Piaget’s theory of cognitive development
Every educator has to learn about the theory of cognitive development by Piaget during our days of training to become a teacher.
Piaget believes that the way children think is not the same as how an adult will think. He observed his own nephew and daughter and he was inspired resulting the development of the theory of cognitive development.
Watch the interesting videoclip below to have a nice overview of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.
The Sensori-Motor Stage: Birth to 2 years old
Learning mainly occurs through basic sensory experiences, basic reflexes and motor responses.
They can learn a lot about language through their interaction with people. They start to learn how to crawl and walk.
Children at this stage are believed to have learnt that things continue to exist even when they do not see them.
They start to associate names and words to different objects.
The Pre-Operational Stage: 2 to 7 years old
Most children often use words and pictures to represent things around them.
They may think of things in their concrete form to represent things so abstract concepts can still be hard for them.
They learn through pretend play but they may have difficulty in logic and understanding others’ point of view. They are rather egocentric and unable to see another perspective suggested by others.
In view of this, schools often use concrete objects to explain things before going to the pictorial form.
After the children are familiar with the pictorial form, the abstract will then be introduced.
The Concrete Operational Stage: 7 to 11 years old
The use of concrete-pictorial-abstract procedure will still be very helpful for this stage.
Most children can start to develop logical thinking about concrete events and things.
They can have more organised thoughts but still associate mainly to concrete things.
They start to understand how others may view the situation in another perspective.
They become less egocentric and learn to understand the feeling of others.
The Formal Operational Stage: 12 years old and above
Learners are able to understand abstract ideas and they can have the ability to reason about hypothetical situations and problems.
Learners at this stage can see multiple relationships and solutions to the same problem and they can figure out more systematically.
In conclusion
Understanding the cognitive stages of development is useful to both parents and teachers.
A more in-depth reading will be necessary to have a better understanding of the cognitive development.
This article is intended to raise the awareness of understanding the cognitive level of children at different stages so that parents and educators can teach at an appropriate level and use appropriate interventions and strategies.
The fact that many high achievers in schools may have been pushed by their parents beyond their stage of development so that they can excel faster than others.
Children can acquire knowledge and new concepts through assimilation and accommodation by adding or changing their existing schemas.
As parents and teachers, we should focus mainly on the joy of learning rather than how much better our own child is better than others.
They may excel for now but the lack of passion and love for learning may result in failure in future due to the lack of motivation in learning.
We should cultivate intrinsic motivation in learning.
Reference:
Piaget, J. (1965). The stages of the intellectual development of the child. Educational psychology in context: Readings for future teachers.
Disclaimer: This is my personal reflection and I am not in any position to instruct anyone what they should do. I am not responsible for any action taken as a result of this post. My post can only be a reference for your further research and growth. By reading this post, you acknowledge and accept that. All images and pictures were taken from google images that are free from copyright under labelled for reuse.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://fun2learn.vornix.blog/2018/08/13/piagets-theory-of-cognitive-development/
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