitive development children might show different personalities of more than one

On Piaget's task for conservation of length, Piaget shows the subject two pencils equal in length and subject knows the pencils are the same length. But once one of the pencils is moved longer than the other one, the subject fails to recognize that they were the same. Piaget's task for conservation for liquid, he shows the young child two identical glasses, then he pours the same amount of water both glasses. The subject knows that the two glasses of water are equal. But if water from one glass is poured into a longer thinner glass, the subject couldn’t comprehend this glass contains the same amount of water as the original two identical glasses. Piaget's explains that children's thinking is "perception bound" in preoperational stage, so they can’t focus their attention on two aspects of the new glass, they were attentive only to one aspect which is that one glass is taller than the other two; failing to realize the taller glass had the same amount of liquid.

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.