Thursday, October 6, 2011

JEAN PIAGET’S COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT THEORY

JEAN PIAGET’S COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT THEORY

Piaget’s Stage of Cognitive Development theory is a description of cognitive development as four distinct stages in children, they are as follows:

i) Sensory- motor stage

ii) Preoperational stage

iii) Concrete and

iv) Formal stage

Originator: Jean Piaget (1896-1980)

A Swiss biologist and psychologist Jean Piaget, who had his life time between (1896-1980) observed his children (and their process of making sense of the world around them) and eventually developed a four-stage model of how the mind processes new information encountered. He posited that children progress through 4 stages which we had mentioned above. These four stages are:

SENSORY- MOTOR STAGE:

From birth to 2 years old, infant builds an understanding of himself or herself and reality of how things work through interactions with the environment. They could be able to differentiate between things that surround the environment including things like objects. Learning takes place through assimilation (the organization of information and absorbing it into existing schema) and accommodation (when an object cannot be assimilated and the schemata have to be modified to include the object.

PRE-OPERATIONAL STAGE:

This stage ranges between the (ages 2 to 4), where children are not yet able to conceptualize abstractly things in the environment, as such, they need concrete physical situations. In this stage objects are classified in simple ways, especially by important features.

CONCRETE OPERATIONS:

This stage ranges from the (ages 7 to 11), where physical experiences accumulate and things within the environment started to be accommodated by children and this situation keeps on increasing on daily bases through every encounter. The children begin to think abstractly and conceptualize, creating logical structures that explain their physical experiences.

FORMAL OPERATIONS:

This stage has been classified as a stage which ranges between the ( ages 11 to 15), in this stage, it has been assumed that, children cognition reaches its final form. It is in this stage, that a person requires no any concrete objects to make any objective as well as rational decision making. It was also expected that at this stage an individual is capable of deductive and hypothetical reasoning. An individual will be capable for abstract thinking similar to that of an adult

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