Cognitive Development Theory Essay

Jean Piaget sought to understand and explain to others how the brain changes from birth until the mid-teens. There are so many huge developments during those years and Piaget got them down to four stages. The four stages in Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development are the sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operational stage, and formal operational stage. These stages cover things such as reflexes to adolescent egocentrism. (Santrock)

Cognitive Development refers to the construction of the thought process that includes problem solving, remembering and the ability to make decisions, from childhood up to the adulthood stage. Cognitive/Intellectual Development is the ability to learn, reason, and analyze the fact that a process begins from infancy and progresses as the individual (Educational Psychology). Cognitive Development contains events that are logical, like thinking and remembering. Some factors remain the same throughout many of the theories on cognitive development. All theorists agree that people go through specific steps and/or

Cognitive development is the way a child sees, thinks and gains understanding of the world through interaction, influence, learned and genetic factors. There are four areas of intelligence and child brain development. They are: biological approaches to intelligence, cognitive succession of stages, knowledge, and intellectual ability.

The cognitive developmental theory comes from the work and research done by Jean Piaget which we believe is an empiricist approach which goes hand and hand with Piaget’s constructive approach. Empiricism is a theory that states that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience. The constructive approach is viewed as children discovering all knowledge about the world through their own learning and knowledge. According to Piaget, children pass through these stages at different times in their lives and cannot skip a stage which causes them to be seen as invariant.

“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).

The sample collected were acquired by surveying parents about children who were currently in the Developmental Psychology class at Union College. These parents were not paid in any way and were recruited by their children requesting their responses. A total of 50 responses were gathered, however some children had two parents evaluate them and others only had one. In these instances, when two parents evaluated, their scores were added and divided by two in order to get the average score for each child. This left us with 32 subjects of which 9 were male and 23 were female.

You have observed and noted the behaviors of one learner in your classroom, who you believe to have a learning disability. You take detailed notes over a designated period of time, with time and date stamps identifying significant performance markers, improvements, or other changes in learning achievement and behaviors. By following this protocol you have conducted ________.

Piaget investigated children’s cognitive development by administering sets of experimental tasks and that typically children achieve these stages at certain ages. Children’s performance on these tasks reflected their stage of development and these tasks have come to be seen as classic experiments in developmental psychology. He was carrying out a set of controlled tests. Children's understanding varies according to the different areas..

In terms, of Piaget’s cognitive development theory, the 8- year old and the 16- year old perceptions of the political convention differ greatly. The 8-year-old is in the concrete operational stage, and the 16-year-old is in the formal operational stage. During the concrete operational stage children begin to think logically, however, they do not completely understand tougher subjects. The 8- year-old may not be interested in the political convention because during this stage, they are still egocentric, however, they might show little interest because they are moving out of this stage.

The second stage is the Preoperational stage which is age two to seven years old. In this stage, they can think and their language becomes fully grown. Their memory and imagination becomes to develop. For example, a four-year-old will imagine to have superpower to save the world which he/she is using her imagination. During the early stages of Preoperational children are still seeing things only from their own viewpoint which Piaget refer to as egocentric. An example of egocentric is that my sister loves strawberry ice-cream so she thinks that her friend loves strawberry ice cream but what my sister doesn’t realize is that she only seeing her viewpoint on strawberry ice cream and not seeing her friend viewpoint on strawberry ice cream. When the child has reach his/her seventh birthday their “thinking becomes more logical, flexible, and more organized than it was during the preschool years” according to Who I am in the Lives of Children. (203) Which means that the child is ready to go to the next stage which is concrete operational stage.

Cognition refers to the mental actions or processes of acquiring, elaborating, storing and retrieving knowledge (Pound, 2013). Gillibrand et al., (2011) argue that these processes go beyond sensory-perceptual encoding and incorporates abilities such as attention, memory, problem solving and reasoning. Newman and Newman (2015) state that the term ‘development’ implies change over time. This is emphasised by Catherwood and Gillibrand (2004) and Pound (2013), who claim that cognitive development is concerned with learning and understanding, where children’s knowledge of the world increases with experience. This is supported by the idea that events which occur in childhood have long lasting effects, potentially hindering development in later adulthood.

The essay is going to introduce short overviews of Piaget (1926) and Vygotsky’s (1978) theories to indicate their different approaches when considering cognitive development. Piaget (1926) developed a constructivist theory which is the basis for the other cognitive development theories that followed. He proposed the definition of schema which refers to children’s construction of shaping their thought and actions through the set of cognitive processes as assimilation, disequilibriums and accommodation. When encountering new experiences, children try to interpret them in terms of known cognitive schemas. In case of failing, they need to adjust their interpretation to the reality (Schaffter & Kipp,8th ed). Based on his assumptions, Piaget (1926) proposed that child as a lone individual progress through four main stages of cognitive development. On the other hand, Vygotsky (1978) presented sociocultural theory. Vygotsky (1978) concentrated on the social interaction between child and adult considering

Development psychology refers to the scientific study of the systematic psychological changes that normally occur to human beings throughout their growth period from birth to old age. It was originally concerned with children and infants, but it has since expanded to include the entire life span of mankind including adolescence and adulthood. Development psychology covers the extent to which human development occurs through gradual accumulation of knowledge, and the extent to which children born with inmate mental structures learn through experience. Several psychological theories and approaches like the behavioral, humanistic, psychoanalytic, biological, and cognitive approaches have been developed to explain the

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

The first stage of Piaget’s development theory is the sensorimotor stage which takes place in children most commonly 0 to 2 years old. In this stage, thought is developed through direct physical interactions with the environment. Three major cognitive leaps in this stage are the development of early schemes, the development of goal-oriented behavior, and the development of object permanence. During the early stages, infants are only aware of what is immediately in front of them. They focus on what they